Sucker Punch The Movie

‘Making an independent movie is draining. It takes everything you, and everyone else involved in the project, has got. It is certainly the toughest thing I’ve ever attempted in my life and if you looked logically at the myriad problems involved you would simply decide against doing it. But with a group of like minded people I decided to say ‘fuck it’ and do it anyway and whatever the outcome, we did it our way and nobody can take that away from us.’

‘Sucker Punch’ was born out of the frustration felt by Malcolm Martin and Gordon Alexander when trying to find finance for their first script ‘The Longshot’. Favourably received and good enough to secure them an agent, the script also secured them a number of high profile meetings and free lunches at some very nice restaurants but always with the same end result-‘call us in a fortnight, a month, six weeks…’ and then when they called in a fortnight, a month, six weeks it was another round of ‘call in a fortnight, a month…’ That’s why they’re called independent movies because if you waited for the industry break you have to be very, very patient and both Gordon and Malcolm were tired of playing patience.

‘You reach a stage where you pour all your emotions into something, bend over backwards for people but in the long run you just end up doing the donkey work for someone else and they take what you’ve done and change it totally from the vision you first had. We were simply tired of doing that.’

Gordon had just finished work on Richard Jobson’s kung-fu take on ‘The Warriors’, ‘The Purifiers’ alongside Kevin McKidd and had received favourable, often glowing reviews but still felt that his acting and choreographing talents had yet to be fully utilised or appreciated. Malcolm had similar feelings working as Producer and co-writer for the cult movie ‘Hell to Pay’ starring celebrity gangster Dave Courtney. Friends since they had both worked on a short, years earlier, they decided enough was enough and that the only way to get the film made, and made the way they wanted it, was to do it themselves.

‘I was tired of being fed ‘bullshit’ all the time. All I wanted was a simple yes or no but every meeting ended on this vague but optimistic ‘this project sounds great’ note that left me as much in the dark as when I went into the meeting and finally I realised that for these people this nice dinner was their work, they were already where they wanted to be but for me it was simply another day wasted, preventing me from getting to where I wanted to be.’