Couch Talk Episode 33 (play)
Guests: Jarrod Kimber and Sampson Collins – makers of the cricket documentary – “Death Of A Gentleman” (www.deathofagentlemanfilm.com)
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Subash Jayaraman – Hello and Welcome to Couch Talk. In today’s episode, we are talking to the makers of the cricket documentary, “Death of A Gentleman”- two quite popular names – Jarrod Kimber and Sampson Collins. Before we get to the two gentlemen, make sure you visit www.deathofagentlemanfilm.com, take a look at their teasers there and most importantly, contribute generously for them to raise sufficient funds to complete the film.
With that, welcome to the show, Jarrod and Sam!
Sampson Collins – Hey, mate!
Jarrod Kimber – Hey, Subash!
SJ – Let’s begin with the “How”s and “Why”s. I read on your site that Sam initially had the idea and he had Jarrod buy into it on the drive from Manchester to London after a T20 game. So, let us know how the whole thing panned out…?
SC – OK. Basically, we were sitting there at The Oval, in the outdoor press box, you know, there aren’t many better places out there to be sat in, in world cricket. And we were pretty happy, I think, when we were just told that we were going out to Australia that winter and a friend of ours came over to say, “Hi”. He’s a producer of a talk-sports and we were talking about whether he was going to come out to Australia. And he was like “Well, maybe we should just do something bigger, so you can come and work with us?”, because he was always talking about how he could get involved. “Why don’t we just make a film about the Australia-india series?” And we thought, “yeah, yeah.”, Jarrod was like “Yeah, yeah. Looks great” in the manner Jarrod does. And, it sort of moved from there. The talk-sport friend, I had a drink with him 2 days ago and it was pretty good that he didn’t come and work with us. He probably would’ve ended up doing sound. He would’ve been the best qualified sound engineer in history. And gradually, the idea sort of morphed into talking about, “What the hell is wrong with test cricket?”. And I persuaded Jarrod and that was the starting point, really.
SJ – Is that all, Jarrod? Was there any other thing involved? You were just sold to the idea that quickly?
JK – Well, it was one of those things. I wasn’t that excited about making a documentary about – the Australia and India series, which is, now looking back at it, not a good idea either. I’m not really a big fan of those sports documentaries that just show a series, because they are, basically, just highlights packages. But, what I am interested in, is trying to answer big questions. Like, the more we talked about “Is test cricket dying? What’s wrong with it?” and all this kind of stuffs. This was on the back of the India-England which was an amazing series in itself, you (SJ) were there. You saw it. I think, we were like, we just wanted to answer a big question and do something more substantial than The Two Chucks. And I suppose, if you’re going to choose a big question, probably about two or three in cricket, and one of them has to be “Is test cricket dying?” because it is what everyone is always talking about!
SC– Which is funny, because you say you don’t want to do a documentary about the Australia-India series and everything which was interesting about the Australia-India series leads back to the question of what is the future of test cricket. Right from Ponting and Tendulkar, and what happens when they go; right down to politics between the BCCI and Cricket Australia; right down to the Big Bash which was happening against that series. All of it leads in to “What is the future of test cricket?” And that, that was a great opportunity to address a lot of the key problems.
SJ – You mentioned my England trip. Before I made the trip, I met Homer, one of your good friends on twitter. I met him in New York. He flatly said “Test cricket will be dead in twenty years”. He has his reasons – administrators, lack of context and contest in test matches, and hence test matches will die out. So, what were your initial thoughts, and how they may have changed as you have made the movie? Or, not changed.
JK – For myself, I was definitely not in Homer’s camp. But I thought, that eventually test cricket might end up almost being an amateur type of sport. Maybe more like hockey, where it is still played but it is not always on TV and it is not as important. I think there are things that the administrators are learning. There are definitely a lot of things that are pushed by the TV companies. I think if the marketing techniques that they have used on T20 cricket can be moved across, then test cricket can be saved. The fact is, that for cable networks to show five days of sports and know that you’ve got some three, four or five days of sports lined up, it is actually a really big thing for them. There is a lot of hope. I don’t think test cricket is actually as close to death as I thought before the film. But, I think things like ‘day-night cricket’. Like, we kept hearing people say “It is played during the week, and it is played during the day. And no one is there to watch it.” There is always another opportunity around that, and that is to play day-night cricket, and to put it on prime-time. Because that’s why One Day cricket and Twenty-20 cricket have done so well.
SC – I think, from my point of view, the standards, going forward, are a massive, massive problem here. In terms of, how quickly India have dropped out of the map away from home in the last year. And I suppose, one of the biggest things about “the journey”, if I can call it that, is just seeing how screwed up the administration is, first hand. All these guys have got their own ideas, or certainly the ones we spoke to have got their own ideas about how the game is going to progress and what the best way to take it forward is. But none of them seem to agree on that. And that manifests itself in the ICC. And these are the functional ones, the countries with a functional board playing the test game, and we are not even talking about the West Indies and Sri Lanka and Pakistan and guys like that. That has been eye-opening.
SJ– Of course, you guys have had tremendous success with the Two Pricks At The Ashes, which morphed into The Two Chucks. How much of a step-up is making this documentary from those efforts, in terms of planning, camera crew, and other background stuff, the actual shooting of the film, etc?
JK – Oh, that’s easy. The difference between The Two Chucks and making the film is the difference between recording a podcast, like you are now, and producing for the BBC radio programme. It’s just completely different on every level. I had a bit of a film background and sort of knew roughly what to do, but every time we think we are ahead of the game, we have been realising there is a whole other thing we need financing for, or we need agreement on, or we need another piece of equipment. It is just getting out of control. It’s a smooth film.
SC – Really, a smooth film. In the purest sense you are putting a camera in front of people and filming them. But, realistically, that footage has got to be versatile enough and good enough. And the audio, good enough to be played anywhere we want it to be played. Otherwise, we don’t have anything to sell. It’s not like The Two Chucks, where we can get away with screwing something up. Here, we had to deal with that, we had to take care of legalities. There are a lot of release forms you have to think about before you can start interviewing people or where you can interview them. As Jarrod says, you’ve got to actually fund this thing. And, most documentaries, as a low budget, as a really low budget film would be 200 Grand, probably. A really low budget film. Most films are produced with a budget, say “From The Ashes”, the recent Botham documentary would’ve had a budget of around the 2 million mark, probably, overall. We have, so far, spent in the region of 35000 pounds, and we will be producing this film for under a hundred thousand pounds. Now, it marks a point in time, which enables us to do the film, which means you can actually get the equipment which is good enough to shoot. We’re shooting on DSLRs, which (JK – which we could’ve used three years ago realistically, not at this level, anyway). And we’ve got guys, working with us, who are charging us less than film rates. There are a lot of easy saves in the film, but, still, to make a film with this amount of money is a serious, serious undertaking to try and save that amount of money that we are. I think it is amazing that we have got to this stage. We have got a decent stuff. We’ve got a crew, we’ve got equipment.
JK – Considering what we spent and considering what we’ve filmed, there are far bigger documentaries that don’t get some of these interviews that we got. Part of that also is, we’re capitalizing on what we do for a living. Cricinfo being very helpful, they’ve obviously sent us out, and we can go up to someone in the press box and say “Look, we work for Cricinfo, but this has nothing to do with them. We’re making an independent film”. You’re talking about an independent film you are being passionate about. “Yes, you are a bit of a famous person and we are nobody’s but come on board. Even if you got only ten minutes. Help us out.” And, almost everyone that we have gone to have said “Yes.”.
SJ– You’ve interviewed Mark Nicholas, Dean Jones, Ravi Shastri, Rahul Dravid…
JK– We didn’t interview Jones. He was just next to Hansie! Patrick Cummins…
SJ – Sourav Ganguly, your buddy Eddie [Cowan]. Harsha [Bhogle], Tugga.
SC– David Morgan. James Sutherland. The biggest break we had was, as I got on the plane to come out to Australia, I had chat with him on twitter, with Eddie Cowan. He’s an old twitter friend of Jarrod’s and had just become one of mine. And actually, probably now, a real life friend. “Hi Eddie!”, if you’re listening to this. He had got into the Australian squad on the back of unbelievable couple of seasons in Tasmania. Also, unbelievable timing as well- scoring four hundreds just at a point when Shane Watson got injured.
JK – He went from someone being we were going to interview once about, someone who loves test cricket and someone who sees himself mostly as a test cricket potential player; to actually having someone whom we can follow around whole summer for every test behind the scenes and film him as he played his first four tests for his country. There is not much access to that sort of stuff in cricket and you don’t usually get players who are far more guarded. And, to be fair, had we done Eddie in the very next series, he would’ve been more guarded. We got him in a time we were mates with him and he wasn’t an Australian cricketer. He was just thrust into the side. We just had this amazing relationship with him, and we pushed him, and almost broke him as a man sometimes.
SC – We pushed him as hard as we could and of course, it is difficult in that instance, because you are looking at a guy whom you want to succeed and….
JK – That reminds me, the last time I saw him, he said, “You’ve ruined my life!”. I reckon he was saying it tongue-in-cheek, but I think there was a slight bit of truth in that as well!
SC– As journalists, as fans of the game, it was incredible experience for us to witness what exactly it is like. Us, sitting in that box and, no different from anyone sitting back at home and watching on TV. Really, none of us have any idea, really, what’s going on in those guys’ heads. And we all have to suppose things. The freedom of the media is that we can say whatever we want. People love to hear people being definitive about stuff. It was a great insight, and I’m sure you will think about what it was like witnessing a guy who was like a fan, like the rest of us to being an Australian test cricket. The line is that thin. He (Cowan) said some stuff about the way media directs the game and how it’s changed history of the media.
JK – He’s changed his view of a lot of Australian cricketers. He had definitely viewed them differently before.
SC– Yeah. He viewed them probably like the way we did. Or maybe slightly different since he played with some of them in New South Wales. I hope that when people see that side of the film, separate to the business side of the film, which is obviously a large part of it, that they will feel informed about, that they will see what we saw, in the way that test cricket affects the guys who actually play it. That they are humans, and not just people to be abused at our will, or praised at our will.
SJ – How did you go about, actually landing all these talents for the interview? I read your post on meeting Rahul Dravid and it made us all warm inside and weak in the knees. Any other interesting stories from your shooting of the film so far?
JK – Sam’s job is, basically, to go up to people who have no idea who we are and convince them that (a) we are legitimate people, and (b) to be in this documentary. These people are very suspicious. Sam has an amazing skill to keep going until they say, “Yes.” Sometimes they say, “Yes.” Just so that he will walk away!
SC– Ganguly!
JK – Yeah, tell him the Ganguly one!
SC– Sourav Ganguly. So, at the start of the India-England series, I’m standing in the nets at Lords, watching Tendulkar bat, and watching Tendulkar’s son being surrounded. I suddenly realised I’m sitting next to Ganguly. I said to myself, “Oh, Great!” So, I asked him to do a Two Chucks intro(duction) and he said “Ok. Great!” And we did a Two Chucks intro. Jarrod and I were, at that stage, doing lunch time interviews as well, for 15-25 minutes. So, I took Ganguly ‘s details and asked “Can we get to do one of these interviews?”, and he was like, “Fine.”. At that stage we thought Ganguly was pretty easy to deal with, very happy to do anything. We spent that whole series, I must’ve approached Ganguly into double figure times. (JK – ah, only fifteen times.) We had him scheduled on three separate days. On each of those days, I remember one at Lords press box, which was quite an open box, there is no escaping from people. He used to sit on the opposite side of the box and he’s supposed to be coming to see us at 2 (PM) and it was about 3 (PM). And I went over to him, “Sourav, are you happy to do our interview now?” (Saurav-) “Yeah yeah, I’ll be right there in a second”. 4.30 – No sign of him coming anywhere near us. He was having the same conversation with the Indian journalists huddled together. At this stage, I’m thinking about how Ganguly stood Waugh up at a coin toss. I was thinking “he can’t be doing that to us, right? That will be pretty pointless.” At 5.30, I’d go over there and he said “I will be over in a second”. That’s it. End of play.
JK – That was at the start of the summer. We had a whole summer of that, where he was always five minutes away. It was good for me, though. I never wanted to interview him in the first place, because I thought of him as a prick. And it was great he lived up to my view. We eventually got him in Sydney, and he pretty much didn’t say anything, anyway. It was a waste of our time!
SC – In Sydney, we were at a totally different press box in the other part of the ground. I went over to him and said “Sourav, can we sort out that interview?”. He was like “Yup. Yup. Definitely. I’ll come and find you in a minute.” I said “Sourav, I’m in the press box at the other side of the ground, and you are not going to come and find me just like that, are you?” He said again- “I’ll come and find you in a minute”. Well, we eventually did the interview. And…he…said nothing. Five months of pursuing for absolutely nothing. Anyway, thanks Sourav!
SJ- You started with the idea of shooting during the Australia-India series. Was it in your plans that you would be continuing the shooting in England, and I read that you are going to Sri Lanka and then India?
JK– Basically, we knew, we shot a little bit before we left for Australia, very little. We didn’t have the equipment at that stage. So, we shot a little bit on the flight. Afterwards, we always knew we wanted to go to India, but we don’t have any money to go to India. Saying that “We are going to India” before even having the money to do it was just a ridiculous way of doing it, so we didn’t do that. We waited until we almost had the money and then decided to go to India.
SC– We waited until we realised that Jarrod had not booked out flights to Sri Lanka. We were supposed to book them in September. And we got to January, and he was like “I haven’t booked our flights!”. We were always going to shoot in England, but we planned to do it before we went to Australia, which in hindsight could’ve been a total… Another thing about the film is that so much happens, that you plan, and then retrospectively, you realise that things change and had we stuck to the original plan, it would’ve been a total bull sack.
JK –Yeah, would’ve been a shocking film, if we did what we thought of originally. So, everything has fallen into place and has gone quite well for us. The India trip. We plan to be a week in India, we get to cover two IPL games in two cities, hopefully get someone like Sachin. We want to talk to Harsha and Ayaz Memon when we’re out there again.
SC– And most importantly, we want to hear from the mystical fan, Paul. He’s from Kolkata.
JK – I mean, that’s like 90% of the reason why we’re going to India. He’s just a cool dude to hang out with.
SC– I sort of imagined him sort of living just outside the Eden Gardens in this sort of Hugh Hefner style. We were so disappointed when we found out his name was Paul.
JK – The entire Kolkata expecting this great Indian name, and then you look at the trailer and – Paul. We were like, “Really?”. He is a big fan of Neil Harvey’s. Any fan of Neil Harvey’s is a friend of mine.
SJ – What has been the prevalent thought among the administrators, ex-players, current players, the fans you have interviewed for your film? Without giving too much away…
SC – No one says the same stuff.
JK – Yeah.
SC – And that’s worrying. Because one of the big thing why we wanted to do this thing was because there is no middle ground in the media. Cricinfo article is in about 2000 words, and Gideon Haigh’s Sphere of Influence, about seven thousand pages, all of which is brilliant, but it is very difficult to find that middle ground. And the big thing is such a big scope – it comprises of players, it comprises of administrators, fans, broadcaster. We just spoke to a guy named Andrew Warblood who sells TV rights for IMG. They’re all across the spectrum and everybody has just his own perspective and basically concerned about themselves. If you asked Justin Langer about the game, he’s going to have a totally different prognosis to a guy who sells TV rights, because they do different jobs.
JK – Some people answer the questions differently. Sometimes… I remember the first time I said it to Eddie. We were not recording, we were in a pub or something. And he was like, “The purpose of the film is wrong. Test cricket is looking strong. Look at this series between Australia and South Africa. Look at England.” And I was like, “It doesn’t matter how strong the teams are, if it is badly marketed, terribly run and no one goes and watches it!” Everyone has a slightly different take on how the strength of test cricket is. Also, it is not an easy question to ask. When we ask the question, some people completely get the answer wrong. They just don’t understand where we come from. We are coming from, we need test cricket to be strong when it is played. Realistically, it can be as strong as you want, but if is not marketed correctly and it is not run correctly, then no one is going watch it and no one’s going to care how strong they are.
SC – Exactly. People really need to stop looking at tests like, Australia and South Africa series, “There is no problem with test cricket. Look at it live.”
JK – Every time I hear, “Told you test cricket wasn’t dead!”, I’m like “Fuck You! There were twelve people there who came to see it! What’s wrong with you?”
SC – And we know test cricket is a great game, already. We see no problem with that. If there are only two teams playing it in a few years’ time…
JK – If South Africa and India don’t want to play it any more, you have 2 teams playing it.
SC – Sri Lanka have gone down the toilet, because they’ve only got Herath’s bowling. That’s the only thing they’ve got left. There’s a problem now.
SJ – You have two questions, from our listeners. One is from Russ, he is on twitter as @idlesummers. He wants to know – “Since filming, what have you learnt that you already didn’t know? Are you more, or less, confident about test cricket?”
JK – I was always of the opinion that day-night test cricket only needed to be played in places like New Zealand. And maybe Sri Lanka and the West Indies, it didn’t matter so much. Now I understand that the TV rights a lot more, and I understand that if test cricket isn’t played in primetime, then it is always going to struggle to get the same money that One Day and Twenty-20 is if it is not going in a ratings time. As far as the whole thing, I came into this thing quite negative about administrators and TV companies. I’m not as negative now about TV companies but administrators deal, you know, when we came in, there were a lot of bull-shit that went on behind the scenes, some of which will make the film, some of which won’t, that leaves me to believe that cricket is definitely not in the best hands that it could be in.
SC – From my part, I was always sort of naively confident about the future, I sort of trust test cricket, that, eventually people will sort the stuff out. One thing I’ve been disappointed about has been the reaction of a certain people, you will see in the film. The way that everybody is out to make money out of cricket. I suppose, as journalists maybe we are still naive, we subscribe as fans to believing the people we watch out there, the players, the other guys with their best interests at heart. Sometimes it is a jarring reality, that those guys are just doing what they are doing as a career, really. As I suppose they’re to love the game, they are more concerned with sponsorship deals and everything like that. That’s not every player, it’s really not every player.
JK – But it is a lot of players, it is lot of administrators and lot of people. The one thing that we came up against a lot was, everyone wanted to earn profit from the game. I mean, you and I have worked in cricket for a long time. That has never been that clear to me until we did the show and suddenly everyone was talking about their product.
SC- I’ve seen when people have thrown it back at us and said, “Look, now you’re trying to profit from the game by producing this film” and we will probably sit here and say that we’ve been producing this film now, unpaid for six months, and have set up structures to actually fund the film to, basically, see us make very, very little money beyond the totally minimal wage out of producing the film. That’s not the case, we actually do love the game. We just want to get some answers from these people. I suppose we might want to ask questions that the people who are listening to this might want to ask about the way the game is run and whether anybody has an idea about the future and whether they are just protecting their own vegetable patch before the drought.
SJ – Benny, who is on twitter as @tracerbullet007, wants to know if there was any particular moment in the movie so far when you realised all this hard work and taking, basically no money, was all worth it.
SC – I’ll let you (JK) go first on it…
JK – I’ve written about it, so sort I’ve ruined it a bit for your podcast. The Rahul Dravid moment was amazing for me. He came over, and just the fact that he left he left his hotel and walked down the street the park to be with us meant a lot. But then, he introduced himself to everyone in the crew, and it was a really soft handshake. We agreed to do a twenty minute interview, and I grilled him for about forty five minutes, and asked as many questions as I could in as much time. Then he did a promo for the film, which he didn’t have to do. And then, the minute he got up, he gave this handshake which was like one of the most aggressive sort of great, friendly handshakes you’ll ever get in your life. For me, I was just like, “He fucking thinks we are good people”. He thinks what we are doing is the right thing, and that this isn’t some non-sense project. From that moment onwards, I was just like, maybe we are onto something. Because, you know, a lot of other people, the minute their interview is over they will just rush off; and this was a guy who was shaking your hand, chat with us and he just seemed like such a nice guy. He is not a normal person, this is Rahul Dravid. So, for me, that was amazing.
That, and a cinematographer who didn’t like cricket, learning about cricket as he went around. Now so much so much as he watched a Pakistan – England One-Dayer with me the other day. He realised how much cricket gets into people. Once in, once they actually get the chance, you can really get it into your blood stream. And that’s what happened to him. Those two stories were massive for me.
SC – I agree, it is those little moments. There have been so many little moments over the course of six months where just somebody says something… I sort of remember that Eddie Cowan, one of the first interviews we did with him before he made his debut and he told about how he felt like a kid on Boxing Day. On Christmas day, I saw him in the morning, and he just sort of gave this little smile. And every moment that I know that somebody sees that on the film, it is going to help them remember what a bloody great game cricket is. Sometimes, things like that can say more than words. And that just makes be fuzzy.
SJ– That’s brilliant! You guys want to talk about the we-fund?
SC– Yeah. We need money, man!
SJ – So, you have a target of 10000 pounds on the we-fund.com project and you have raised about 36% of it so far?
SC– Yeah. With the stuff we’ve got coming, and the amount we’ve got in bank accounts from people who’ve not been able to use PayPal accounts, we have nearly 50%.
JK – We’re at a point at this moment where we had an initial investment which was enough to do the initial filming and we are pretty sure that once we get a big kick-ass computer we can edit enough to get a distributor or more investors on board. But we are in the middle period, where people are interested in investing in the film, but we haven’t got a big chunk of money that will pay for the India trip and then the editing when we get back, and to pay our crew. We are in this period right now where we sort of use the we-fund as a way for topping that up so that we don’t have to go through, I mean, when we go to investors there is a lot of little stuff involved where we’re trying to prove, also, with we-fund, that people do care about test cricket. And when they hear about a film that is about test cricket, they want to put some money in- whether it is 10 quid or you put a 100 quid in, we really want to prove to people that we go to sell the film a lot of them are going to go and say “No one really gives a shit” while I’ll say, “Well, wait a minute. We managed to get 10000 quid from fans without really using any major media out, to fund this film”. That’s a big part for us, we really do need the money. We are in a really dangerous point where if we don’t get the money shortly, we might have to stop and wait for investors to come in. And when you wait, and when you are stopping a film, no good becomes of that. You can keep plowing ahead as much as you can. Me and Sam are now broke from putting our own money in, so we really need other people to help out as much as they can.
SC– That’s the thing. We’ve got an extraordinary amount of people who’ve re-tweeted us and linked us, and yet, that just does not correlate to the amount of people who have actually donated. It seems a lot of test fans are passive. The idea that we are making a film that, hopefully, the people would want, you know, would ask the questions that the people would themselves want to ask. So, if people care about test cricket, then even 3 pounds, 2 pounds, 5 pounds. That makes a difference, you know. If every single person who watched one of our podcast for the last eighteen months donated 2.50 pounds or 2 quid, we’d easily do this. And that’s all we need from people. We just need them to stand up and help us, make it stand for test cricket, really.
SJ – So, where can they contribute?
SC– We’ve got on our website, there, you really can’t miss it. Loads of things direct you to the we-fund site. There’s also, if people are allergic to PayPal, which is totally understandable, they can get in touch with us directly on one of our plenty of web addresses. There is deathofagentlemanfilm@gmail.com . We’re really aware that we are not a charity.
JK – On wefund, you can get something back for your money.
SC – I can remember, you can get a hug for 10 quid, and you can get T-shirts and DVDs and all sorts of different things.
JK – If you put in, if you actually invest, you get credit on the film.
SC– And there are many things in-between them, like, cricket matches and barbeques that we’ll be having.
JK – Yeah, especially if you’re in London, you’ll be able to do things like that. We’re trying to make the best film possible. So, we HAVE to go to India, we HAVE to get editing equipment. So, we really need this money. If anyone out there could help us out, that will be awesome!
SJ – It’s awesome what you guys are doing. I’ll chip in some more at the end of this month, but, this is awesome. That’s all I can do, you know, I can do limited amounts. So, whatever I can, I will!
JK – Let me tell you a story about one of our investors. I won’t say his name, I don’t know if he wants us to say it out. Basically, he told me once that he only really got onto the internet because Cricket With Balls and only really worked out these stuffs because of Two Chucks and Two Pricks At The Ashes., absolutely loves what me and Sam do. This guy is just a working guy. He’s just a labourer. And he told us he was going to help us out by investing in the film. We were over the moon. He is a really nice guy. Any amount of money will get us over the moon. Then this guy tells us he is going to invest a week’s wages in this film. Now, this isn’t a banker or a lawyer or anything like that. This is a guy who is a labourer in the country in New South Wales. And he is willing, he believes so much in what we are doing and who we are, that he is willing to put in a whole week’s wages towards our film. We don’t expect everyone to do that. But, that, to us, those sort of things really mean a lot. Because, this guy is not really rich by any means. His whole life is just following cricket. And, if you can get anyone help us out, who actually do earn in a great way, I mean, we don’t need a week’s wage, but someone who has money, we need only an hour’s wage of some of these people.
SC– When you are talking about one of those moments, I have another one. Earlier, we approached a bloke before we went to Australia. John Woodcock, a former Times journalist. He must be in his eighties right now (JK –almost nineties). And he is great, great guy.
JK – He’s on the level of Neville Cardus or some of these guys, with the old cricket writers that everyone has read.
SC – Yeah, and I continue to read him in the Times. We approached him about being in the film. And, hopefully he still might be. He told us to bugger off, but that, he would invest some of his money in it. And that was great. (JK – that was early on, too.) I mean, we are nothing, basically, and he had placed his trust in us. That was one of those moments where we feel that sort of sense of responsibility that we can’t just toss something out. This film has got to be something that does justice to everybody from the fans to John Woodcock, one of the ultimate living voices of the game. It’s an amazing responsibility. So, it is also pretty inspiring.
SJ – On that note, Sam and Jarrod, thank you for coming on the show! Wish you both the very best in making of the film.
And, listeners, thanks for listening. Get to www.deathofagentlemanfilm.com and donate as much as you can!
SC, JK – Cheers Mate.
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Episode transcribed by: Bharathram Pattabiraman