London-born Iain Softley managed to parlay his early love of music and painting into a career as a feature film director. Directing and designing theater productions as a student at Queen’s College, Cambridge, made him realize his vision lent itself more to film, and he turned to the small screen, working first for a documentary unit of Granada TV. Softley then joined the BBC and created 30 "auteur documentaries" for television before becoming a successful director of music videos. While still at the BBC, he started looking for a rites-of-passage story to make into a feature film and came upon