They were told to stick to their knitting, making TV, but Cheeky Studios gave naysayers a middle finger and made the Amazon hit 'Cop and a Half'.
Imagine deciding to make a movie because someone else told you that you cant; and that you should rather stick to your knitting.
Well, that’s exactly what happened when a film industry professional told Yusuf Stevens.
In 2018, Cheeky Studios had just won a SAFTA for Winging It, a reality show that did very well for the company.
Stevens already had an itch to do something beyond TV and his dream at the time was to produce a feature.
“I was chatting to another winner backstage who basically said that film wasn’t for me, and we must just carry on doing what we are good at,” he said. “That pushed me. I went home thinking, you know what, we’ll see about that.”
Cheeky Studios had built its reputation on television, commercials, and unscripted projects.
After the snub, Stevens began exploring what it would take to make the leap into film.
“I caught up with actor, presenter and director Jonathan Boyton Lee, who’s always had a love for cinema, and we started brainstorming ideas,” he said. “By early 2020, we had shot a teaser trailer, calling in every favour we could. Then lockdown hit, and suddenly we were editing remotely and sending files back and forth, trying to make it work.”
Egged on by naysayer
Eventually, the teaser was done, and it became the proof of concept for what would grow into Cop and a Half, Stevens’ first feature film.
He said it was “a massive risk on every level.
“When we tried to raise funding, everyone still saw us as the TV guys,” he said. “Nobody wanted to take the risk. So we decided to do it ourselves. We funded it. We put our own money on the line.”
Stevens’ background in finance helped him make magic with the numbers. The steps he had to take led him to a decision to disrupt the status quo in filmmaking, starting with how to pay for productions.
“There are funds for filmmakers out there, but they don’t make sense,” he said. “The interest rates are ridiculous, and if your recovery period is three years, you’re already losing. It just doesn’t work.”
But funding a film and then making it is just the beginning, he said. Then, you have to get your movie to its audience. It’s another massive challenge.
“Distribution is a nightmare,” he said. “Streamers like Netflix, Showmax and Amazon changed the game, but it’s still an incredibly closed system. It can take months, even years, to get to the right person.”
WATCH: The trailer for ‘Cop and a Half’
Even as someone who had been in the industry for years, he said the process felt like starting from scratch.
“There are a handful of people who sit at the table and decide what gets made and what gets shown,” he said. “I get it, they get bombarded, but it shouldn’t be this hard to get a seat at the table.”
Since trying to distribute Cop and a Half, Stevens said he has been steadily building relationships with international distributors and attending global film markets to widen his reach.
“You can’t keep making films that sit on a hard drive,” he said. “We need a proper ecosystem, where funding and distribution exist in the same space.”
ALSO READ: SA’s got talent: Gen Z dancer and choreographer Chloé Blair
To that end, he’s busy working out how to put a film fund together to help moviemakers.
“We’re working with people from the venture capital world to create something fair and sustainable. Filmmakers need access to funding without signing away their future.”
He’s also mulling how to help other producers budget, narrow focus, and manage the business end of flicks.
“One guy came to me saying he needed fifteen million dollars for a project,” he said. “I asked him, do you know how you’re going to recover that money? There’s a big gap in understanding the business of film, not just the art.”
‘Cop and a Half’ shot out the lights
Cop and a Half, now streaming on Amazon Prime, has shot the lights out for Cheeky Studios.
“We didn’t expect to make a fortune,” he said. “The goal was to break even, to show we could do it. We wanted to prove that we could make a proudly South African film that would appeal to international audiences.”
And with that, he also gave the middle finger to the backstage veteran who, in 2018, told him to forget about making a movie in the first place.
“We made every mistake you can make, but we learned from them,” he said. “This film built Cheeky Studios’ reputation in the scripted space. Now we’ve got more projects in development. The next one will be bigger, better, and smarter.”
NOW READ: Growing up with Parlotones rock royalty: Gen Z Emma Hodgson
