Two unknown British filmmakers have captured the imagination of Hollywood with a trailer filmed in Derbyshire for their action war epic The Lost Emperor.
John Watts and Thomas Wood had a shoestring budget of £20,000 and needed to call on Chinese waiters to bulk out the cast in battle scenes.
After the trailer drew 80,000 YouTube views in two weeks, however, the pair are in talks about turning their script into an £8m production.
'Instead of spending our meagre budget trying to make a cheap film, we boiled the script down to just five minutes and made the best trailer we could,' said Mr Watts, 32.
The ever-changing English climate worked in the pair's favour on the three-day shoot, with bright sunshine, rain and fog.
'It helped give the trailer an epic look, like we'd been filming over several months,' said Mr Watts.
But if the US-backed production goes ahead, its directors will leave the picturesque landscape of the peaks behind to shoot it in China.
Watch the trailer, which can also be viewed on The Metro website, here:
