rem - The Screengrab

Screengrab Q&A: Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, Directors of Son of Rambow

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.

Take Five: Movies With Lyrics

Danish director Susanne Bier’s new film, Things We Lost in the Fire, is already generating a tremendous amount of indie hype. If the buzz manages to survive this opening weekend, it may result in the words "Oscar" and "Halle Berry" being mentioned without the words "fluke" or "Catwoman" appearing in the same sentence. The quiet family drama’s name may seem pretty arcane to people who aren’t as into indie rock as they are indie film – the title is drawn from an outstanding 2001 album by Duluth slowcore band Low. As more and more directors who grew up on a diet of punk, alternative and indie rock start making films, we’re likely to see more such abstractions; but while we wait for a generation raised on post-hardcore to grow up, here’s a few films from the past with musical names.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (1968)

Filmed simultaneously with the Rolling Stones' recording of the song of the same name – indeed, footage of the Stones putting down tracks for the single are featured in the film – this was one of the first movies to use a rock song as its title. Jean-Luc Godard’s documentary/agitprop/drama/black comedy/whatever is a typically brilliant, typically frustrating film, very much in keeping with his work of the era. And, like the song, the film seems to be nothing so much as an admission that the end of the Sixties were a chaotic, turbulent vortex that owed as much to the hand of Satan as they did the peace-and-love generation.