With no cinema release, no advertising and no publicity how did an action flick written by two Teesside students reach number 5 in the US DVD charts and become the 36th most downloaded film of all time? The Tournament’s writer/ director Nick Rowntree on disappointment, disillusion and against the odds success…
My one and only meeting with Nick Rowntree is a chance and unlikely one. I’m on a train with some friends headed to the airport; he’s across the gangway listening in to our conversation. I am no actress but he’s overheard enough to know that we are involved (in a roundabout way) with theatre and tells me to look up his new film. I am skeptical. My first instinct is that this complete stranger has a penchant for soft porn and home- video. After all, who expects the writer of a movie that tops the American DVD chart and stars Robert Carlisle to be in the next seat on the transpenine to Manchester? It’s hardly the glamorous surroundings one associates with big-bucks moviemakers. A little research tells me that not only is Rowntree’s story legit, but his film ‘The Tournament’ has become a major underground hit.
You say that most [British film] ‘makers who get 3 million quid to spend just take it to the nearest council estate to tell a harrowing tale of heroine addiction, alcohol abuse or domestic violence’. Do you think this trend attracted you to making an ‘action flick’?
Between 2001 and 2004, before we came up with The Tournament, we (Scott Mann and I) tried to get another feature film made, a socially aware comedy about a disabled football supporter, and though everyone loved the script and thought it very funny and fresh, nobody actually wanted to invest. We even heard from Johnny Depp that he was very interested in it, but then Pirates of the Caribbean happened and we never heard from him again and we were back to square one. We then went to the Cannes Film Festival and witnessed the kind of films that were getting financed and distributors were buying, and both disability and football were conspicuous by their absence. We saw that most of the posters featured monsters or men with guns or long legged women in stockings and stilettos or more importantly an American movie star cast. Then we asked ourselves honestly that if we went to a cinema and we saw these sexy posters promising thrills and spills and excitement surrounding our own poster with a wheelchair and a football on it, which would we go and see… Of course we might ultimately have a much more rewarding experience from seeing our socially aware comedy, but the likelihood of being ‘in the mood’ for a film like that, compared to being in the mood for some brainless popcorn entertainment was slim. So we figured if we felt that way about our own project, then so will our potential financers, so we started again with a new agenda... if they want sex and violence, lets give it to them with cherries on top
Still, ‘The Tournament’ is predominantly set ‘up North’. Was this a conscious decision or do you feel that it was a natural choice as it was written whilst you were studying in Teesside?
We basically had the idea of taking the conventions of a Hollywood action movie and relocating it to somewhere unconventional. Of course as we are all from Middlesbrough, it seemed logical and amusing that our town was as an unlikely a setting for an action movie as anywhere else, so what the hell. We came up with a conceit that this assassin tournament as unlikely as it is would only occur in a small ‘ordinary’ town because the provincial unarmed police could not cope with it, as opposed to a major city were the police have machine guns and could fight back. Much of that logic was lost from script to screen but it was there originally honest
What advice could you give to aspiring screenwriters when it comes to pitching scripts to potential investors/ distributors?
There’s a saying “sell the sizzle not the sausage”. This simply means don’t get bogged down trying to explain every scene of your film to a financer but instead to recognize the ‘hook’ of your story and focus on that. Your chances of success are dependant on your ability in recognizing material that cinema audiences would pay to go and see. The first thing to do is ask yourself what were the last five films you yourself actually paid to go and see. You may find your answers are surprisingly predictable. Financers particularly those spending their own money, want to see they have a good chance of getting their money back.... You can’t eat Oscars. No financer is interested in a filmmaker whose films succeeds critically but fails at the box office. This is show business at the end of the day and like any business, you need to show an investor how they will get two pounds back for every one they put in. You need to come up with material that will sell, that will compete against the Inceptions and the Harry Potters. I think it was Kubrick who said that “The aim for the film maker is to maintain 100% artistic integrity and make as much money as Star Wars’ of course this is extremely difficult and very few film makers in history have consistently mastered it, arguably Alfred Hitchcock was the greatest at this high-brow/low-brow balancing act, but now you have Pixar doing exactly the same but to a younger audience. The best you can do is aim to find the balance as best you can. But there is a mindset in the British film industry that ‘commercial’ is a dirty word. I have discussed this with many writers and film makers who have, themselves, grown up watching a certain kind of movie, but then when they go to film school or become involved in the industry, they become affected and actually ashamed of the entertaining movies that inspired them to become film makers in the first place. As a scriptwriting teacher I encourage my students to embrace the films they truly love, and not the films they want to be ‘seen’ to love. I had one student for instance who talked about his love of sci-fi action movies, like the Running Man and Robocop and the old TV series ‘Airwolf’, then when it came down to presenting his idea, he wanted to write a harrowing drama of a ballet dancer rebuilding her life after a brutal rape. Now, of course he has every right to make this film if he wants to, but after further discussion it turned out that he never watches films of this type, he doesn’t know anything about ballet and he didn’t have any understanding of the issues surrounding rape. He just thought this worthy topic would make him appear to be a ‘serious’ writer. He felt stupid writing stories about futuristic helicopters. I have my own screenwriting rule, well its more an amendment to an old rule that says “write what you know” well if everybody only wrote what they knew, there’d be no Star Wars or Lord of The Rings or Batman or any of these other fantasy stories, the type that basically make all the money. My rule is “write what films you know” If you look at your own DVD collection and see that you own mainly action movies or horror movies or romantic comedy musicals then that’s what you should be trying to write, because you will instinctively, after years of accidental research, be aware of the clichés of the genre. You will have a feeling for what works and what doesn’t. You will know what’s been done before. Incidentally that student is now writing a sci-fi about a super-soldier with a talking machine gun. Sounds pretty lame I know, but I guarantee that for every one person who went to see his harrowing rape drama, fifty will pay to see his action film about the talking machine gun, and as an investor I am interested in the fifty, not the one. Having said that I don’t think the world needs anymore Zombie or Gangster movies. So no more of those please. If you want to make money, then children’s or family movies are the best bet. For the simple reason that a child doesn’t go to the cinema alone, their parents take them, so there’s three tickets sold for every one child who wants to see it. Case in point, in the last month, Inception has taken a very respectable $360,000,000, but Toy Story 3 has taken $830,000,000. I’ll leave you to do the maths
‘The Tournament’ was co-written by yourself and Jonathon Frank. Did you have strong shared vision or did you have to reach compromise on elements of the plot? Do you think there are advantages of having co-writers when working on a script?
The script we plotted was much bigger in scale and had more characters. I guess it was more like Battle Royale in structure. At the time though we were unknown, we weren’t ‘name’ writers, and Scott wasn’t a name director either, so there was whole pots of money that was unavailable to us because no one on the project had previously made a feature. So it was decided that Gary Young, who’d had a number of low budget films made, would be brought in to do a redraft. However his draft wasn’t quite what was wanted, so Jono and I came back and rewrote it again. By now though sets were being built in Bulgaria and we were restricted in the amount of new scenes we could add even though we did add quite a few in the end. The script you will see when the film comes out is a bit of a mash up between our original script, Gary Young’s redraft, and our further redraft, and then of course the actors get involved and start improvising on top of that. Jono and I have just finished writing the story for Tournament 2 with Scott Mann (the director) and I will then write the first draft of the screenplay alone. What happens after that, well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Filming for ‘The Tournament’ began in 2007 but it was released until two years afterwards due to funding and distribution issues. Was there any point during the process that you began to lose faith in the project?
Actually, it is three years and counting. We were scheduled for a 250 screen UK release on the 23rd July 2010, but due to unforeseen circumstances, the release has been postponed. Keep checking your listings for updates. It will have its cinema release sometime this year. In answer to the second part, YES, we lost faith over and over again but we just kept putting one foot in front of the other and continued moving forward when all out family and friends were telling us to give it up. Finance came and went until we were one-month away form our shoot date and had absolutely no money to make the film. During the shoot we ran out of money and again I looked as if we were doomed to fail, but we just found some more and kept on going
We showed a promo of the film at the LA film market in October of 2008 before we’d even finished shooting the final pick up scenes, and it basically turned into a bidding war, which was eventually won by Harvey Weinstein and his company Dimension, which he co-owns with Quentin Tarantino. He bought up all the remaining territories. So we had pre-sold the film to very available territory and we hadn’t finished shooting yet, so we were of course very excited and dreamed of all the fame and riches to come. Things would play out a little differently than that. It was planned that The Tournament would have simultaneous worldwide cinema release in the Autumn of 2009, and those who were planning to release it on DVD would wait until December of 2009 before they did, so that those countries giving it a theatrical release would have time to do so. Unfortunately this clause was not put into Harvey Weinstein’s contract and, due to financial issues at Dimension, they it released in the US on DVD in October of 2009 without any publicity or advertising. Our worldwide cinema release began to topple as many of the countries, which were planning a theatrical release, changed their mind due to it now being available on DVD and download.
It was a disaster. We thought we were ruined. But then the strangest thing, it started to climb the US DVD charts. We were being contacted and asked about how we feel that IMDB has listed The Tournament as the 11th most popular film of the year. We didn’t know what they were talking about and started to check it out. It was true. We had become an underground hit with ‘the kids’.
We had now reached to number 5 in the US DVD charts, we were number 1 on the X-Box download charts and we are now the 36th most downloaded film of all time. All of this without a single advert being shown or poster displayed. Suddenly we were being invited to comic and film conventions. We would receive pictures of fans dressed as the characters. Youtubers were making tribute videos. It was all very odd, because still no one in the UK had heard of it. I think it was this unprecedented word of mouth response to The Tournament that has encouraged Entertainment UK to give it the full nationwide cinema release after all and we are delighted about that. The Tournament is a big spectacular rollercoaster ride designed to be experienced in a dark cinema with surround sound, not the TV screen or PC monitor
Having spent years developing the film, is it difficult to read critical reviews from the press?
Erm no, not really, which has surprised me. I pretty much thought that if the critics didn’t like it, I would quit the industry, grow a beard and start writing my name on the wall with a crayon between my toes, but actually I don’t care much at all. Too many teenage boys think it’s the coolest thing they’ve ever seen, and they were always the audience we wanted the credibility with. I guess my feeling now is that if you are trying to be a filmmaker or indeed trying to carve a career in any of the arts, you must remember that you are making your stuff for the people who do like it. Those who don’t aren’t somehow more important, they just need to go find a filmmaker/poet/singer/photographer etc whose work they do like and do connect to. If I do have an issue with the critics, it’s with those who don’t recognize what we achieved at a production level. We already know that it’s a flawed script but we also know we have done something remarkable with what little money we had. We have made an authentic action movie that totally stands up against The Expendables or Transporter or many of the Hollywood Actioners, but we did it with a fraction of the money that they had to spend. Let’s face it, traditionally the British don’t do ‘Action Movies’ at all, well for better or worse, now we do, and three lads from Teesside started it.
The film eventually earnt around £4,000,000 in funding, received from Sherezade Film Development, Storitel Production and others. What effect do you think the Tory cut of funding to the British Film Council will have on the British film industry? Do you think it will become harder for budding filmmakers to emerge?
My feeling is that it will have both a positive and negative effect, which will take years to play out. It will obviously affect the workers of the industry, like the sound guys an the camera men and so on who will find that there is just not the work there anymore, but it will also mean that the creatives, by which I just mean the writers and directors are forced to up their game and start getting their heads around the idea that they need to make films that people actually want to pay to go and see.
The film council did not put money into The Tournament because they deemed it “too commercial”. Now I don’t know what kind of industry we can expect to have when those with an instinct to generate money with their product are actively discouraged like that. The US doesn’t have a film council, and many of the films are independently made outside of the studio system. If they can do it then so can we. I guess on my part I just hope that puts an end to all these downbeat dramas about football yobbos and Heroin addicts. And no more Zombies please!
