Veteran producer Jonathan Sothcott has been a cornerstone of the indie British film business for well over a decade, with past successes including We Still Kill The Old Way and Vendetta. We caught up with him on location in Poole to talk about just how different his Shogun Films venture is to what he’s done in the past and his new hands on approach.
We’re here on location at a marina in Dorset, in absolutely torrential rain and wind where you’re filming Knightfall: can you tell us about the film?
Knightfall is that curious thing – a British indie spy thriller. They are very few and far between – The Fourth Protocol, Who Dares Wins, that kind of thing – it is something I’ve always wanted to do and it arrived as a spec from two talented writers Robert Dunn and James Smy. It was much more comedic to start with and I developed it with the director Ben Mole and another writer Bob Schultz to make it grittier and more modern, without losing that lionheart core which first drew me to it. Knightfall is about Ros, a science officer at MI5 who is called in on a top secret black bag job where she discovers her boyfriend Hugh is leading the op – which is to intercept and apprehend a deadly bio weapon during an exchange in the docks. At the crucial moment an assassin appears on a motorbike spraying everyone with bullets and the weapon is separated in two – the villain takes one component and Ros is left with the other. She is ordered to keep it but after an assassination attempt in an MI5 safe house she realises she has to go off grid to survive and heads to the country house of the one man she knows won’t be compromised: her estranged father, retired spy catcher Charles Knight. Needless to say the villains soon home in on them but it isn’t long before the hunters become the hunted as Charles has more than a few tricks up his sleeve. It’s the most action-packed film I’ve made and as you’ve seen there are speed boats and motor bikes going flying about all over the place and it’s a LOT of fun. Which is what this shoot has been.
When can we expect to see Knightfall?
The release dates are down to the distributors but I’d imagine at the end of the year. Sadly there’s no Boxing Day DVD bonanza anymore but this feels like a Christmas release for all kinds of reasons.
I’ve seen some familiar faces running around shooting guns and punching lumps out of each other tonight – who is in it?
Our interesting new star is Geoffrey Moore, who you’ll notice bares a striking resemblance to everyone’s favourite James Bond. Geoffrey has alternated between acting and singing for years – he even starred in a movie with his father called Fire Ice & Dynamite and of course was a successful restauranteur as the founder of Hush in Mayfair. We have been talking for years about finding a role for him in a movie but it had to be the right one – and Hugh in Knightfall is, literally, tailor made for him. He’s a terrific actor with boundless star quality who lights up the screen and I know audiences are going to love him. There are definitely further Moore/Sothcott collaborations on the horizon.
My favourite leading lady, Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, is playing Ros Knight and having the time of her life – she spent most of tonight doing an epic fight scene with our brilliant stunt co-ordinator Darren LeFevre – when Knightfall first hit my desk it was pitched as a vehicle for her and Ros is a really interesting character because she’s from this kind of espionage dynasty but at the same time she’s a desk jockey so she’s suddenly thrown into this Enemy of the State scenario and the only person she can rely on is her father, who is actually like Gene Hackman in that film, and they’ve not spoken in years. Jeanine’s a terrific martial artist and her background in that means that these fights look less ‘Screen Combat Course’ and more realistic. She and Darren have worked incredibly hard on these sequences to make them as good as they can possibly be. You know when we started Shogun she stole the show for me in Nemesis, which was a challenging shoot to say the least and had a less exciting role in Renegades than I’d have liked but in Helloween and Knightfall she’s really getting the opportunity to shine and boy does she deserve it.
We also recently had Michael Paré in the movie who blessed us with a fantastic guest star appearance as a world-weary assassin who tries to murder Ros. Michael is such a class act and he has this brilliant speech which he ends drawling “I’m just a thug with a gun” – watching that on set gave me shivers. Michael, of course, needs no introduction but so many times I see him – and actors of his calibre – be the best or only good thing in films made without care and attention. He had such a blast making Knightfall he didn’t want it to end and the feeling was mutual. Lee Majors was the same.
On that note I’ve noticed recently you’re very visibly always on set on these films. I always thought you were one of those ‘producing from the hotel bar’ types.
I’ve been doing this for a very long time now but these last three films things have changed and I am leading from the front. We are building an incredibly strong band of filmmakers at Shogun – these talented young people are becoming a little unit and I can’t ask them to stand out in the cold and rain if I’m not going to do it myself. The last 3 films have been shot by a wonderful DOP named James Westlake who is very talented (he reminds me of my first DOP James Friend, who of course, won an Oscar last year) and his team are all absolutely terrific. Darren our fight co-ordinator is the best I’ve worked with, he totally gets our limitations but still treats everything like Mission Impossible. Francesca in make up, Sean on sound, super human gaffer Andy, Truman flying the drone… it’s like coming to work with an extended family, it’s wonderful. Geoffrey said to me “you should cook pasta for them like Cubby Broccoli did”… I explained if I did they wouldn’t come back… haha… but at least the catering was good on this! I’m also, for the first time in many years, working with a lot of new people, on both sides of the camera, which is exciting and refreshing. It can be very easy to just keep working with the same group of people but I think the formula soon becomes stale. This is a whole new chapter in my life.
So this team was built on Peter Rabid and Helloween – where are you with those two?
Peter Rabid which is a fun and zany little slasher film, is finished and just awaiting release. Helloween, which I’m very proud of, is still being cut, the director Phil Claydon (brilliant) is cutting it himself. He’s a filmmaking force of nature. This film is something very special indeed, it’s familiar but different, visually absolutely stunning and boasts stand out performances from Paré, Jeanine and Ronan Summers who is absolutely terrifying as Cane, the villain. I’ve been very lucky to have Claydon direct Helloween and Ben Mole do Knightfall. I remember years ago going into the offices of Momentum Pictures to see exec Robert Walak and they had a big quad poster on the wall for Claydon’s film Lesbian Vampire Killers and I sort of raised an eyebrow and Robert, a highly intelligent, sophisticated man, just said “don’t – it’s made a fortune” – and I learned a valuable lesson that day. You can make a B movie with a crazy title and if you do it well, with a proper director, it’ll work. It’s amazing really that filmmakers like Phil and Ben are still bouncing around making movies at the indie end of the business but before they are snapped up for studio movies I’m making hay with them.
Ben Mole directed a Krays film called Code of Silence – is that how you got together?
No Ben and I have known each other for nearly 20 years – he and his brother Alex were working in TV when I was at The Horror Channel and we were introduced by a filmmaker named Simon Sprackling. We all were trying to make horror movies and eventually somehow out of that I met Bart Ruspoli (Boiling Point) who I eventually went on to make a picture called Devil’s Playground with. Let me just say I love working with Ben, he’s just the right balance of intellectual and commercial and he’s also practical and very, very switched on. We have had a wonderful experience on this and we’re about to go into another.
What’s that?
Werewolf Hunt is a terrific action horror written by Josh Ridgway (The Flood, Section 8, Into The Deep) from a story he and I concocted. It’s about a wealthy recluse who summons a cadre of the world’s most fearsome hunters and killers to his remote island home to hunt the Werewolf that has stalked his family for generations (rather like a lycanthropic Baskerville hound). Think The Beast Must Die meets Predator. I love this project, it’s going to really kick arse. We are doing all of the werewolves practically and the suits – which are stunning – are being built at the moment. This one’s going to be epic.
What else is on the Shogun slate?
It’s hard to keep up, even for me. We just signed another three picture deal with a distribution company and we’re slotting those into the 24/25 schedule, we’ll announce the deal at the American Film Market in Vegas probably. The thing with all these movies is they mostly take place at night so it’s hard to shoot them in the summer when the days are longer!
We are very much focussed on action and horror – Knightfall is our 5th Shogun movie and I am hoping to hit ten by this time next year. We have a wonderful serial killer horror called Dr Plague which will shoot this summer, a contained action thriller called Active Shooters, a really creepy supernatural horror called Harbinger and a brilliant high concept character thriller called Too Long The Night which will reunite me with supremely talented director Stephen Reynolds (Vendetta) for the first time in a decade. Other projects in development include An Eye For An Eye with writer/director Reg Travis, a couple of westerns and a couple more horrors – maybe a modern Mask of The Red Death, something called Circus Of The Full Moon and a very modern vampire movie. There’s a cyborg action thriller called Nexus and a Chad Law hitman movie called No Good Men. I feel like for the first time in my career I have got the formula absolutely right and am surrounded by a winning team. We are now controlling the distribution and I’m right across every aspect of the films.
So what makes Shogun different to other production companies?
I think it’s the fact that I love the genres we work in. I grew up in the 80s video shop era and so horror and action really are my thing. I’m unapologetic about it – I want to make werewolf films and hitman movies (and werewolf hitman movies?!) and I don’t want that to stop. People say I’m like a British Roger Corman (or a poundland Guy Ritchie!) but my inspiration has always been Hammer Films. Sir James Carreras, the chairman, had a great ‘give the public what they want’ mentality whether it was Dracula, or The Mummy or One Million Years BC (or even On The Buses) – he said “if they want Strauss Waltzes, we’ll make Strauss Waltzes” and he never really received the respect and recognition he deserved for making dozens and dozens of movies and essentially keeping a big chunk of the British film industry afloat for three decades. The other things we have in common with Hammer is that we are always trying to stretch a buck as far as we can and we try to make the very best genre movies we can. I spend endless time working with filmmakers to finesse the products with the resources we have and I think that shows. People maybe don’t realise either how small our operation is or how involved in every aspect of them I am.
I think one of the other things that sets us apart is our focus on working with older actors. Particularly when it comes to actresses over 40 we’re there – we think they have so much to offer and we’re creating roles for them. This is something very much spear-headed by my wife, who has also set up a black cinema division, Shogun Noire, having grown up finding herself massively underrepresented in popcorn genre movies – we have some really interesting stories to tell in that space, which is exciting, first one coming soon.
How is the state of the British Film Industry at the minute?
Well in my tiny corner things are obviously buoyant, we’re getting our heads down and making movies. Generally things seem to be looking up – the new 40% Film Tax Credit can only be a good thing and the government are making positive noises about other tax advantages for film investors. It certainly hasn’t gotten easier raising funding for these British indies.
Piracy is a massive problem here – more so than in other countries in my view, everyone just expects everything free on those evil firesticks. If the government spend 1% of what they spend terrifying old ladies about their television licenses on cracking down on the everyday film piracy, producers might be able to make more local content (and to be fair we’ve all been saying for over a decade “if you keep pirating our movies, we can’t make any more”). So there have been all kinds of unfortunate deals to be done to get anything made. Hopefully these new incentives mean we’ll see an end of the decade long trend of Vanity Acting for example, where filmmakers are forced to cast investors in substantial roles, which happens far more often than you think and which is a no-win situation for both parties really. It was particularly prevalent in the British gangster movies I’m known for but as they seem to be drying up – or at least transitioning from DVD to high end TV (The Gentlemen, Sexy Beast et al) – it is coming to an end. The major disadvantage to that particularly genre suddenly becoming gentrified is that there is now a working class audience dramatically underserved by big budget shows made by a lot of posh graduates – or by Nick Love or Guy Ritchie whose positions at the top of the tree have been unchanged for two decades. There are no new voices coming through in that space now that everything is a big expensive series rather than a gritty indie movie. I hope that changes and that I never hear the words “I’d like to try a bit of acting” ever again.
What else is on the horizon?
We’re planning a festival strategy for Helloween, it’s good enough to deserve one, and of course we’re shooting Knightfall. We’re also building these werewolves which are just wonderful, very much straight out of the 80s Stan Winston school (though the closest comparison I can give you is Howling IV The Original Nightmare) and testing LED Plague Doctor masks for Doctor Plague which I think will be a riot. And on the action side I’m just waiting for the new Active Shooters script from my US buddy Chad Law, that one’s been percolating for a while and it’ll be great to start blowing stuff up! We’ve been developing a Wild West revenge thriller too, Reckoning Day, I really want to get that going. For me, it’s wonderful to be busy, I’m lucky to be working with people I love and there’s never been a better time to make these movies and that’s what we’re going to keep on doing.
For More Information please visit www.shogunfilms.com
