EIFF Round up: Spotlight on IMDb Founder Col Needham

This year the Edinburgh International Film Festival has undergone a bit of a reinvention, with a larger focus on independent films and smaller venues. On Sunday I attended an interview with Col Needham, one of the founding members of what we can all consider to be the largest and most informative film site on the net, the Internet Movie Database.

An interesting aspect of this interview was that the making of this site was clearly through a love of film and not as a business venture. As it is now 20 years old, the IMDb was created before the world wide web actually came into existence, and as Needham explained, was first merely a group of film fans creating lists and databases on actors, directors etc to share amongst each other as a way of gaining knowledge on their love for film.
It wasn't until at least five years later that the beginnings of the website we know it as now came into being, and up until then all the creators were still working 9-5 jobs elsewhere.

Some interesting facts Needham told the audience about himself were that in 1990 he watched a total of 1100 films, how he managed to keep count I have no idea. He also mentioned that he owns 8000 dvds and blu-rays, and still manages to watch at least one film which he has never seen before every single day of the year.

This was an enjoyable discussion as it focused on film talk rather than business ventures such as advertising. Lastly, Needham claimed the director whom he would most like to have direct a film of his life would be David Fincher...but that there were no hidden secrets about the foundings of IMDb such as displayed in The Social Network!