POISON ARROWS

In 2002 I set out to make a rise-fall-and rise-again comic-book story about a strange and gifted boy, Perry 'The Poison Arrow' Peters who gets picked up and thrust into the world of professional darts by an audacious US sports impresario, whose thrilling new talent management team 'TopFlite Darts' is headed by the devious and unscrupulous 'Cocky' Rocky Goldfingers.

In 2003 having tracked around a variety of professional darts tournaments getting to know the administrators, I got the chance to shoot some scenes at the BDO World Darts Championship.

Realising the uniqueness of the offer (the broadcasters and sponsors were all in their final year of contract and were relaxed about us being there) - and despite not having raised a dime to make the film yet - I maxed out my credit cards and took a team of actors, dancers and a four camera crew to the Lakeside Country Club, to shoot all the tournament footage I could in four days, live in front of the Lakeside audience.

The BBC and the professional dart players all generously helped out and we got some amazing and authentic footage.

However, in the months after, raising the £1.5m to complete the film got very tricky. The box office failure of a similarly themed Crown Green Bowling film made investors at the time wary of minority sports films.

So with time marching on, I tried to turn the story into a TV series and was eventually commissioned to write a pilot for the BBC.

However, the piece was always more mini-series than it was a sitcom format (which was a more popular comedy format at that time) and when the commissioning editor was moved on the project was shelved.

By this stage the original actors were visibly older than the first material we'd shot and with no obvious way to back to the feature film route - it had to be canned.

We all moved on and did other things.

Fifteen years later, I met with Geoff Bell (who played Rocky Goldfingers) socially and we talked about that darts film we should have made and all that footage I still had sitting in cans in my cupboard.

We speculated about what we could ever do with it and hit on the idea of using it as documentary archive footage in a present day re-telling of the same story.

It occurred to me that if we could explain the (then) 15 year gap narratively then we could look back and re-explore the story in a mock-documentary format.

I contacted Ralf Little who played the Poison Arrow back in 2003 but he had moved on and wasn't interested in getting involved, so instead we had to work out a narrative devise that would naturally exclude him.

That is when we hit on the idea that Rocky had been accused of killing the Arrow back in 2003, gone to jail for 15 years and was now coming out to try to prove he was innocent. All we had to was write what happened next.

So, suddenly we had a way forward. But still no budget.

Pulling a few favours we started with two day shoot in a old prison building owned by Canterbury University.

Using their film students as our crew, we drafted in some actor friends of Geoff's and Ben Gardner Gray to play LJ Maitland, the Louis-Theroux-style documentary filmmaker, tracking Rocky's story, and we shot the opening scenes of the film.

In the three years that have followed we have had a number of additional challenges. First by my emergency liver transplant put a hole in 2019, then the pandemic wiped out 2020. However, whenever we were all safe and available we still went out to shoot however many scenes we could afford to shoot.

Finally, when we were nearing completion we showed what we had to John Henderson, the owner of a classic British Film library and asked him to help us complete it, especially in relation to financing the music licensing.

When he agreed we were able to complete the film, three years after we started the new mock-doc elements and twenty after I shot the first 16mm frames of the original.

So, 'Poison Arrows' has been a labour love, absolutely. A triumph of determination over adversity, undoubtedly. But whether it was all worthwhile is down to an audience, ultimately.

I hope your festival will feel the film we've made deserves one.

Simon Sprackling