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Garth Jennings Channels His Inner Rambow
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MM: That definitely is how you take things in when you’re younger.
GJ: That was the trouble: Trying to capture how movies affected us, the impact they had on us. In the early drafts it just wasn’t coming across. We kept verbalizing it, and that’s boring. People want to feel it with the character.
MM: Was working on features ever a goal when you were starting out?
GJ: Oh yeah, absolutely. I’ve always wanted to be a moviemaker of some kind. I didn’t know if I’d be a director or anything, but I suppose from the age of 12, when I did my first little Rambow movie, I thought, ‘This is the best job in the world.’ It just went from there really. I used to get drafted to do a lot of wedding videos for relatives and I’d spice them up with effects and things—but that’s a whole other story.
MM: Are you planning on continuing with features? Do you have another one planned?
GJ: Yeah, we’ve got two things that we want to do, but we’re right at the beginning. Our next film will be animated. We just quite like doing something different than what we’ve done before. We’re still bashing out the story; we’re almost there. It’s going really well. I don’t even know what form of animation we’re going to use yet. Whether it’s 3D or CG or models or cell or, I don’t know.
MM: So it’s just exciting to do a completely different thing?
GJ: Just focus on the story and make something incredible. It’s going really well. It’s a kind of real epic. And if [the story] goes okay, then we’ll look at it and go, ‘It feels like it should be made this way.’ And again, like I said before, we have no idea how to do it. All we know is the best way to do it is to make much of it ourselves. Not actually animate it, but bring those elements within our own little community rather than trying to do it through someone else’s system where we don’t understand as well.
MM: Do you think starting out you were helped by the fact that music videos allow you to churn out a lot more for practice?
GJ: Yeah. The thing is, if you’re just churning out stuff, we realized—
MM: Maybe churning was a bad—
GJ: No, no. It’s true because we were at the beginning. We were just making as much as we could to build up a showroom because none of them really commission you until you have a great body of work. Then you realize quite quickly, if you just keep doing that, then actually you’ll just make stuff; you’ll never make anything good. So it’s a good thing to do to start with, but then you have to go somewhere from there.
Then it became, ‘Let’s just focus on the good bands and the good stuff and try to make something excellent.’ People would respond to these videos. You’d have “Coffee and TV,” which we did for Blur, and you go into that thinking, ‘This is crazy, I don’t know what we’re doing here with a man in a suit running around a green screen studio. Jesus Christ, it feels very Ed Wood.’
MM: Is that one of those ideas where you pitched it—
GJ: …and then we had to do it. Yeah. No idea. Absolutely no idea.
MM: That seems to be sort of the theme.
GJ: Yeah, absolutely. Just do it as you go along!
MM: At the end of the film, mostly everyone I was in the theater with had grins on their faces.
GJ: Oh, Good! Good. That was what we were going for. Before we had the plot, way before we had the plot, all we wanted was to capture that feeling. Just films where you’re left feeling better for having seen it. That’s how we felt when we thought back to being kids. If that was the effect, then that’s it. It worked.
MM: There’s just something about watching people watching a movie. The end is really almost a testament to the power of movies. Is that something you guys were going for?
GJ: Well yeah. I just…Yes! We’re not very good at articulating these things, but when we’re making a film, it seems to be very simple to explain it. People get it when they watch it.
But I think that’s going to be its stumbling block, getting people to see it. Because they’re like, “What the hell is that about? Son of Rambow? I don’t want to see a film about his son now, I’ve just seen him blowing up Burma.” So it’s really going to be word of mouth if it works.
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