INTO THE LEAD: FROM LIVERPOOL TO THE WORLD

Continuing our series profiling participants of Into The Lead, Screen Alliance North’s leadership programme for independent production companies across the North of England, we hear from Sol Papadopoulos, co-director and founder of Liverpool-based Hurricane Films. 

Founded in 2000 by Sol and producing partner Roy Boulter, Hurricane Films began in television before pivoting fully into feature films. The shift crystallised around Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008, when they brought Liverpool-born filmmaker Terence Davies back to the city to make ‘Of Time and the City’, chronicling Liverpool’s transformative change throughout the decades. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, the film marked a turning point for Sol. Seeing it play on a huge international stage, Sol recalls, was the moment he realised he was “smitten by film”, watching something move from “an idea on a page to a screen in front of 3,000 people” was a truly “magnificent experience”.  

Since then, Hurricane Films has built an international reputation, regularly co-producing with partners across Europe and beyond. “It’s a global industry,” Sol says, “and Liverpool has always looked outward.” Despite ongoing pressures on independent film finance, the company remains committed to distinctive, director-led storytelling. 

Sol’s own route into the industry was unconventional. Originally training as a marine engineer, he moved to Liverpool to study at what is now Liverpool John Moore’s University. After time at sea, he set up a photography studio, began making short documentaries and, following a successful pitch to Granada in the mid-1990s, spent a decade directing and producing documentary series all around the world including ‘Warship’ and ‘Warplane’ for Nat Geo and ITV and PBS. But Liverpool always called him back. Inspired by the maverick spirit around the making of ‘Letter to Brezhnev’, he saw a city where you didn’t need permission to tell your own stories. “I fell in love with the place,” he says. “There’s a writer in every coffee bar.” 

Hurricane Film’s feature slate reflects that outward-looking ethos. After ‘Of Time and the City’, the company reunited with Davies on ‘Sunset Song’ and ‘A Quiet Passion’, starring Cynthia Nixon. Other credits include the Merseyside-shot ‘Sometimes Always Never’ with Bill Nighy, ‘The Last Bus’ starring Timothy Spall, and ‘A Prayer Before Dawn’, telling the story of scouser Billy Moore, which has recently found new audiences on Netflix. 

For Sol, joining Into The Lead was about perspective. “You never stop learning,” he says. With rapid change across technology and AI, he believes it’s vital “to keep a finger on the pulse and understand the new ways of telling stories.” The programme arrived, he adds, “at exactly the right time,” offering space to reflect not just on projects, but on how to lead people and ideas in a shifting industry. 

More than two decades on, Hurricane Films remains rooted in Liverpool while making films designed in the global language of cinema. As Sol puts it “it’s about wanting to tell stories to an international audience and touch the hearts of people, not just here in the UK, but across the globe. So heartwarming stories, historical stories, action, whatever it takes, but films that move you in some ways, that have an impact.” 

Sol will be serving as the executive producer of the forthcoming Creative Cities Convention, an event dedicated to bringing professionals in film, TV and digital content together, taking place in Liverpool on 6th-7th May.