ARTS / Production Notes: Simon Sprackling on what happens when your spoof horror turns into a disaster movie

WHAT summed it all up for me is when I discovered that for Barry Norman to review the film we had to fork out pounds 150 to hire a cinema for him to watch it on his own - 150 quid to slake the ego of a man who wears pink jumpers] I also worked out that we generated pounds 200,000 of reviewing fees for journalists - pounds 200,000. And what have we made for ourselves . . . ?

We were outsiders when we began, in that we didn't go to the right film schools, and it still feels like we're outsiders. We never expected a cinema release. Funny Man was conceived as a 'genre' horror film on video, but even when raising the money, we found it hard to make people understand this. People who ran pension funds would tell us they'd lost money on British films. We said we weren't talking about a big feature: 'Have you ever been in a video shop?'

Our distributor was very keen to go with a recognised PR agency. We said we didn't think it was the right film: we wanted to do a much more underground campaign, marketing it through fanzines and rave clubs. But it was to no avail, and because most of what's released in Britain is American product or big arthouse stuff, the publicity methods are very formulaic. If you have stars, that's fine. So everyone focused on Christopher Lee - who was never meant to be the centre of attention - and the only other way to publicise the film that was offered to us was that we were toe-rags.

We were trying to talk about the British sense of humour, which is very vicious - that's why we chose the British icon of the jester. We wanted to talk about pop culture, and we thought the way to do it would be to try to put it into a popular format - horror. But neither our own PR people nor many of the critics wanted to listen.

In fact, I think many of those who have criticised the film didn't know a great deal about the genre to start with. I don't think they understood the context. Among the people I know, there's a shared understanding of drug culture, and of sudden, unexpected and unmotivated violence. It seems critics don't share the cultural references we do.

So, of course, I'm angry. But we're off to Milan this week to sell our next project, and we'll try to put the anger into that. I loved making Funny Man, and I wouldn't want to put anyone off making a film. It's just, as I see it, a question of expect no favours if you're not going to tow the party line.

Simon Sprackling is the writer and director of 'Funny Man'