Written & directed by TONY HIPWELL
An antiques dealer gets a lot more than he bargained for when he comes across a cursed object that won’t take no for an answer.
ABOUT THE FILM
Bad Penny was an Official Selection at our BIFA Qualifying Kino London Short Film Festival. Other festival highlights include: Dead Northern, Beeston Film Festival
Panic Fest, Leeds Horror Festival. It won Best Horror Short at the Underground Indie Film Fest and was nominated for Best Actor at the Dark Red Film Festival, as well receiving an Honourable Mention from GASP!
It’s since been released online via Klipist.
ABOUT THE FILMmaker
Tony is a multi-award-winning filmmaker whose work has screened at Academy Award, Canadian Screen Award, BAFTA and BIFA qualifying festivals such as Fantasia, HollyShorts and the Edinburgh Film Festival.
Their debut feature, Whoops! premiered at Raindance 2013 and was the only British film selected for the Raindance Tour 2014. Since then, Tony has developed projects with the BBC and Searchlight Pictures, worked as the Video Producer for Young Thug Records in association with EMI Records and been selected for the inaugural Future of Film and IHS X FEAR incubators.
Tony's most recent projects include the award-winning adaptation of 'Standing Woman' by internationally acclaimed author Yasutaka Tsutsui which was nominated for the Yorkshire Film Award at Leeds International Film Festival 2021 and has since been acquired by ALTER. Their new short, 'The Lure' premiered at FrightFest 2023 and is touring festivals around the world now with sponsorship from CenterFrame.
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH TONY
Welcome back to our Short of the Week series. What have you been up to since we featured your last short "Standing Woman"?
I’ve been winding down the festival run for Bad Penny and starting the tour for The Lure, my new micro short. We premiered at FrightFest which is always a thrill and it’s had a great response so far which has been really exciting. I also had the pleasure of seeing How To Kill Monsters launch its festival run which I worked on last year with Dark Rift Horror who also just released my low fi horror comedy Zomblogalypse on Blu Ray which is kind of like The Disaster Artist meets One Cut of the Dead.
Can you tell us about the genesis of Bad Penny?
Bad Penny was really borne from two things, a desperate desire to shoot anything after lockdown and lucking into a great location a friend had a small window of access to. I also just wanted to make something really stripped down. Standing Woman took 5 years to make and I wanted something closer to 5 months this time round!
What were some of the main obstacles you experienced when making of Bad Penny and how did you overcome them?
It was the definition of a skeleton crew, I did literally everything except the make up so that was a fun kind of stress – making sure everything was technically sound whilst still trying to actually just direct. We had a really short window of time to shoot so it’s probably the fastest I’ve ever shot something. I did have a DOP lined up to shoot the film but they quite rightly balked at the shooting schedule so I leapt in myself as I knew what I wanted and the cast were all old friends and pros so I knew they could nail what I needed quickly. I think the whole thing was shot in no more than 6-8 hours.
Tell us about the journey of getting Bad Penny to audiences.
It was relatively straightforward but also a bit of a sobering one. The Standing Woman run had given me a great education on what I really wanted out of a festival run and potential end point but BP had a really shaky start. I had the most rejections I’ve ever had up front and for a while I thought I’d fucked up for not making something as ambitious as Standing Woman as a follow up. But then the tide turned and it found an audience. We picked up two BIFA qualifiers and festivals like Dead Northern and Panic Fest so that was a really gratifying reminder that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Now that the run is over, we’ve premiered with Klipist who we met at KINO last year and have been a great partner for the film. I’m also really excited to have it featured as a short of the week with KINO as that was a highlight of the festival run for the film.
What's next for you?
I’ve got some great new projects lined up for 2024 including a found footage collaboration with the Indie Horror Society, Orillo Films and FEAR as well as a seasonal horror feature with the producers of How To Kill Monsters.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
I saw Godzilla Minus One over Xmas and like most, absolutely adored it so will add to the chorus and give it an atomic breath sized recommendation. I’d also highly recommend The Moor and New Life, two phenomenal low budget horror features I caught on the circuit last year and will hopefully see release this year.