It’s a long way from Teesside to Bulgaria – and an even longer journey to launch a movie.

FILM-MAKERS Jonathan Frank and Nick Rowntree and were having their photograph taken outside the Arc in the centre of Stockton on Thursday when someone they hadn’t seen for several years stopped to talk.

Quite by chance, it was one of the two drivers from the North-East who had driven red double-decker buses from Eaglescliffe to Bulgaria – to be smashed up in a stunt-packed film called The Tournament.

A still from the film shows the bus going along the A1 (rebuilt in Bulgaria) with a car flipping over spectacularly behind it. The bus’s destination, according to the notice on the front, is Easingwold.

That was staged three years ago.

In the intervening years Rowntree, Frank and first-time director Scott Mann – all former Teesside film and media students – have experienced first hand the pressure and pitfalls of making your first feature film as well as negotiating the tortuous British movie distribution system.

Making an action movie was a reaction against a failed attempt to get finance for a film based on disabled Darlington FC fan Paul Hodgson’s book Flipper’s Side, despite interest from Johnny Depp’s “people” at one point. “There were no politically incorrect comedies being made at the time. We had this great script, but the subject matter was too challenging for people. No one wanted to make it,” says Rowntree.

The Tournament, which stars The Full Monty’s Robert Carlyle and Ving Rhames from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, couldn’t be more different – a violent, stunt-packed thriller about a fight to the death between the world’s deadliest assassins.

And it is set in Middlesbrough, where the project began in the canteen at Teesside university where Frank and Rowntree, who like Mann are from the North-East, came up with the idea for The Tournament.

Rowntree and Mann, who had made short films together, put together a teaser trailer with local actors, including Denise Welch and Thomas Craig and headed for the Cannes Film Festival with a £99 portable DVD player on which to play the demo. “We pitched it to everyone, in the street and in parks. One time, in a bar, we had a queue of 50 people waiting to see it,” recalls Frank.

THE next two years were spent writing and polishing the script. During that time they saw financing for the film come and go. Frustratingly, on two occasions they were ready for the cameras to start rolling and the money fell through. They also came to realise that they couldn’t make the film in Middlesbrough. “It was proving too expensive to shoot in England at all.

For practical reasons we wanted to film in Bulgaria. It was a big compromise not being able to film in Middlesbrough,”

says Rowntree.

Some of the £3m film was shot there but interiors and action scenes were filmed in Bulgaria. As a result the geography of some scenes is a little strange – Carlyle is seen in a café filmed in Bulgaria, goes outside to a street in Gateshead and is next seen with recognisable sights of Middlesbrough in the background. A stretch of the A1 was built in Bulgaria with several stunt sequences filmed on the road, including one involving a bus heading to Easingwold.

The assembled cast was impressive for a low budget movie. As well as Carlyle and Rhames, it includes Kelly Hu from X Men, Liam Cunningham, French master of parkour and free running Sebastien Foucan and Ian Somerhalder, who was in Lost and now The Vampire Diaries on TV. Two local actors, Craig Conway and Bill Fellows represent the North-East, along with Franks and Rowntree in cameo roles. Both meet nasty ends.

Franks is shot 28 times, and Rowntree has his head blown off in a movie the makers cheerfully admit is very violent in an over-the-top sort of way.

The film has an 18 certificate in this country. In Germany it had to be re-edited after being banned. In the Middle East the nudity was removed, including a shootout in a strip club called Angels (a homage to a similar establishment in Middlesbrough).

Making the film looks easy compared to getting it financed and released.

They took the movie to the US Film Market in Los Angeles in 2007.

“A bidding war took place much to our surprise because we thought we were making something that would end up on DVD,” says Rowntree.

There were lunches with big Hollywood and British producers and distributors. A release date was announced, but the film stayed on the shelf. An offer for a screening at the London Film Festival couldn’t be taken up. It was a frustrating time.

“We thought that was the end of it,”

says Rowntree. It wasn’t. The US distributors decided to release it on DVD in October last year after a screening at the Screamfest Horror Film Festival in Los Angeles.

AT the same time, plans for cinema releases in other parts of the world went ahead, with the film proving popular in Thailand, Japan, Canada and the Middle East. Without any advertising it reached number five in the DVD chart in the US and became the 33rd most downloaded film on IMDB’s chart. “It was like a juggernaut,”

says Rowntree.

A UK cinema release date was set for three years to the day since filming began. Despite being trailered in cinemas that never happened, although a DVD release has been set for later this year. Before that, The Tournament will receive its UK premiere in Middlesbrough, where the film is showing at Stockton Arc, and the Prince Charles Cinema in London’s Leicester Square.

Rowntree and Frank are currently writing The Tournament 2, which won’t be set in Middlesbrough although they’ve promised references to it. “We’re very confident of Tournament 2. We want to make it much bigger and better. We’re looking at $30m to make it, with big stunts and in 3D,” they say.

■ The Tournament (18) is showing at Stockton Arc until Thursday.

Box office 01642-525199. For details, see arconline.co.uk