How Sam Huntley, Marshall Street Editors and Sine Audio Told a Little Story About a Brave 9 Year Old

Director Sam Huntley, Marshall Street Editors and Sine Audio recently presented an astonishing short film 'So Let Me Tell You A Little Story' about strength and tenacity in this intimate portrait of Tony Hudgell; a charismatic, complex nine-year old double amputee. 

Here, Sam along with editor Toby Conway-Hughes and DOP Adrian Peckitt delve deeper into the project.

Q> How did you meet Tony? When did you decide you wanted to make a film about him?

Sam> I first met Tony when I was casting for a McDonald’s ad I was shooting. It was all about kids playing football, so I had literally hundreds of self tapes to look through, and about half way through I opened this video and there’s this little boy doing press ups in his back garden, wearing his prosthetic legs.

I was immediately struck by him and I cast him in the advert. I got to know Tony and his mum Paula a bit better throughout the pretty full on casting recalls and shoot days, and I just thought what an incredible, tenacious, determined kid he was…

Then, about a month later, I was flicking through the newspaper and, a few pages in, there’s this picture of Tony from McDonald's…and it was this horrific story about what had happened to him… I just couldn’t believe it, I was so shocked because I had absolutely no idea. My little boy was quite young at the time as well, and it just really affected me, made me angry to think that this could’ve happened to this amazing kid.

I started digging around on Google and found out more and more about it - Tony had been all over the news and on TV, and I mentioned it to a few people and everyone seemed to know about him (my mum had even donated to his fundraiser!). So at that point the documentary maker in me probably took over and I thought I need to find out more, so I decided to reach out to Paula and Mark to see if they’d be up for talking with me about it.

Q> What was Paula and Mark’s response to the idea of making a documentary about Tony?

Sam> Well I went down to see them and we had a good chat about it and they seemed really open to the idea… At that point I still didn’t really know what I wanted to do exactly, so when Paula asked me what the idea would be / how long the film would be? I didn’t want to raise expectations too high, so I just suggested we make a little 5 minute portrait piece about Tony. She just laughed and said, “You’re mad… five minutes won’t even scratch the surface!!”. She was right. She said that the most important thing for her was that she wanted whatever we did to be honest, to not sugar coat things…and for it to really capture Tony’s personality. And hopefully, that’s what we did.

Q> How did you prepare for the shoot and did it go to plan?

Sam> I prepared for it like I would any other shoot; I had a schedule, shot list, loads of ideas of different stuff I wanted to capture. I talked it all through with Paula and Mark and they just looked at me like ‘Good luck with that!”.

We started shooting and after about 3 minutes I knew exactly what they were implying…I looked at my DOP Adrian with a look of panic, thinking ‘this isn’t gonna go as we thought!’. Although it was my film, it was immediately apparent that Tony was The Boss! 

He essentially realised very quickly that he could bribe us to do whatever he wanted - and what he wanted was for us to play Playstation with him, and for us to bounce him on his trampoline! So everything became a negotiation - so it was like 10 minutes of trampoline time for 10 minutes shoot time…

So we’d all be bouncing around on the trampoline - me, Adrian, Nate our sound guy, Tony…and he’d be having a whale of a time (we all would - the whole shoot was so much fun), but I’d be looking at my watch thinking, “what are we doing?!…we haven’t shot anything for 2 hours!!”.

But that’s the only way it could’ve worked really…when you make a film like this, where it’s such an intimate portrait of someone, where you’re immersing yourself in someone’s world, you have to play by their rules! So my initial plan didn’t work out, but we just went with it and stayed flexible, and luckily we ended up with a load of great stuff.

Adrian> As Sam said we quickly realised we had to chuck the plan straight out the window and both match and capture Tony’s energy.

Thankfully, Sam and I had a really good idea of what we wanted to do even without the shot list so compositions and coverage of each moment came quickly with minimal discussion between us, it was just a matter of keeping up with Tony…which is easier said than done! We spent a lot of time chasing Tony from room to room and from one subject to another. There was part of me that thought we may be able to start predicting what he might do but he always took us by surprise.

I’ve done a fair amount of handheld work in my career but this was on another level. I was careening around from room to room chasing Tony, never being able to settle into a shot and set my posture as well as having to manage all of the camera kit and stop it falling apart from the chaos, all with every break of filming turning into another bounce on the trampoline. I think it took my body about two weeks to recover.

Q> How did the film take shape? Did you have an idea for the beats you wanted to hit when you went in, or did you just shoot lots and piece it together in the edit?

Sam> I had a vague idea of the story I wanted to tell, but as I said the shoot took a lot of different twists and turns, and there was certainly an element of still figuring the story out as we were shooting. 

So serious props to Toby because he spent literally hundreds of hours on this, because we had so much great footage and so many different ways we could tell the story, it really was a pretty big undertaking.

Toby> Sam shot around 40 different set ups / scenes over the days he spent with Tony and his family. I started by cutting each one down into 20-30 second vignettes which I thought really captured Tony’s personality. 

Tony has a great sense of humour and comes out with some really funny and random lines. For example, “Kyle’s room smells like his beard…which I like”; in the beginning I thought lines like that wouldn’t make the cut with such a sad and serious story to tell. I had done my research and knew the abuse Tony had suffered at the hands of his biological parents. I had imagined at the beginning of the process that the film would tell us all about them, what they did, what they were like and where they are now etc. Watching through the footage of Tony that Sam and Adrian shot I quickly realised that Tony is writing his own story in life and that his biological parents didn’t need to be a presence in this film. Yes you need to set up the backstory so you understand where he has come from in life, but I didn’t think we needed to dwell on that. This needed to be a story about an incredible little boy not a story about his abusers.

Sam shot a really powerful interview with Tony’s mum, Paula. In that interview she details the timeline of events of those tragic early weeks of abuse. This interview could easily have been the backbone of the whole film. We gradually realised though that Tony’s character was so strong that that’s what people would find fascinating. So in the end we decided that actually showing our audience the story in an observational approach rather than directly telling them the story was a more impactful and also respectful way to do it.

Q> What are the moments in the film that you think were especially important to include?

Sam> For me I think the key things we wanted to capture were Tony’s personality, his relationship with Paula and Mark, and his sister Lacey…and some of the challenges that he faces on a daily basis.

So scenes that I really love and feel really convey these things are for example, a scene where Tony’s in the back of the car and Paula tells him not to eat a packet of sherbet because it’ll make too much mess. He immediately ignores her and starts tucking into it, and of course it goes everywhere! 

There’s another scene where he’s trying a suit on with Paula and he gets frustrated with her because she’s not doing it exactly how he wants it done, and they have a series of really lovely looks and exchanges between them which just really encapsulates their relationship.

Also a scene where Tony discusses Paula’s illness. In that moment (a rare moment of quiet), you really catch a glimpse of his vulnerability, and his true self.

Toby> I really like seeing the bond he has with his family. Watching his Dad Mark carry him though the woods, making fun of him watching TV and chucking him around in the pool. They are all tiny slices of life but quickly show the love and support Tony is surrounded by and also that under it all they are a normal family and Tony is a normal kid. I also love watching Tony do handstands, he’s so strong!

Adrian> I love what Toby and Sam have done in the edit in terms of seeing both Tony’s stubbornness and his joy and humour. Through the interactions with his family, and by seeing some of the challenges he faces, I think it paints a really true picture of who he is - he has struggles, but he has a family around him who loves him, and that’s so important. If I had to pick a favourite moment though it would be the shots in the elevator, mainly because I had to contort myself to fit inside whilst Tony was sending me up and down between floors!

Q> What were some of the important creative choices while you were shooting the film that made it turn out as impactful as it is?

Adrian> We wanted to have the film feel very portraity, but without relying on just long lenses, so we decided to shoot the film in a 4:3 aspect ratio and really try to let things play out in wider shots or tight closeups. We would compose simply and mostly central, to really feel both with Tony but also feeling the relationship to the space. He’s got such an expressive face, those big eyes, and we wanted it to feel really intimate, like we were right there with him.

Sam> I also wanted to have a kind of poetic, almost dreamy feel to it in places…and me and Toby tried to emphasise that in the edit with certain sequences. Frankie and Michele’s sound design and Danny Mulhern’s amazing score really helped with that too.

Toby> Creatively for me the use of the archive was really important in making the film impactful. In all of Sam’s present day footage Tony is his positive, outgoing and cheeky self, so we decided to lean on the archive stuff to build the emotional beats and ups and downs in the film. I have watched this film hundreds of times whilst making it and every time we cut between the filmed footage and the archive footage I feel that emotion. Everyone who has watched the film says they have never bounced from tears of sadness to laughing out loud so many times in 25 minutes. That’s exactly what we tried to achieve and I think it’s the energy of the present day footage contrasted to the archive footage which naturally puts our minds in a vulnerable place.

Q> How has your time spent with the Hudgells affected you as a director and as a person? 

Sam> I think any time spent with Tony is cherished time. He’s so fun and charismatic it can’t help but affect you as a person and as a director, in a really positive way. To see how he faces any challenges in life head on, is so positive all the time, and is so keen to help other people. I think you learn something from most films you make, but especially from projects like this when you’re so invested in it.

Q> What’s next for the film?

Sam> I’ve started putting it into festivals, so hopefully it’ll start getting a bit of traction from that. But ultimately I’ve felt right from the start that this project had the potential to be a longer format film - going back to that first chat with Paula and Mark - I didn’t want to go in and suggest that we were gonna make a 90 minute film, but I’ve always thought it could play out across that length.

For me, what’s so interesting about Tony, is not what’s happened in the past - you need to know that to give the story context - but he’s already achieved so much for someone so young, but there’s so much more to come in terms of new opportunities, and challenges, that’ll come his way, and I would love to document that. So myself and Paula and Mark agreed early on that we would use this short film as a sort of proof of concept to get interest in developing it into a longer film.

Q> Finally, can you tell us about the walk you did to raise money for the ‘Tony Hudgell Foundation’?

Toby> Sam and I decided to do a sponsored walk to celebrate the first screening of the film and hopefully raise a little money for Tony’s charity, which was set up to help children who have suffered physical, emotional or psychological abuse. We set off from Soho Square at 6.30 am on a Sunday morning and walked 33 miles to Tony’s village in Kent. It took us 12.5 hours and 73K steps in the end! It was a really hot day, so it was pretty knackering, and we both had a few blisters to show for it! But it was really enjoyable, and for such a great cause.

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