Making Poison Arrows
Simon first began shooting material in January of 2002. Geoff came on board the following year, after Simon got clearance from the tournament organisers to shoot scripted action sequences at the BDO World Darts Championship at Lakeside Country Club, Frimley Green, jumping up on stage in the 15 minute gaps between scheduled matches.
Fans, officials and competing professional players joined with the actors to simulate matches, press conferences and a fully choreographed dance routine, complete with pyrotechnics, to create authentic looking footage, in front of a live audience. With Geoff also improvising, in character, back stage in the player's bar, some extraordinary material was captured.
But there was never a budget in place to complete the rest of the film, and as they tried to raise it, retrospectively, other funded projects took precedent.
Time slid by. The cans of film sat idle in a cupboard. Careers moved on.
Fifteen years later Simon and Geoff met up and joked about how they never managed to finish that crazy darts film. Then musing on the thought of reviving it, they wondered how to use the old footage in a contemporary story. Where had these characters been for the last fifteen years and with the actor who played 'The Poison Arrow' no longer available how could his sudden disappearance from the story be explained away?
Then they had a thought.
If Geoff's character 'Rocky' had been found guilty of killing 'The Poison Arrow' and been in jail for the last 15 years, we could pick up the story again in the form of a documentary tracking him on his release.
Pulling favours from old friends, Simon and Geoff filled in and expanded that story, on camera, a day or two at a time. They filmed - hand to mouth - over a period of four years in spite of numerous challenges, including Simon's life-threatening emergency surgery in 2019, and the global pandemic in 2020 and 2021, until finally, in 2022, Poison Arrows was completed.
A labour of love? Certainly.
A triumph of cheerful optimism mixed with bloody mindedness? Absolutely.
This is a genuinely original and award-winning film, made through hell and high water, in the truest independent tradition.
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