Sally Phillips on MIGHTY PENGUINS with Ollie, Charlie & Louis, plus WHAM! & THE DEEPEST BREATH with John Battsek
Kermode on Film
HLA Agency
4.4 • 913 Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
In this edition of the Kermode on Film podcast, Mark talks to legendary producer John Battsek, who explains why the Oscar-winning documentary WHEN WE WERE KINGS inspired him to devote his career to enthralling documentaries.about his two documentaries released simultaneously in the summer of 2023, WHAM! and THE DEEPEST BREATH.
Mark also talks to Sally Phillips and director Louis Myles, alongside Olly and Charlie – two brilliant young people with Down syndrome – about their football documentary, all about their football club, THE MIGHTY PENGUINS.
Opening title quotes from:
Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, Walt Disney Productions – featuring Julie Andrews)
Nope (Jordan Peele, Universal Pictures – featuring Keke Palmer)
Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, HandMade Films – featuring Richard E. Grant)
The Exorcist (William Friedkin, Warner Bros. – featuring Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair)
These films are essential viewing.
Watch them. Love them. Share them.
They are masterpieces.
MK3D is a production of HLA Agency
This episode was edited by Alex Archbold Jones
Cover photo: Julie Edwards Visuals
© HLA Agency
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. |
| 0:03.6 | You find the fun and snap. |
| 0:08.5 | Did you know that the very first assembly of photographs and sequential order to create a motion picture was a two-second clip of a black man on horse? |
| 0:17.9 | We want the finest wines available to humanity. |
| 0:23.2 | We want them here and we want them now. |
| 0:29.1 | You really don't want me to play, huh? No, I do. Captain Hardy said no. |
| 0:30.3 | Captain who? |
| 0:59.0 | Hi, this is Mark Kermode. Welcome to Kermode on film. Thanks for joining me for part one of the MK3D show recorded live at the BFI Southbank on the 17th of July, 2023. In this episode, I talked with legendary documentary producer John Vatsig about two very different features releasing at the same time. One is Wham, which tells the story of George Michael and Andrew Ridgley's 1980s popular beat combo, and the other is the deepest breath, a literally breathtaking film about an attempt to break the free diving world record. And I talked to Sally Phillips |
| 1:04.0 | with Charlie and Olly about their film Mighty Penguins, about the amateur football team |
| 1:08.0 | consisting of players with Down syndrome. Enjoy. |
| 1:11.6 | Hello everybody, how are we? |
| 1:15.6 | I went to the Oppenheimer premiere on Wednesday, Thursday. |
| 1:24.6 | And when we got there's a thing when you have to walk up the |
| 1:28.7 | What's the name, you know, and there's all the celebrity people doing their stuff. |
| 1:32.3 | Although actually, all the actors turned up really early because at 5 o'clock or 5.30, |
| 1:37.2 | they announced the strike. So everyone was there being like, yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| 1:40.4 | Then the strike was on. Everyone was gone suddenly. So they were looking out for people to photograph, okay? |
| 1:46.0 | And I was walking just towards the thing. |
| 1:49.0 | They went, oh, Mark, come over here. |
| 1:50.0 | Come over here. |
| 1:51.0 | Now, I am usually not backward in coming forward and having my photograph taken. |
| 1:54.0 | But I thought, well, I'm only going to do this if I was walking up with Dave Norris and Julie, |
... |
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