Jonathan Sothcott is one of the best known indie film producers in the UK and we caught up with him to talk about his start in the industry, some of his films and his ambitious plans for his production outfit Shogun Films.
In his teens, Sothcott was a film journalist, boldly submitting articles on spec to print magazine and wrote his first book, about legendary actor Christopher Lee, which was published as he turned twenty. Off the back of this, and via a meeting with filmmaker-turned-distributor David Gregory, he began working in the burgeoning DVD extras market, recording audio commentaries with such British film luminaries as Ken Russell, Peter Yates, Bryan Forbes, John Hough and Brian Clemens as well as learning the basics of production on ‘making of’ documentaries. When Anchor Bay, the company Gregory was working for, acquired the Studio Canal/EMI catalogue for DVD release, Sothcott went into bat for a special edition of one of his favourite films – The Man Who haunted Himself (1970). “I knew that if I could get Roger Moore involved, that would elevate the movie, which was a real obscurity at the time,” he explains, “Roger was delighted to be asked, he was rightly very proud of the film and we got his great friend Bryan Forbes involved too and after a memorable lunch at Scotts, we laid down his first commentary track. It was quite a coup and his contribution got the film reviewed widely and, I believe, got it the heat it still enjoys as a cult movie.” What was Moore like? “Exactly as you’d expect, ridiculously famous (we got out of a taxi and he was mobbed by Japanese school children all chanting ‘James Bond’ – he patiently signed all their school books. That’s the standard by which I judge all celebrities now), warm, charming, very funny and self deprecating. He wrote the foreword to my Christopher Lee book. Leslie Bricusse arranged that, he was the initial link. It was a very surreal moment when a fax started buzzing through my dad’s fax machine and at the top it said ‘Roger Moore CBE – MONACO’. When we were in the studio he flopped down in a chair and the seam of his very light summer trousers split with quite an audible ‘ripppp’ – without missing a beat he looked up bashfully and quipped ‘well that wasn’t very suave was it?’ He was hilarious. We talked about how his career could have been different, with more films like The Man Who Haunted Himself. He wanted to direct more but producers always wanted him in front of the camera. He and Bryan Forbes told me about a project they’d tried to get together called Dear Jesus, about a kidnapped kid writing Christmas cards to alert the authorities as to their whereabouts. It was a really cool idea but not at all what you’d expect. I love all those old film business stories.”
Sothcott absorbed this knowledge osmotically, becoming a walking encyclopaedia of British film history. Another veteran filmmaker he met was David Wickes, lead director on The Sweeney and The Professionals as well as the man behind the epic 1988 Jack The Ripper mini-series starring Michael Caine (a Sothcott favourite) who became a mentor. “The older I get, the more I realise he was right about pretty much everything,” says Sothcott, “he really was an incredibly sharp, shrewd, entrepreneurial filmmaker.”
Another mentor was legendary British producer Euan Lloyd, whose credits include The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves and Who Dares Wins, about whom Sothcott produced a documentary entitled The Last of the Gentleman Producers, which featured John Glen, Kenneth Griffith, Joan Armatrading and Sir Roger Moore amongst others. The film had its premiere at The Bradford Film Festival. “Euan and I travelled up to Bradford, as did my mum and Dad,” recalls Sothcott, “they were quite surprised to walk into the hotel bar after and find Euan and I smoking cigars (that’s how long ago it was!), I think they realised then that I’d grown up, that spending my teens obsessively watching videos might actually pay off.” Euan Lloyd died in 2016 and Sothcott gave a eulogy (fittingly also entitled The Last of The Gentleman Producers). “Roger Moore was to ill to go, but Barbara Broccoli was there, so there was some pressure to perform,” recalls Sothcott. “I’m very proud of my association with Euan he was a lovely man. Not long before he died I took him for lunch at Les Ambassadeurs in Park Lane, one of his old haunts when he worked for Cubby Broccoli and he was full of anecdotes and high spirits. It was a different world then.”
Aged 24 there was a sojourn to Newcastle to take on the role of Head of Programming at the nascent Horror Channel, which made him the youngest Television Executive in the UK. Unfortunately the channel was hampered by budget constraints and the line between available programming and audience appetite was blurred “the guys behind it were full of good intentions” remembers Sothcott, “but there was no budget at all, I was pulling off quite miraculous deals but there was a lot of public domain filler. Ultimately I realised it wasn’t for me and resigned and not long after it was sold on and got some proper backing but the problem was always trying to cater for a very picky niche audience on a channel that advertisers weren’t exactly vying for. It was also concurrent with the DVD boom so licensors were getting much better deals there, it’s not like they were sitting on cans of film with nowhere to place their product.”
Back in London, Sothcott began working for David Wickes in his office, learning about development and business. It was during this time that he met the actor Martin Kemp. “I was developing my first movie project and wanted Martin to star in it. I met him at his agent’s office and we just sort of clicked. The supposed financier was the first in a long, long line of fantasists and tyre kickers you meet as an indie producer, and he just fizzled out and vanished, the insect. I thought that was it, the film’s fallen apart, I’ve pissed off Martin Kemp, my career is over before it’s begun. Back to the DVDs. But Martin was not just gracious, he’d been around the block. He said it happens all the time, let’s do something else. So we made a short film: I produced it, he directed it and his brother starred in it. Off the back of that we made a feature called Stalker (2009), a horror-thriller which starred Jane March, Colin Salmon and Billy Murray who became another great friend. I then got slowly dragged away from the horror movies I really wanted to make into these kind of British gangster movies which I knew nothing about but which were very popular. In retrospect it was immaturity on my part, although I do think there’s a place for them, giving working class filmmakers a voice they might not otherwise have in a particularly snobby industry.”
Sothcott’s first real success as a producer was The Rise & Fall of a White Collar Hooligan, a credit card fraud crime film with a football hooligan component. “I knew nothing about football, let alone hooliganism” he opines, “but it was a solid film with a good lead performance from Nick Nevern and it broke out. It was released in the UK by Momentum, who advertised it heavily during The World Cup and it sold a lot of DVDs. Suddenly it was open season for these ‘geezer movies’ and before I knew it I’m being interviewed on Channel 5 about football hooliganism as the most prolific producer of the genre! It never really sat right with me, people who followed me on Twitter would stop me in the street and be disappointed that I wasn’t a cockney wideboy.” An increasingly threadbare series of spin offs and follow ups ensued, culminating with Fall of the Essex Boys, which was a huge success on DVD but dismissed by The Guardian as ‘peculiarly inept.’ “They weren’t wrong,” says Sothcott, “there’s nothing wrong with formula but there was a lack of ambition with these things.”
Sothcott rallied with 2013’s Vendetta, a low budget Death Wish type revenge movie starring his then regular leading man Danny Dyer. He threw everything at the movie, from a small theatrical release to a novelisation stocked in WH Smith but it wasn’t an easy task. “I remember putting on a screening for Universal because we really believed in the film,” says Sothcott, “and I sat there with Dyer and the buyer in an otherwise empty room. When the lights went up, he literally said he’d have bought it if it starred another actor. Dyer was toxic at the time after a run of bad choices and controversies.” Eventually his faith in the film and its star paid off: it was picked up by Anchor Bay, heralding a whole new era for Sothcott with that company after his DVD work for them a decade earlier and became a huge success, both critically (albeit within reason) and commercially. In 2014, Anchor Bay announced a production pact with Sothcott to make 4 movies per year, kicking off with We Still Kill The Old Way, another revenge movie, this time starring Ian Ogilvy and James Cosmo as old London gangsters coming out of retirement to clean up the streets and avenge the murder of Ogilvy’s brother (played by Steven Berkoff, another frequent Sothcott collaborator). We Still Kill The Old Way was another success but the rest of the Anchor Bay output was disappointing and the collapse of DVD saw Sothcott having to re-evaluate his place in the market at the turn of the decade. Anchor Bay UK was quietly shuttered, another casualty of the decline of physical media. During this time he at least had the happy distraction of his relationship with glamorous theatre actress Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, swiftly transitioning from party boy to family man. The two have always lived their relationship in the public eye and are still clearly utterly besotted with each other. “Jeanine saved my life,” reveals Sothcott, “ I don’t know where I’d be without her. She’s my rock, my inspiration and my absolute confidant.”
In 2020, he married Jeanine and inspired by her they set up Shogun Films to refocus on movies for the international market. But then the lockdowns hit and the first Shogun production unexpectedly became gangland home invasion movie Nemesis, with Billy Murray, Nick Moran and Bruce Payne starring in a spirited but ultimately flawed thriller hampered by Covid restrictions. Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott stole the movie with a dazzling turn as gangster’s moll Sadie, establishing herself as a key component in the Shogun model. The film was picked up by Samuel Goldwyn in the USA where it enjoyed some AVOD success but the UK release was more muted.
The next Sothcott production, 2022’s Renegades, boasted the biggest cast he’d yet assembled including Lee Majors, Danny Trejo, Patsy Kensit, Louis Mandylor and, in one of his last movies, the late Tiny Lister. Also on board were Sothcott staples Ian Ogilvy, Billy Murray and Nick Moran as well as TV favourites Michael Brandon and Stephanie Beacham. But the film was a bloated mess directed by the late American filmmaker Daniel Zirilli whose influence is clear in narrative, production values and edit style. “We thought we were punching up with a bigger budget and an action movie director” laments Sothcott, “but in fact it was a big step backwards, the value wasn’t there in the film and as it landed, the market shifted dramatically away from ‘old men with guns’ and these brief cameos that helped with key art (which was the most important thing in covid) but couldn’t extend into press and PR – I doubt Danny Trejo even remembers doing that film!” Although a disappointment in relative terms, Renegades isn’t the worst example of the genre and was nominated for two prestigious National Film Awards, showing Sothcott’s aspirations weren’t entirely wasted. “It really was back to the drawing board – those films were looking backwards – it was time to look to the future and level up.”
As 2023 rolled in and the disappointing results of Renegades became clear, Sothcott was back from that drawing board with a plan for what he calls Shogun 2.0. “An opportunity arose to make a horror movie without name cast for a distributor. Peter Rabid isn’t something that I had any particular longing to make – it’s a solid 6 kids in a house with 2 masked killers flick, but it was an opportunity to push the reset button and get away completely from the gangster movies. Everything happens for a reason and it created the momentum to make Helloween, which we ultimately funded internally and that’s where things started to get really interesting.”
Helloween, undoubtedly Sothcott’s best film to date, is an 80s-inspired mix of The Purge and The Terrifier, written and directed by Phil Claydon (LVK) and featuring superb performances from Michael Paré, Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott and Ronan Summers. Set during the 2016 ‘killer clown’ craze it is a clever, genuinely unsettling movie that tries to do something original within a reassuringly familiar structure. The film was picked up for international sales by prestigious US distribution company Film Bridge and will debut in Quarte 1 2025. “Working with Claydon was a revalation,” enthuses Sothcott, “he has that rare mix of passion and talent and his work ethic is phenomenal. He’s crafted a really special film which I can’t wait for audiences to see.”
In 2024, Shogun has produced another horror-thriller, Doctor Plague, starring Martin Kemp, Peter Woodward and Wendy Glenn, as well as spy thriller Knightfall starring Ian Ogilvy, Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, Geoffrey Moore (son of Sir Roger in a nice culmination of a two decade cycle) and Michael Paré. Both films are currently in post-production for a 2025 release. Doctor Plague marks the first in an output deal with Trinity Creative Partnership, who will release it in April. “When we got the Doctor Plague key art through from Trinity,” says Sothcott, “I was so pleased because it said ‘from the producer of Helloween’ rather than Vendetta or We Still Kill The Old Way and that was such a relief. To leave that behind and have made something worthy of that recognition.”
Next up is The Secret of Guy Fawkes, which has begun pre-production, as well as vampire thriller Midnight Kiss, action flick Active Shooters and the self explanatory Werewolf Hunt. “We’ve had practical werewolf suits made for us in the USA,” says Sothcott, “they look absolutely stunning, in the style of The Howling, and this is going to be a real audience pleaser.”
2025 boasts hitman thriller Too Long The Night, horror Harbinger and fighting film Killer Instinct amongst others. “I’m aiming to shoot ten movies in 2025,” enthuses Sothcott, “we’ve really hit our stride now and I’m determined that Shogun will be the number one producer of quality low budget genre movies in the UK and Western Europe by 2026.”