Papadopoulos & Sons Director Q+A

After having a Q&A session with the Producer of Papadopoulos and Sons, Marcus Markou, there are 5 main things which I feel I have learnt from the discussion:

1)I learnt that Marcus did not produce the film to make money, but that he wanted to make a film based on his childhood realisation, and that the film portrays his personal story of his perspective as a child of the Greek community- represented by Spiros, and the British, represented by the family. In order to fund the film, he put nearly a £1million of his own money into the budget, meaning that he was not concerned about making a profit.

2)Marcus is a strong supporter of self-distribution, therefore utilised his open access to online sites where he had potentially unlimited outreach to users. For example, on the social networking website twitter, he used his account to directly target chip shops, and followed as many as possible to create a large following, and then used this to get them to buy tickets to his screenings or promote the film in store.

3)Due to the tight budget, Marcus decided that he was going to spend as little as possible in as many areas of the project as he could. He decided that he would not directly approach his preferred actors with a proposed payment, and instead sent them a description of his film, resulting in many cast members, such as Frank Dillane, offering to work for free, or minimum costs, meaning he could spend money in other areas, and he recommends this approach to other independent film producers.

4)He also explained how he underestimated how difficult he would find it when taking the role of the director, and that even on his rather small, independent film task, he was still in charge of a crew of 100, and a cast of 17, meaning that it was a very stressful time and required his hard work. He talked about how he lost a day of filming due to unforeseen circumstances, and that it was his job as the director to redesign the script overnight to make up for the loss and save the film.

5)He talked specifically about the importance of marketing to a specific target audience, in this case, the Greek community. He explained that he located all of the Greek churches in London, and found the nearest cinemas to them, from this he was a able to produce a marketing plan, which he used to get his film into Cineworld- screening the film in cinemas specifically within the Greek communities- for example, the cinemas in Enfield and Wood Green to target the specific audience and make the film easily accessible for them.