‘The Tournament’ 2009
My involvement with the film started way back in early 2005 when Scott Mann (who has since visibly aged might I add) approached me with a part finished script that he wanted to make a trailer of in order to raise finance. He had no money, well certainly nothing for me, but promised to take it to lil ole Cannes. Based on this, the commerciality of the film and an impressively unassuming tenacity that Scott possessed (a skill he has much improved whilst swimming with blaggards and vagabonds) I gave way to my more cynical side and decided to take a punt.
stills from original trailer shoot in April 2005
The original trailer was shot over 3 days in and around Levenshulme in Manchester
Once the film is out i will put up the original trailer.
After a long haul and many a frustration Scott eventually secured initial finance and in 2007 they began principle photography. Eventually full finance was secured and the shoot moved ahead at full steam, not without incident of course. In the autumn of 2007 the film came back to the UK where I picked it up again with Scott and along with great crew we completed the filming in Feb 2008. The Uk element was like a great big twisted puzzle. We had way less money than in proportion to the rest of the shoot, were required to shoot a lot more than was expected and we had to match critical scenes into existing key footage. In one sense it was the most complex shoot i have ever undertaken, it was certainly the most painful and in an odd and twisted way the most rewarding. I wouldn’t be saying that of course if we had failed to achieve what at that point seemed an incredibly up hill battle. Shooting from scratch although sometimes is difficult it never produces the same set of problems when matching existing footage, especially when it was filmed using Bulgarian sets and props that were just not available for the UK shoot. We filmed over 6 months in the North East, St Helens and Manchester on two occasions. The film is due for release theatrically both in the UK and the US in the 1st quarter of 2009. Thankfully 