Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith made their production company's name — "Hammer & Tongs" — on their inventive music videos for Blur, Pulp and R.E.M. With their debut feature film, an adaptation of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, they showed off a sweet sensibility that belied the metallurgical toughness of that name, and with the just-released Son of Rambow, they go one step further. Rambow follows schoolboy Will (newcomer Bill Milner, an instantly endearing tangle of scrawny limbs), raised by his mother in a conservative religious sect, the Plymouth Brethren. His upbringing has kept him away from all media, so when his troublemaking classmate Lee Carter shows him a bootleg copy of Sylvester Stallone's First Blood, his world is forever changed, and he and Lee Carter set off to make their own First Blood sequel — "Son of Rambow."
This is a great comedic premise, but what Jennings and Goldsmith could've played as broad farce, they instead use as a startlingly tender look at childhood friendship and loss. It's warm and nostalgic without ever getting cloying, and it has a compassion and fellow-feeling that should make it a family classic. I spoke to the duo about how they shaped their ode to filmic summers past. — Peter Smith
There's a very bittersweet undertone to the film. Both characters are missing their fathers.
GJ: Both of us have our fathers intact, but my dad lost his dad when he was about nine, and one of my best friends had almost exactly the same experience. But it wasn't the starting point. We didn't know where to start originally. We knew we were trying to capture how great it was to be that age and not have any fear of consequences. But when you're trying to capture a feeling, rather than make a documentary of how things really were, you've got to sort of start using storytelling techniques. And one of those is to take things away from the character. For example, the next-door neighbors of mine when I was growing up were Plymouth Brethren. By making Will a Brethren, you understand the impact movies had. Whereas it would be really hard to do that with a regular kid, like we were.
It makes seeing First Blood so much more of a mind-blowing experience for Will.
NG: Exactly — it's very difficult to convey it without having to verbalize it. And the last thing we wanted to do was just tell the audience.
GJ: The kid would be going, "Hey, have you got any more movies like that? Wow, that was cool! My mind's blown wide open!" And at that point the audience would've left the cinema.
The kids who play the leads are wonderful.
NG: Well, we had them made by a really good specialist. [laughs] They'll never grow old, and they'll be in shops by Christmas.
GJ: Really, the success of the film is down to the fact that we found the right kids. Because they're the hardest thing to find, and if you get it wrong they're the most unpleasant, uncomfortable thing to watch.
Neither had acted before. How did you prepare them for the shooting?
NG: First off we went and made a short film in my mom and dad's backyard, which basically involved Garth and me making them watch us have fun. But then we did some rehearsals with them, and they got it. So it was actually all about trying to keep that as innocent as possible, and not do too many rehearsals. And then on set, to create an environment that would allow them to blossom. We didn't have any video monitors, so they couldn't see themselves and get self-conscious.
What let you to frame the film with the arrival and departure of the French exchange students?
GJ: Again, it's a heightened memory, but when that coach would turn up, those kids would get off, and they were so exotic, just by comparison — their clothes, their attitudes… Even physically, the boys already had their little mustaches. Maybe that only interested me because I was a late developer and wanted a mustache so badly.
You depict the French teenager, Didier, as this sort of alien rock star, but at the end there's this sweet moment of empathy when you realize he's —
GJ: Going back to nothing. [laughs]
Yeah — and you could see that as comeuppance, but I just found it kind of poignant.
GJ: That's right — there's hopefully no actual bad guy. Even the ones you think are bad, they're just not right for that relationship. There's Joshua, coming in to try to become the head of the family, and he's just got it wrong. He's just not the right guy. Again, it's all based on memories, and how when you look back, you realize that cool jock probably wasn't as happy as you thought he was. There was always more to it than you realize. You've got to love your characters.
The movie has been in the works since before you made Hitchhiker's. How did making that change your conception of this?
NG: We were told going into Hitchhiker's by many different people that making a film was very different from doing music videos. And what we realized in making Hitchhiker's was, actually, we've had a really good film school in making videos, and it's not really any different. So the main thing that we took from Hitchhiker's was a confidence to make Son of Rambow the way we wanted it.
There's a melancholic tone in Douglas Adams' work that's somehow very English.
GJ: You're never allowed to get too happy. [laughs]
But there's something very sweet and resigned about his whole worldview. You're never going to get the right cup of tea. I actually thought Son of Rambow captured more of that than Hitchhiker's did.
GJ: Douglas Adams had written Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy more than twenty years before we became involved, so our job was to try to not get in the way, really. But with Son of Rambow, really before we had the plot, it was that feeling we were after. And we're quite emotional little sappy people, really. [laughs] We like to have our buttons pushed by films. To do that properly, there needs to be a balance. You need to be up and down, not just one thing. Otherwise you start to react against it.
The movies or books or music that move you the most are usually the ones that push to the edge of sentimentality, but not over into it.
NG: It's a fine line, and it's very easy to fall over the edge. And I'm sure some people will go see Son of Rambow and think it's one way or the other. If you get it right, it's brilliant, and the film works incredibly well for that person. Like Garth says, there's a sense of manipulation sometimes. But often when you go into the cinema, you want to be manipulated a bit.
This film pays tribute to VHS films you made as a kid in the '80s. Do you still have copies of those films?
GJ: Yes, definitely. In fact, we're using them to inspire the next generation, allowing people to enter their own films into a film competition. We set up on sonoframbow.com a competition, so that the winning home movie, no more than five minutes in length, would get its own special slot on our DVD. And in order to inspire people I put up my first home movie that I made as a kid, having just seen Rambo, which is called Aaron, Part 1. And it's a good one to put up, mainly because it's bad enough for people to think, "Well, I could do this."
