The Screengrab : pulp

Mike Hodges Remembers: The "Get Carter" Director Writes About Making the Movies That Nobody Sees

Phil Nugent — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The British writer-director Mike Holdges scored a big hit right out of the box with his first film, Get Carter (1971), which starred Michael Caine as a vengeful hit man and which just about single-handedly created a new kind of gritty British gangster movie. A couple of decades later, he helped make Clive Owen a movie star with another neo-noir, Croupier, a small film that narrowly escaped going to straight to video but managed to become a genuine sleeper. In between, he worked on probably his biggest-budgeted movie, the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production Flash Gordon, a somewhat underrated entertainment that is one of the few comics-based movies to achieve true camp--the real, gilded thing itself, mind you, not that sniggery TV-Batman stuff. Aside from these high points, Modges has enjoyed the kind of career you might expect from a smart, talented guy who basically works within the industry but whose instincts aren't strictly, safely commercial: he's made some films, such as the 1987 A Prayer for the Dying, that were reportedly mangled by the distributors, and some, such as the 1985 Morons from Outer Space, where it's tempting to think that some mangling could have only helped. He's also made some movies that, as he writes in an article in The Guardian, never had much of a chance to find an audience. Such as his first film after Get Carter, the tantalizingly bizarre comedy Pulp, which also starred Michael Caine. He played a sleazy writer hired to ghost write the memoirs of a movie star (Mickey Rooney) with actual gangland connections.

Hodges writes that the movie bewildered studio executives and so was banished to the vaults, where it "languished for a year or more. Then one day, a technician appeared, brushed the accumulated dust from its label to make sure he had the right unknown, unloved film, and loaded it on to a truck. It was on its way to New York." Pulp had been selected as the first film shown at a boutique theater in Manhattan that was designed to specialize in noteworthy films that the big chains had no interest in showing at all; in order to emphasize the collectors-item nature of the enterprise, the films were booked for one-week runs only. "Now, at last, the critics would get to see it. Much to the distributor's surprise, it received rave reviews. Time magazine got a little overheated and even mentioned the word 'masterpiece'. While I'm of the opinion that film critics spend too much time in the dark, I'm always grateful when, in the case of my own work, they come to the right conclusions." The only downside was that this was in the pre-Internet days when people had to actually wait a few days for such precious information to get out. By the time those rave reviews in the print magazines had hit the newsstands, the one-week run had ended and Pulp was back in the vault.

Hodges followed that one up with the sci-fi slasher movie The Terminal Man, based on a Michael Crichton novel. In this case, the results are harder to defend, but it does sound as if Hodges put a lot of thought into the choices that make the movie so cold and repellent. (It stars George Segal as a brain-damaged fellow who has part of his brain hooked to a computer to help him get over his bad habit of stabbing people. Guess what happens.) Clearly he responded on a surprisingly personal level to its "message" about the "obvious insanity at the very heart of what drives us," which "also drove me to make the film." For the score, Hodges went austere, using only Glenn Gould's recordings of The Goldberg Variations. The pianist was famously reclusive and paranoid, and the movie had to be sent to Toronto to be screened for him to get his approval for the use of the music. "His own solitary existence and extreme hypochondria," Hodges noted dryly, "must have made for a weird screening."

A "director's cut" of The Terminal Man is showing in London in December. On November 30, there will be a screening of what may be Hodges's most obscure obscurity, the fascinatingly moody thriller Black Rainbow (1989), starring Rosanna Arquette and Jason Robards. The movie was kicked under the sofa by distributors, and Hodges writes that "From then on I consoled myself by calling my work "films in bottles". They would wash up somewhere, some time, and maybe surprise somebody watching some remote cable channel in the early hours. This theory was proven correct one morning when I was working with composer Simon Fisher Turner on the music for Croupier... The doorbell rang. It was a Japanese musician friend of Simon's, who was built like a sumo wrestler. They did their business, and he was on his way out. He suddenly turned back and approached me. My name had rung a bell. 'You make Black Rainbow?' 'I did.' 'I see six times.' I was so astonished I assumed he'd seen it on video. 'No. In cinema. Black Rainbow very big in Japan.'"

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

Peter Smith — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:45:00 GMT

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."