“My 15 minutes of fame were really uncomfortable for me”

What Steven asked Stel Pavlou, author, presenter, and screenwriter

As part of our ongoing series checking in on Medway-related people in the United States, Steven caught up with Medway-born Stel Pavlou via Zoom, with Stel at his home in Colorado. They discussed Stel going to Cannes, making a feature film starring Samuel L Jackson, making a TV show about Atlantis, and how he ended up volunteering to join the Greek army.

Stel Pavlou

Let's get the local legend bit out of the way first. Is it true you wrote the script for The 51st State whilst working in a Rochester off-licence?
Yes. The idea of it started when I went to university in Liverpool, but I didn't know how to do it, because you needed a lot of money to go to film school and stuff like that. I had no bloody clue. I didn't come from a family with money. My family had money for like six years. The only reason I took American Studies is because you had to live in America for a year, so I took that degree because it was supposed to be an exchange year with San Francisco and a film school. And then, lo and behold, as soon as I get to Liverpool, the exchange program falls through, and my options are Rhode Island and Mississippi. And I'm like, ‘What the fuck?’ Neither one of those. I don't like shivering, so I went to Mississippi, and Mississippi was like a time machine back to the 50s. But while I was there, I travelled around America. I travelled around I don't know how many states, and what I realised was that everything was bullshit. The lies they tell themselves and their infrastructure was falling apart. I was like, ‘Why is this country that is not honest with itself having so much influence on us in the UK?’ That was the kernel of the idea.
Years later, when I left college, the early 90s was a bloody great big recession and there weren't any jobs. I ended up getting a job at Threshers, which I believe has gone out of business now. That was on Rochester High Street. It was part-time. I lived on the high street in a flat above one of the shops. I started writing that movie in the off-license in my downtime. I'd have a little notepad by the till. Every time I thought of a piece of dialogue, I’d just write it down. At the same time, I wrote my first novel, Decipher. I'm writing a novel and a screenplay at the same time while dealing with people making occasional interruptions for alcohol, while they wanted to buy rubbing alcohol or whatever to get through their day. That was it, basically. I wrote it there, and I think at one point I sent the script out to a few people, and I couldn't get any traction because I didn't have an agent and I wasn't anybody. What do you do?
My mate said his sister sets up companies, and we could set up a production company. I'm just going to call myself a producer. I set up the production company, it was all registered and everything, and then turned the back room of Threshers into our office. I'd take phone calls at Threshers. I basically just went out to the actors I wanted. I was getting phoned there, and I’d have to explain the door ding. ‘Oh, don't worry about that. That's something we got going on.’ Nobody knew. I was fielding calls from other production companies and from big actors while at Threshers. It was just nuts. It's all that bravado of when you're young. No one said that you can't do this.

How would you describe the film?
The film is, on the surface, about a drug dealer from America who's come to England to sell his latest recipe. He wants a big payday because he wants out of the business. He wants his money and wants to get out, and everybody's fighting over it. The subsurface story is one, that drugs are slavery. And two, this culture clash of America and Britain. It went through a lot of changes. It took seven years to get it made. Originally, it was set in London, and we were going to shoot it in Liverpool because it was cheaper. There were bits of Liverpool that looked like London. Eventually, we met financiers who were like, ‘We'll only give you the money if you make it set in Liverpool.’ I didn’t care, where it's set didn't make much difference. There were other movies like it at the time that were being produced. I had to rewrite all kinds of different scenes and various acts because they ended up getting lifted and ended up being in other people's movies because that's what the movie business is like.
The movie that got made is not the original movie I wrote. The movie that got made… I still get fan mail for it. I'm absolutely shocked that I still get fan mail to this day about that film. To me, it doesn't make any bloody sense as a movie. We got one made, but the original thing was much more cohesive. It's a film of great bits. We ended up with 13 producers, each producer bringing some money.
If you ever look at movies and you go, ‘Well, that was a bit shit,’ that's because the more producers there are, the more chances there are that someone's messed up the movie. We had all those producers, plus various language barriers, and I am amazed that it came together as well as it did. At the end of it, I suffered from severe burnout and severe depression and didn't get out of bed for two years. My God, that's what it took to make one. Well, it turns out that isn't usually how exhausting it is. It was just my routine.

There are big names in the movie (Samuel L Jackson, Robert Carlyle, Emily Mortimer etc) and the director (Ronny Yu). Who was the first big name that kind of came on board to help?
Tim Roth, who isn't in it. Tim Roth was going to be Felix, who ended up being played by… I'm going blank… (Robert Carlyle). Tim Roth called me at home. He was really excited about it. He even spoke to Tarantino about it. He's talking to me about who's going to direct it, and I was going to direct it. I'm in my bullshit phase, right? What I didn't know was that he was looking for a movie to direct. This whole thing could have gone in a different direction really early if I'd said, ‘Would you like to direct it?’ But I had no clue because I'm not actually in the business. I'm faking being in the business. He was on board for about six months to a year. He gave us what's called a letter of intent, which we could take to producers and production companies to try and raise money. We took that over to the Cannes Film Festival.
Here's another story. Jesus. Alright. I'm working in Threshers part-time. I'm also on unemployment supplement. My mate from college, we both wanted to get into movies, and he ended up being a producer over at Sky TV and stuff like that afterwards, but we found out how you get into the Cannes Film Festival. You're supposed to, this is god's honest truth, put a company stamp on the form. Stamps cost £200 to get made at the time. We knew an art friend who carved one out of potato. We stamped that form, and it looked like we were a legit company. We put our forms in, and we got accepted to go to the Cannes Film Festival to be able to pitch our stuff. Because I was on that unemployment stuff, you're not allowed to leave the country, so I had to chance it. I didn't have any decent clothes. My mum's fella loaned me a jacket, and we pissed off to Cannes and lived on brie sandwiches for a week. We wandered around Cannes, meeting everybody. I ended up on bloody TV at the British film pavilion. I'm not supposed to be here. We end up going to meet big actors, big producers, big financiers, we end up going to movie premieres. We ended up getting invited to LA Confidential. They hadn't even finished the end credits. We went down the red carpet. Once you declare yourself one of them, they just assume you're one of them.
Anyway, that was the first person. We did meet up with a production company, a small production company in London that took us on to try and get the movie made. Eventually, Tim Roth dropped out, but by then we'd got our deals with production companies to get the ball rolling. Then it got really weird. At one point, honest to God, we had Marlon Brando on board because there was a different role in the movie that isn't in it anymore. It's from an earlier draft. Within about six months of getting together with this production company, we actually landed Samuel L Jackson. I hadn't written the role for him in mind. I'd written it for Laurence Fishburne because he was the most famous actor at the time, and then all of a sudden, Pulp Fiction came out, and he was suddenly the it guy. For some reason, he loved this script, and he wouldn't let it go. He stuck with it for four or five years. He was, ‘I want to make this because it's nuts. You have to remember we're actors. They like to dress up, and they like to do weird stuff.’ They don't get the excuse, certainly a black actor at the time, he's never done anything in a kilt. I mean, now you've got the Doctor Who guy wearing one every five minutes, that was not a thing back when I wrote the movie. It was fun. It was off the wall. Once Samuel Jackson was on board, it was a question of finding the right director. We went through two or three directors and finding the other members of the cast. We ended up with a really eclectic cast of people. I'm only giving you the brief, surface level stuff. The story of getting this movie made is more interesting than the movie.