Lan Artis – Riches from London providing mystifying screenplays

Ever since I’ve been brutally scarred by The Lion King as a child, I’ve wanted to tell stories
that would carry such an impact on readers and audiences everywhere. I first started writing
short stories in primary school. The main characters always seemed to be either bunnies or
squirrels and to be fair, squirrels do make terrifying villains. In my third grade, our class was
given a task of writing a ten-page fiction book and I jumped at the chance to prove myself.
To my utter shock, my masterpiece only received a paltry B+, sending my life into a
downward spiral. OK, maybe I’m being a tad dramatic. I was, however, determined to prove
my teacher wrong and decided to expand my ten pages into a fully-fledged novel. That is
how The Young Inventor was born. As an eleven-year-old, obsessed with Harry Potter, I
might have borrowed a few elements from it, but luckily everyone thought it was adorable.
Even the teacher responsible for it all had to admit it was quite the achievement. A lone
copy of the novel still resides in the National and University Library in Ljubljana, Slovenia,
waiting for some poor unfortunate reader to stumble upon it.
As the years went by, other interests took hold of me, mainly acting and music. I landed my
first acting part around the same time as the novel was being finished, the main character’s
best friend in a teen drama called Nina. This was soon followed by roles in other
productions, a short The Photo, a three-part miniseries The Suffering of Young Igor, and a
teen comedy Distortion, for which I also contributed a song for the soundtrack. But as I got
older, the parts began to dry up. As such, I shifted my focus again, to music. My high school
band was a collection of rich and interesting characters, dreaming of stardom, riches, and
easy lays. After a few initial successes (we managed to win a battle of the bands) all those
interesting personalities began to clash with one another, leaving the band broke up, a
microscopic footnote in the vast history of music.

And so, after years of blaming the world for my failures, I decided to move countries and
start anew. Moving to London from a smaller country can be quite a shock. Whatever you
do, don’t expect it to look like a Richard Curtis film. But because we always have to make
the best with what we got, I tried to do just that. Since, I’ve finished my Master’s in
Screenwriting, written 5 feature screenplays, self-published my first English novel called My
Conversations with Death, which is being made into a film as we speak, and worked as an
actor and extra on over 30 film and TV productions.
In a world full of remakes, sequels, re-imaginings and reboots, I would like to strive for the
return to big concept original ideas. New stories and new characters for new generations of
film enthusiasts and story lovers. Stories, whether they are shown on the big screen, or
leaping from the page, will always have to be there to make people laugh, cry, or even help
them through a dark time in their lives. And if any of my stories manages to do just that,
well, I would have fulfilled