Filmed in York, edited alongside Eddie Redmayne: The amazing inside story of new movie

How did your story start?

We’re what you would call proper working class, we’ve not had any kind of privileged upbringing. In a nutshell at 15 we both shared a dream to make movies.

At 15 I met Scott at grammar school and we just hit it off. Scott has dyslexia and he was in the D and E sets. Our paths didn’t really cross so it was only by accident that we met.

I thought he was like a breath of fresh air and though not academically smart he is the smartest guy I know.

In a careers lesson we were asked what we wanted to do when we were older. Scott said he wanted to earn £300,000 and then the teacher turned to me and said: “I suppose you want to be an astronaut?”

One day after school we got frustrated with the whole situation and the light bulb moment sparked. We wrote down all the things we wanted to do in life and made our ‘Dream Chasers’ list. Top of our list was to make movies.

How did you make money?

We set up a string of businesses and started off oven cleaning when we were still in our teens, then we went into event management and setting up charity balls and after that set up a media company.

But this was all about getting expertise together to get into film making. We’ve learnt a lot about taking a product to market and that’s saved us a lot of time and money. As you can imagine you have to knock on a lot of doors to sell oven cleaning!

Then you sold the businesses…

After a chance meeting with an old school friend Scott realised we were running the businesses for the wrong reasons. He wanted to sell up and make the movie and at the time I really didn’t want to and it came to blows.

We didn’t speak and next morning I looked at him and apologised and pulled out the dream chasers list we wrote when we were 15. I said: ‘What’s next?’ We sold the business to get out and focus on making movies.

By 24 we’d learned all about marketing, sales and selling products across different industries. We took all this experience. Sold up. Travelled the world. We went to New Zealand for three and a half years. We created businesses in New Zealand.

When did Scott And Sid become a reality?

We travelled back to the UK as we realised it was a UK movie. Then we went on the trail of raising money and seeking investors.

We got around 15 investors. The first investor who backed the film put in £250,000 – the first thing you think is ‘we have to do this now’.

The movie budget was £1.2 million but at same time we thought we have a long way to go. The 18 months nearly broke us. We flew out to New York to meet a potential investor – we were skint and trying to make the dream possible. Our meeting was cancelled twice and we were really dejected and saw no one.

We realised we needed to target big people, all the people who invested were self-made people.

We accidentally met filmmaker David Yates over two cappuccinos and a croissant. We ended up cutting our film sitting in Warner Brothers with the likes of Eddie Redmayne.

How did you go about casting the movie?

Casting was a crazy adventure in itself. We found Tom Blythe and Richard Mason and our director of photography was Will Humphris.

Our editor was Chris Gill who did the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. We convinced him to work on our film for free. I think he saw something special in our script.

Why did you choose to film in York?

We’ve always loved York and both lived here since in our twenties. We ended up living here after coming back from New Zealand.

To me York is like a giant movie set. Nothing really iconic has been filmed here and we thought why not?

It was such an important part of our growing up. It’s in essence a Yorkshire story and York is the capital of Yorkshire. We had lots of help from the city council too.

You are distributing the film yourselves – why?

Bringing the film to market was like preparing for battle again. We don’t like being told what to do.

We realised we wanted to do it ourselves. So the film will be exclusively sold in HMV, on iTunes, Amazon and on Virgin.

But we are responsible for bringing the film to market at cinemas, not just on home entertainment. We wanted to keep all the rights and all the royalties.

We have a great publicity team in London. We hope to be on the Chris Evans show the One Show, we’ll be on Calendar, etc. Welcome to Yorkshire and Visit York are behind it. Leeds United are behind it.

Any regrets?

My only regret is we didn’t dream high enough and we’ll make another film (if we get the return on this film that we need).

We have an idea to write about Guy Fawkes and we’re developing the idea around that now, the other is about the Yorkshire Ripper.

We want to make movies in Yorkshire about Yorkshire, I love Yorkshire people we’re two Yorkshire lads, there’s a grit and determination and the people are so down to earth.