Stevan Riley is the award-winning director of a feature-length cinema documentary on the explosively gifted West Indies cricket team of the 1970s & 1980s Fire In Babylon. Since then, he has been working with me on an unnamed, unnanounced bullfighting project before he was taken away from it by Barbara Broccoli to direct her big budget documentary celebrating 50 years of James Bond, Everything Or Nothing – The Untold Story of 007, which premieres tonight in Leicester Square.
Director Stevan Riley
Since I am writer and co-producer, through Mephisto Productions, on the bullfight doc, I was very happy to see this officially confirmed in the trade journal, Screen International by Stevan, for the first time naming our main producer, Passion Pictures, under the Oscar-winning producer John Battsek (Best Documentary – One Day In September).
The documentary centres on a Spanish fighting bull from the greatest ranch of toros bravos today, that of Núñez del Cuvillo, and a Spanish torero from the greatest family of in the bullfighting world, Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez.
Matador Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez (Photo: Nicolás Haro)
(Cayetano is a fourth generation matador de toros. His great-grandfather, El Niño de la Palma, was the model for the matador in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, his grandfather, Antonio Ordóñez, was the star of Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer (Orson Welles’ ashes are also interred at his house), and his father, Paquirri, was famously killed by a bull in 1984.)
With much of the film in the can already, filmed on the visually astonishing Red Epic cameras, I am looking forward to starting work on it again in the coming months.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison by Nicolás Haro
Both Cayetano and the bulls of Núñez del Cuvillo get a mention in my feature about another matador and mentor of mine, Juan José Padilla, in last month’s issue of GQ magazine now available online here. The whole story of all of these characters, and myself, is available in my GQ recommended, William Hill Sports Book Of The Year shortlisted, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight. It is available from all the usual outlets, including iTunes via GQ itself at a discount here.
P.S. Stevan’s film has been reviewed by GQ here.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
