Ben Hopkins On Distribution

Ben Hopkins won the Evening Standard Best Newcomer Award for his trippy avant-garde feature The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz. But a year ago the film was sitting on the shelf having been rejected by every single British distributor. The lesson here? Director Ben Hopkins rolled up his sleeves, swallowed his pride and got his film into the cinemas - for a bargain basement £4,500. Ben told FilmFour.com exactly how he did it.

Comment on this feature >

All the art house distributors turned it down. Nine Lives is a black and white weirdo film so I can understand why! However, it had been distributed already in Germany by a small, determined hard-working distributor, who had found an audience and made money.

I screened it for Geoff Andrew at the National Film Theatre who agreed to put it on, so the race was on to find another commercial cinema in the West End to show it concurrently and therefore give it a higher profile. Fortunately Tony Jones, who books the Metro near Leicester Square, liked it and agreed to release it at the same time. It was great to know that there are people like Tony and Geoff out there who are still committed to showing unusual work and taking a few risks.

My lovely German Producer lent me £4,500 for the distribution budget. This broke down into something like £1K for the BBFC certificate, £1K to hire a publicist, £1K for posters, postcards and press packs, £1K for Time Out adverts and £500 for admin, post, photocopying etc.

The publicity legwork was covered by me, the BFI press office and Tina Price the publicist. But in terms of the admin, I did all the work, from organising the poster print-outs to booking couriers. I would often pretend I wasn't the director, just someone who worked for the distribution company to avoid questions. It also made conversations shorter.