Filmmaking is verging on the creative in Hollywood for a change; as French director Michel Hazanavicius puts it under the telescope for his silent feature-length movie ‘The Artist’. The film is a period drama set on the eve of the birth of the talkies within the Hollywood film studios.

“When I first told people about my idea for this movie, they just laughed at me," says Michel Hazanavicius. "Friends, actors, producers – they all laughed. They'd say, 'OK, OK, but what do you really want to do?'"

The Artist focuses on George Valentin, a swashbuckling, thin-moustached Hollywood silent movie star modelled on Douglas Fairbanks, whose career plummets with the advent of the talkies. The film production has proved a calling card for Hazanavicius in Hollywood. "Now I'm getting sent scripts for period movies as though that is what they think I do" But among the offers he's received, there lies a particular gem from the head of fiction at HBO. "He said he liked The Artist and would be really glad if I had an idea for a serial. From the people who made The Sopranos, which to me is at the level of Dostoevsky, that is so flattering."

“I don't care about my reputation. People thought of me as a pasticheur, but I'm also co-author of a documentary about genocide in Rwanda. I'm not this Neanderthal guy who just makes a good show – although that is difficult enough. I only have one obsession – not to be boring."

The Artist will be by the beginning of 2012, and if you want to bring your movie idea to life in a creative way then check out our studio rates.