In 1995 (when I was one) my dad bought a Racing Green Eunos Roadster MK1 1.6 in Tokyo and took me around in it on the weekends. When we moved back to England, the car also came with us. In London he’d take me on similar drives when he wasn’t working, similarly toward the end of his life, down in Dorset, we’d explore the country lanes all weekend. These are cherished memories, the beautiful car playing a key role in all of them - the headrest speakers, old leather smell, deteriorating canvas roof, even the same box of paint wax he’d bought in Japan back in the 90’s.
When he died in 2021 and I took responsibility of this cherished vehicle I thought, ‘let’s salute him by taking the car on a road trip to Europe’. I then realised I thought that this was the meaning of life. That by remembering someone whilst driving you get to see the world in an even more beautiful light than it had been before. And then realised this is what my next film had to be about. That was the beginning of the film I’m about to make - Sunflower Thieves.
Three years later, I’ve spent a year living in the south of Spain getting to know local communities, around Granada, Seville, Ronda and all the campo in-between, with this fabulous little green car I’ve found the story I want to tell in cinema. In pure fiction. In adventurous celebration.
Sunflower Thieves, a tale about a young woman who finds a dog called Paddy and returns him to Granada, is set in this exact Mazda Eunos my dad bought in Japan 30 years ago. She’s still got a deteriorating roof, still has under 80,000 kilometres on the clock, and still blasts our Dire Straits CD fantastically along the roads. The AC stopped working about a decade ago though, that’s a bit of a drag, especially down in Andalusia.
The film, a 90 minute fun, adventurous melodrama, starts shooting NEXT WEEK. That’s 14th October 2024, and I wanted to make a post here to invite two things in particular.
-
If anyone happens to be driving their MX-5 in the area of Andalusia we would LOVE to shoot a scene with you. Imagining the cars meet each other, a very fun addition to the film, and the more the merrier, 20 of us would be just the best scene ever. We could be in touch about what dates work best.
-
I am looking for backers to invest in the film, and thought I should look in a place where there are people who are similarly passionate about this car.
The TOTAL cost of the film is £20k. I’ve so far raised £9K of the budget, and I’m asking if people want to become Executive Producers of the project by putting in £1k or more. With their name in bold in the credits, they’d also get a private screening with the other Execs before the premiere (around April 2025), a trip to my favourite martini bar for a few brilliant drinks, and a heap of other perks. Not to mention owning a percentage stake in the film itself. Say someone puts in 50% of the budget, they’d end up taking 25% of the film’s profits (after getting their initial stake back of course).
So, the film starts! Whether or not you’d like to invest, we’d LOVE you to get involved. If you just want to follow the progress without much else, I’d absolutely love this. As I say, it’s more the merrier - more brains splattered on the creative canvas, the better! If you want to come and sing a song in the back of a scene, please do! If you’d similarly like to come along and watch it, or get a link to it when it’s done, we can make this happen for no cost whatsoever.
In all of this I never thought I’d be a car lover. In many ways I’m not. I’m a Miata lover. One young man once stopped me in the street, nearly got himself run over, and shouted at the top of his lungs, ‘it’s a Miata, it’s a Miata’. Many others have told me what this car means to them. In this car I’ve laughed, cried, flirted, shouted, sung, thought, thought, thought, danced even, and stared at so many sunsets I finally found some sense. That’s the crazy thing about it. It is a car with intangible emotional weight. Certainly, it is for me. I hope I can in some way go to explain this in the film, and I hope you all can enjoy it once it’s done.
Thank you for reading, and best wishes to all! Please get in touch with however you’d like to participate 
Hector
PS. A few pictures attached. Of the car, Paddy the Baddy, and some Andalusian sun.
I am sure there could be a whole genre of MX-5 linked feature length films, a couple of years ago when I did a trip with numerous MX-5’s from Lamds End to John O’Groats I remember sketching out an idea in my mind loosely based on the 39 steps to be called the 39 MX-5’s sadly I never committed any of it even to paper 