Like her friends Azazel Jacobs, Gerardo Naranjo and Goran Dukic, Georgina Riedel is a distinctive new voice in American independent filmmaking. A first generation Mexican American who grew up in Arizona, Riedel studied film at the University of Arizona where she made a series of shorts. She gained her MFA at the American Film Institute, where she became friends with fellow directing students Jacobs, Naranjo and Dukic. Riedel's graduation film, One Night It Happened (2002), a black-and-white romance about a one night stand starring Jacobs, played at festivals worldwide, and in 2005 she produced Jacobs' second film, The GoodTimesKid.

Riedel's debut feature, How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer, which is released this week, premiered at Sundance in 2005 and is based on an idea for a short she had while still at AFI. The plot revolves around three generations of the Garcia family, teenager Blanca (America Ferrera), her divorced mother Lolita (Elizabeth Peña) and her headstrong grandmother Doña Genoveva (Lucy Gallardo). Over the course of a hot Arizona summer, the three “girls” flirt with the possibility of love and sex, each both tentative yet passionate in her own way. Beautifully shot in 35mm, Riedel's film captures the rhythms of small town life and excels particularly in the portrayal of its female leads. The film's protagonists are complex, strong-minded and sexual, and even in the case of 70-year-old Doña Genoveva this last trait is never sensationalized, but is treated with a rare sensitivity and humour.

Filmmaker spoke to Riedel about the real-life inspiration for the film, tackling old-age sexuality, and her lack of desire to have a penis.



Filmmaker: I believe the idea for this film stemmed from a question you asked your grandmother.

Riedel: I asked my grandmother what she wanted for Christmas, and I was only half listening because I fully expected her to give her regular line, “Oh, nothing, just you being around is enough.” But then I hear her say “A car.” I thought I heard wrong, but then she said it again, “I want a car.” My grandmother is no longer with us and I kind of regret not having the foresight to ask “Why do you want a car? Where is it that you want to go?” I had all of these questions, but I was so surprised that I didn't ask them to her. But I asked them to myself, and that night I wrote a treatment. In my mind, my grandmother got a car, she didn't know how to drive so her gardener would teach her, a love affair would bloom. To this day, I still don't know what she wanted with a car, but part of me felt that it must have had to do with wanting to go someplace and not wanting to be so confined to this one place she'd been at for the past 30, 40 years.

Filmmaker: What was the process of writing the script like?

Riedel: After graduating, I decided I wanted to write a feature and went to stay in Mexico for a couple of months because I really wanted to get away and focus on this. Everything came together except for the Lolita storyline. I really couldn't relate to her character: I've never been married, I've never had children, I've never been divorced. [laughs] I had such a hard time to imagine what she would do or what she would say, and I have to relate to characters in order to figure out what they're going to do. It wasn't until I thought, “Well, you've never been these things, but you've felt lonely at times,” that I had a breakthrough with the Lolita character. As soon as I had that little click, her story came together.

Filmmaker: How difficult was it to finance this film given that it has an unconventional perspective?

Riedel: My parents are the executive producers and they're the only people who believed in me enough to give me money to make a movie, period. My mother read the script and she's an amazing businesswoman so if she had thought the script was crap then she would have said “Move along.” I thought, “I can shoot this for $200,000 and then we're gonna put together the edit and somebody's gonna come along [with finishing funds.]” Even before we shot, we had a little interest from HBO but no one ever came forward with the finishing funds so it took me a year in post because my editor and I worked during the day. I ended up getting amazing people working on the film just because they loved the project and they charged me little to nothing.

Filmmaker: The film looks like it had a much bigger budget, not least because you shot on film.

Riedel: Part of the reason I think it looks so fantastic is because my D.P., Toby Datum, is really phenomenal. We're so on the same wavelength. It was one of those great working experiences. I'd never prior to that worked with a D.P. who was so entrenched in the story: the camera, the angles and everything we discussed had to do with benefiting the story. It was so nice to work with a D.P. who wasn't about making pretty shots. [But] it ended up looking beautiful.

Filmmaker: This is a rare instance of a film from the perspective of women where it's not a chick flick nor are the women are objectified. It seems like you are giving your take on the world without tailoring it to the usual conventions.

Riedel: Directing it, I felt like “This is what I'm going to do and this is my agenda,”and I was very much doing things that were true to myself and in keeping with the way I saw the world. But, at the same time, if you were to ask me what I think about the way women are portrayed by Hollywood films in general, I could just go on a rant. I think that this film was definitely a response to that. I wasn't politicizing the whole thing but it does anger me how women are portrayed in cinema, by the U.S. mainly. I'm a huge fan of Catherine Breillat and other than the fact that she always has her shocking endings (which she doesn't need), she does such a good job of portraying what it is for a girl struggling with her sexuality. It's so open and honest and I'd like to see that more here.

Filmmaker: Your title seems to allude to that essay kids are supposed to write every fall about what they did over their vacation.

Riedel: That's totally it. I love that where you have to answer how you spent your summer vacation, and I can even remember writing in cursive writing “How I Spent My Summer.” It's definitely a summer film from start to finish. I like how I used “Girls” rather than [just]“Garcias,” because a big question I had while writing the movie was “What turns a girl into a woman?” At what stage does it happen? Is it the clothes you wear? The high heels? Is it having sex? Is it falling in love? Is it just being confident in yourself? There's that strange age between 20 and 24 where you're not sure whether to describe yourself as a woman or a girl. I remember for the longest time it didn't seem natural to say “I'm a woman.” With Garcia Girls, what I realized is that you can be a girl at any age. For me, even though the grandmother had had a child, she'd never really become a fully-fledged woman, she'd never taken control of her sexuality or fully understood it or enjoyed it, and I felt that she was very on a par with the teenager. Whether you're 70 or 40, that thrill of the first kiss with someone new, the butterflies in the stomach and that excitement, those feelings are all the same.

Filmmaker: Have you encountered greater difficulties in the film industry because the business is so male-dominated?

Riedel: I'd like to live in a bubble and think that there isn't any difference [between the opportunities for men and women] whatsoever and I've had so many wonderful experiences where being a woman didn't matter and it was what your thoughts where, what your approach was and how you were on set. At the same time, unfortunately I've had some experiences where that's not necessarily true. I went into [filmmaking] knowing it was going to be difficult and if it's a little bit more difficult [as a woman] then maybe the journey's going to be worth it when you're finally able to do it on a more consistent basis. Are there times when I've thought “Would it be a little easier if I had a penis?” Yes. But do I want a penis? No, not at all. [laughs] I don't have any ambitions to be a man, I'm perfectly content being a woman and I just have to work harder.

Filmmaker: Aside from giving a realistic view of the world from a female perspective, the film is also relatively unusual in the bold way that you tackle sexuality in old age.

Riedel: I remember watching Harold and Maude when I was in college and while I enjoyed the whole movie I was completely shocked when we saw Ruth [Gordon] and the young guy [Bud Cort] in bed. I was not only shocked, but kind of outraged – I couldn't believe that they showed that. But years later when I was at AFI, I rewatched the movie and was in love with it from start to finish and was no longer outraged. I was like “Wow, there's something beautiful there,” and [the] question in my head was why had that scene disgusted me? I know it sounds really horrible, but there was something about that scene that repulsed me and I felt bad and wanted to understand why. The whole sexuality in [my] film was a response [my feeling that] I shouldn't have that reaction. The old people in the film are so beautiful and so sweet and I was sort of teaching myself along the way. Just because you're extremely old [laughs] doesn't mean you don't have those same feelings you did when you were younger.

Filmmaker: Can you tell me about your experiences at AFI? I know you were part of a great group of filmmakers there.

Riedel: I have to say, the best part for me of AFI was the friends I made. It was mainly a group of directors, Azazel Jacobs, Gerardo Naranjo and Goran Dukic, and we were all very supportive of each other. There's that friendship there and it's great that you're not in film school anymore but you still have people around you that think like you and who you can bounce ideas off of and who've gone through similar experiences. I recently called up Goran to ask “How was your release with Wristcutters?” because I'm getting closer [to this filnger. m coming out]. I can't speak highly enough of them and I really value our friendship. I find it really cool that although none of us has exactly broken into the big Hollywood system yet – and not all of us want to – but through sheer force of will we've been able to make movies, A lot of people in our year are still waiting for the call from the studio, “Here's your $20 million budget, go ahead make your movie.” I think early on, a bunch of us had a passion to make films and that was first and foremost.

Filmmaker: What's the most embarrassing film you watched the whole of on a plane?

Riedel: There are movies where you're on the plane and you've maybe avoided something when it came out and three years later you're watching all of it. One of them was Tomb Raider, but Angelina Jolie's so sexy, I didn't feel bad about watching that. There was something with The Rock that I specifically remember. Was it The Pacifier? I was pretty blah about it. It's funny because I just went to see Iron Man and one of the trailers was for Get Smart, which The Rock is in. When the trailer came on, some guy in the back was like “Whoooo!” I was like, “Oh my God, that guy is in love!” [laughs] It was so loud and so clear and so enthusiastic and it was for The Rock, which I thought was kinda funny.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you burst out laughing on set?

Riedel: In that scene in How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer where Elizabeth Peña and Steven Bauer are going at it in the car, I remember everybody having to hold their laughter. The first take, she fell down and we had a little mattress there but we all started busting up. We only did a couple more takes, but that was definitely excruciatingly hard. On one take, Elizabeth's leg was caught in Steven Bauer's pants.

Filmmaker: Which film do you wish you had directed?

Riedel: The Apartment I think would have been cool to do, Breathless would have been to cool to do, even something like Lost in Translation. One, honest to God, is [Azazel Jacobs'] The GoodTimesKid. I read that script before Aza made it and I was like, “Wow.” It's just so freakin' lovely.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 5/16/2008 10:55:00 PM Comments (0)

Immediately distinguishable by his understated good looks, laid-back, drawling English voice and, of course, the boom mike seemingly always in his hands, Nick Broomfield is an iconic figure in documentary filmmaking, as well as one of the form’s most talented artists. The son of English photographer Maurice Broomfield and a Czech refugee, Broomfield went to a Quaker boarding school before studying law at Cardiff University, political science at Essex University and finally film at the National Film School in his hometown of London. Combining his interest in sociopolitical issues with filmmaking, Broomfield made his directorial debut while at university with Who Cares (1971), a short documentary about the slum clearance in Liverpool. Broomfield’s early films tackled racism, juvenile delinquency, and working class poverty and were often co-directed with his wife, Joan Churchill. His profile increased after making Driving Me Crazy (1988), the first documentary in which he was a prominent presence, and the following year he made his fiction debut with Dark Obsession, a thriller about the cover-up of a hit-and-run death by British soldiers. Over the past 15 years, Broomfield has had huge success making personality-driven documentaries such as Tracking Down Maggie: The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher (1994), Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (1995), Kurt & Courtney (1998), Biggie and Tupac (2002) and two films about the serial killer Aileen Wournos, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003).

In 2006, Broomfield returned to narrative filmmaking with Ghosts, an account of the death of Chinese cockle pickers in England in 2004. He continues to blend fact and fiction in his latest project, Battle for Haditha, about the 2005 killing of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. soldiers. With a cast made up of ex-Marines and Iraqis, Broomfield’s film examines the events surrounding the killings from the perspective of Iraqi insurgents, Iraqi civilians and the U.S. Marines. It effectively utilizes a naturalistic, documentary style in presenting a balanced account of the massacre which humanizes the actions of each faction in an attempt to understand why these tragic deaths took place. Immediate and immensely powerful, Battle for Haditha is simultaneously sympathetic and critical of the actions of the insurgents and occupying troops but offers hope for the conflict with the idea that each side should attempt to understand the other.

Filmmaker spoke to Broomfield about his shift to fiction filmmaking, the current political malaise and his aborted attempt to make a funny film about a tax office.



Filmmaker: Before I started recording, you were saying that you are currently having to do a lot of commercials because of how much of your own money you sunk into Battle For Haditha.

Broomfield: Well, I inadvertently ended up sticking my salary in it, which was pretty bad. I have this particular deal with Film Four where I pretty much keep the back end so I’m used to subsidizing the film and trying to pay myself back from the back end. There definitely will be a back end on this film, I just think it’ll take a lot longer than with other films. I’ve always found that quite a good exercise in a way, a good discipline – I did it with all my documentaries. Sometimes my budget is for five weeks and I end up doing it for 14, or however long it takes to make the film. You always have to try and make the film that is there rather than the film that fits in the budget, which is a good discipline for any filmmaker. It’s just that this has been a much bigger shortfall than I’ve had on my other films.

Filmmaker: Did you go over schedule?

Broomfield: No, we kept to the schedule but there was a shortfall of $1 million. I was slightly over-optimistic about how easy it was going to be to get it, so basically I’ve had to defray a million dollars pretty much myself, which is a lot of money. Filmmaking is a gamble and one of the prices of being an independent filmmaker is that you take on as little money as possible that will compromise your independence. When you get lots of people involved, their money always comes at a heavy price.

Filmmaker: What lead you to make the shift from straight documentary to a mix of fact anf fiction?

Broomfield: I just decided that I wanted to do a different kind of film. It’s taken what I’ve learned in documentary – which is how to work with real people who have an amazing story to tell – and blending that with a more structured storyline or script, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Because of the technological changes a new kind of cinema is possible, and that involves using real people and real locations and shooting in a style which is very much like documentary. In other words, long takes and editing in real time. It’s potentially a much more powerful cinema than we have at the moment and it could lend itself to action and comedy as well. I’m just playing around with it, really, but I’m sure that a lot of other people will start working in that form in the future. I think it will be an enormous and overdue change in cinema. It's an exciting future, actually.

Filmmaker: How different was your preparation for this film from what it would have been for a documentary? Presumably both involve very rigorous research.

Broomfield: I tend to do the research on the documentaries as I’m shooting the films. Normally I do a fair amount of preliminary research, but what I like most about documentary – and there are lots of different styles and ways of making them – is to have them being very spontaneous and a quest, rather than it being all sewed up with your beginning, middle and end all worked out. Why not go and make a feature film if you’re going to do that? So my documentaries are less researched than this film. On this film, I met the Marines from Kilo Company, spent quite a few days with them, met all the journalists, not only who worked on the Haditha story but journalists who had generally been covering the Iraq war. I then went to Oman and met with survivors of the massacre and insurgents and people who knew about the insurgency. It was probably a much more thoroughly researched film than one of my documentaries would have been at the outset. We wrote the script very much from that research.

Filmmaker: How detailed was the script? How much room did you leave for improvisation and spontaneity?

Broomfield: I would say that the overall structure of the film very much reflects the script that we had. The scene breakdown was pretty detailed as to what was to happen in each scene but the Marines and the Iraqi actors all brought a lot of their own experience to it. One of the problems of the tradition of writing scripts is that often the scriptwriter doesn’t know as much as real people who’ve lived it. He’s only in his Hollywood bungalow, or wherever, he hasn’t been to Iraq, he doesn’t know any Iraqis, he doesn’t know anything about Muslim culture, so a lot of it’s imagined. It’s a great luxury to have those people with you and it’s better for them to say “Actually, we don’t do it that way,” “We don’t say that,” “We don’t clear our house this way.” So you defer to them, which is very much like making a documentary, and I’ve always enjoyed that process of having a sense of the film you’re making but allowing the people to define it in the detail.

Filmmaker: How much did let the action just play when you were directing?

Broomfield: I certainly let the action play at the beginning because I’m fascinated to see what they’re going to do with it and sometimes they do things that are very unexpected and sometimes what they do is a damn sight better than what you had in mind. They surprise you. It’s bit like with a documentary: you allow those surprises to happen, which is the joy of making those films. It’s often the unexpected that is revealing and fantastic. And then I would define it more; often it’s cutting down dialogue. People tend to speak too much and they speak a lot of rubbish sometimes, so you say “Do the action, but don’t feel you have to talk so much. Just talk when there’s something worth saying.” Sometimes the first take’s a great one, sometimes it’s take 48.

Filmmaker: There’s a scene in the film where the insurgents coach a young girl as she is giving her testimony on camera. Is this something you ever are tempted to do or need to do when making one of your documentaries?

Broomfield: I would never do that. Maybe when I was a film student. Last night a young student asked me about ethics and I always think the litmus test as a filmmaker is to sit through your film without squirming. If you set people up, it’s just an uncomfortable thing. I don’t think you ever need to. If you pre-interview people, they will inevitably say things better the first time so then you try and coax them into saying what they said the first time and it never works, and you learn to shoot them the first time.

Filmmaker: I asked you about that because some people try to make their documentaries totally unambiguous.

Broomfield: Everyone got all upset about whether the Queen had walked in the room before or after [her infamous walkout in the BBC documentary A Year with the Queen], or whether the shot had been the other way around. That guy [BBC One controller Peter Fincham] resigned over it. I mean, let’s get real here: there are some issues that are worth getting upset about, like Tony Blair and George Bush lying to the whole world about why they were going into Iraq. That’s something worth getting into. Do I give a fuck about whether she had an argument before a shot was taken? No, I don’t care, and I think it’s all a storm in a teacup, it’s evading the big issues. We’ve lived in a decade of evading any real issues, and people in Britain and America feeling completely impotent to make themselves heard. So people seize on irrelevant things and address non-issues. The real issue is most of the electorate in both countries was against the war. We still went to war and we’re still fighting this war five years later. People have said we’re against torture, and we have an American president that’s saying waterboarding’s OK. I think people feel it doesn’t matter what they say, so many rules are being broken, they’ve lost power, they don’t have a political party that represents them anymore – it’s a terrible, dangerous apathy. That’s why all political films, not just the Iraq films, are doing badly. Any film that’s to do with anything vaguely political is doing badly because people feel impotent.

Filmmaker: You write in your director’s notes about your hopes for what the film can achieve, but how can you overcome that Iraq movie apathy?

Broomfield: One of the sad things about all the Iraq films that have been released by the studios – and I’m not including the documentaries in this statement – is that none of them have had any Iraqi characters in them, which is kind of telling. You would think one of the things is that we’d learn who some of the Iraqis are, what their culture is, how they see the world. That’s the way forward, but unfortunately none of the films have done that. I think that’s indicative of something. Around the time of Vietnam, there was a feeling that people could do something – it was power to the people, and people were demonstrating. It was a very political time when people believed that what they said mattered. There was the civil rights movement, there was all that political fervor, and this is the opposite to that. This is a period where two million people did march in London [in opposition to the war], but it didn’t make any difference. People think, “Let’s look at Britney’s tits instead.” Part of what a democracy is about is that people are supposed to be active and they feel that their vote counts and what they say matters and I don’t think there’s that belief anymore.

Filmmaker: It’s very true that previous Iraq films have had a purely American focus, but this film is the exception to that rule. You break the situation down into the three factions and then sympathetically show each side of the story.

Broomfield: Well, that’s how we move forward, a recognition of who your so-called enemy is – which in this case is the people we’re supposed to be liberating. [We need to show] a respect for their culture, a respect for their religion, their lives. Obviously, that hasn’t happened at all.

Filmmaker: Over the course of making the film and recreating the Haditha massacre in Jordan, did you see any signs of hope?

Broomfield: I think what cinema does – or can do – is stand back from the plethora of news reports and newspaper articles and give you a context in which to look at it. That’s what I hope the film will do really, but it also needs to be reflected in a change of political administration or direction or vision. Maybe after the election there will be a change, there will be a new vision, a new approach, and then people will be more receptive to actually engaging and working out what that way forward is and have more of an interest in who the Iraqis are.

Filmmaker: What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?

Broomfield: Making a film about a tax office which was supposedly to be entertaining and funny, and realizing that it was just the most boring place. It was in the days of the union film crews so I had an enormous crew and a cameraman who refused to use a zoom lens, so if I said “Go in tight,” he would actually walk up to the person and, not surprisingly, they’d stop talking. It’s the only film I never finished. We shot for two days and just said, “Look, it’s not going to happen.”

Filmmaker: What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Broomfield: To not wait for the money, to believe in the idea and borrow a camera and just go and shoot it.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was the first film you ever saw?

Broomfield: It was probably Charlie Chaplin, maybe The Gold Rush or something like that. My father had a projector and I remember he used to rent Charlie Chaplin films, so he was my hero. He was always somebody who managed to say lots of things that were worthwhile saying in an extremely entertaining and funny way (look what happened to him…), so I guess that’s something worth emulating.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 5/07/2008 10:37:00 AM Comments (0)

When you meet Garth Jennings, it is immediately apparent where much of the energy, enthusiasm and imagination in his films comes from. The effervescent Jennings, born in Essex, England in 1972, attended the Central St. Martin's College of Art & Design in London where he met Nick Goldsmith with whom he formed the creative partnership Hammer & Tongs. Though the pair have always collaborated closely on everything, over time Goldsmith has taken on production duties while Jennings now directs. The pair are most famous for their innovative and quirky music videos, such as Blur's 'Coffee and TV,' Fatboy Slim's 'Right Here, Right Now,' and REM's 'Imitation of Life.' After winning numerous awards for their pop promos and television commercials, the pair moved on to features and in 2005 Jennings directed the long-gestating movie of Douglas Adams' cult novel and TV show The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with Goldsmith producing.

Jennings' follow-up feature, Son of Rambow, is a project he and Goldsmith had been trying to get off the ground years before they were offered Hitchhiker's. Based on Jennings' childhood experiences, it is the 80s-set tale of Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), a naïve young teen whose family belongs to a Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren, and who is sheltered from modern evils. A chance encounter with school scamp Lee Carter (Will Poulter) introduces Will to the wonders of movies – and specifically Rambo: First Blood. His unlikely friendship with Lee (and their collaboration on a Rambo sequel) threatens to cause a rift between himself, his family, and the Brethren. A charming crowd pleaser with great performances from its two young leads Son of Rambow is smart, sweet and funny in its nostalgic recollection of Britain in the 1980s. Writer-director Jennings creates a vivid and colorful world for his young protagonists and, like them, shows so much passion for movies that it is infectious for the audience.

Filmmaker spoke to Jennings about 80s movies, the pressures of making Hitchhiker's and playing a crackhead in Hot Fuzz.



Filmmaker: You have an extremely close creative relationship with the other half of Hammer & Tongs, your producer Nick Goldsmith. How exactly do you function as a team?

Jennings: We met at art school 17 or 18 years ago, so we've been friends an awful long time and we've been working together for 10 or 12 years. We worked together on everything from the start and it was only as things started to go well that we realized that he suited production more than I did and I suited direction more than he did. And there's our third member, Dom [Leung], who became the editor, even though he's a director too – everyone can do all that stuff in their own way. We've always had a very hardworking ethic and for us the majority of the film is made in preproduction: I spent three months storyboarding Son of Rambow, then I went through it all with Nick and Dom, and prior to that Nick and I worked out the script together. I am technically the writer, but that's more because it came from my experiences and I brought the premise to the table and could join the dots. [Nick and I] worked on that outline together and he read every page as it came in and responded to it, so I feel like it's a 50-50 relationship.

Filmmaker: From a practical point of view, what is it like to have the film so clearly defined in your head before you start shooting?

Jennings: I just find it really relaxing, everyone knows what they're doing. Everything changes on set, as you know – the sun goes in, the guy hurts his foot... Someone's always hurting their foot, I don't know what that is. It's always like, “Where's so-and-so?” “Oh, he's hurt his foot.” And when they hurt their foot, you have to switch and find something else but if you've got this brilliant map that everyone, even the runners, know what they're shooting today, it's amazing how much energy and enthusiasm you can get from a crew. It galvanizes people when there's a common goal and it's OK to then deviate from that.

Filmmaker: What sort of obstacles did you have in making the film?

Jennings: No one would finance us. We couldn't get any financing and none of it came from the U.K. in the end. We saw everybody, absolutely everybody – most of them twice – over the period of about two years. [The reaction] mainly was “Boys, you're making a film that you say appeals to everyone. Well, how do we market to everyone?” Also because we'd done a big sci-fi movie it was like “What's this then? Surely more robots, puppets...” Luckily there's two of us, so we'd pick each other up, but it was really hard because it wasn't just being rejected, it was being told that you're absolutely wrong, that this will not work. There was one guy sitting there saying “Adults are not going to see a film with children in it,” and behind him on the wall was a huge poster of Billy Elliott. I remember thinking, “I've got a choice on this one: either I pick him up on this and tear a strip off him, or I just realize that this is just not the right man to be making the film with.”

Filmmaker: So let's talk about your childhood and 80's cinema...

Jennings: [puts on psychiatrist's voice] “Go back to your childhood...”

Filmmaker: So, tell me about your mother...

Jennings: [laughs] “What's your relationship like with your mother?” I do actually have officially the best mum in the world. She's brilliant, she's the business. She'd come on Friday with cakes to the set. She's amazing. It'd be a hallelujah moment for the crew. Why was I talking about that...?

Filmmaker: I was asking about your childhood.

Jennings: Oh yeah. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars... We got a great chunk of movies to grow up with. The first film I ever saw was Star Wars when I was five years old. It blew my head off, and from then on I loved films. But then First Blood came out when I was about 12 and it blew my socks off because it was the first film I'd seen that wasn't meant for my age group, and it was also a brilliant, brilliant film. We used to play in the forest every day in Epping and then here's this guy in the forest who's got a stick and a knife and he's taking on 200 men, he's sewing up his own arm – it was brilliant! Survival, a man on his own, a guy who has to outsmart the enemy and they're all after him and they're all unreasonable – that's how you think of adults when you're a kid. Even though it's a cliché, it's true. Even your parents, they're sort of the enemy, they get in the way of what you really want. It struck so many chords that my friends and I decided we should make our own film. It was sort of my production: we got my dad's video camera, even though we had no idea how to use it, and we made this action movie called Arran, Part 1. It was a tremendous hit! It was a day shooting, it was 10 minutes long, it was cut in camera.

Filmmaker: That's quite an achievement at that age.

Jennings: I didn't think so at the time. I thought it was cool, but I look back and I think, “Brilliant, we did so well.” It was so lovely because it was all my friends, my sister, my dad played the getaway driver for the terrorists who kidnapped the head of the M.o.D., who's me. The P.L.O had kidnapped me. We had no idea who the P.L.O. were. No idea. We'd heard this name on the TV. So the P.L.O capture the head of the Ministry of Defense and they hold him hostage, and it was in my mum and dad's shed which they doused with water (which was supposed to be petrol) and threatened to burn me alive unless they get the money and the terms they're after. My friend Arran comes to save me and burns them alive in a shed. That was our little film. My sister was the fiesty reporter going live to the scene. We had scrolling credits, a soundtrack. It was amazing, really, and so I just kept doing that. About eight years ago, I was talking to Nick about how great it was to be that age and not give a shit about the consequences, never worry about screwing up or whether what you were doing was stupid or if you were good at something, you just did it. Even though we liked the idea of kids making a film, it was more important to us to capture that lovely feeling we had.

Filmmaker: How difficult was it on Hitchhiker's to not worry about screwing up?

Jennings: Initially I turned it down because I wanted to make Son of Rambow with Nick. We were getting ready, starting to cast it and everything, but I grew up with Hitchhiker's and was a huge fan and when I read Douglas [Adams]' last draft of the script I thought, “This is amazing!” In terms of the outside pressure, the first thing I did was meet with all of [Douglas Adams'] family, especially his widow and his daughter, because they had to like us. There was no point in forcing ourselves on them, they had to like us and what we were doing. They did, so did his mum, so did everyone else, but all the people on the internet – who are either pro us or against – I don't know them, and I don't actually have to meet them. They can write their silly things, even if it's nice, but when you're making a film, I can't tell you how abstract that becomes. There's a guy knocking on the door saying, “We need to approve the molds for this thing by three o'clock or we're fucked,” or “The set's going up now and we've chosen the wrong lighting. Can we please go and correct it?” There is absolutely no time whatsoever to worry about [internet opinions], you're just trying to do this good thing.

Filmmaker: How was it working with the kids in Son of Rambow? Obviously so much rests on finding the right child actors in a film like this.

Jennings: Everything does, everything does. Most of the time it's hard to get young actors right, and it can be quite hard to watch when they're bad. So we took five months to find them, but when we found them they were perfect. They'd never acted in anything before. Well, one of them had been in a school play, but that was just as a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. It was such a pleasure to have such genuine [kids]. They were self-confident, but still kids. They hadn't been to any acting schools, they were still themselves. They were quite happy to play and if you wanted them to cry, they weren't worried about not looking tough in front of anyone. On the second day of shooting, we were shooting the end of the movie in the cinema. I thought, “This is going to be too much for little Will Poulter sitting there.” I'm talking to him off-camera about what he's looking at and there's all these people sitting there in complete silence. He started to well up, tears start rolling down his face, and I was just thinking “Holy Jesus Christ, this kid is amazing! He has no idea, absolutely no idea how much he has just made my day!” They're also two of the nicest people I've met. Their enthusiasm - they're like, “Wow, we get to swing off a crane!” - is infectious to all of us. The crew had seen it all, they've been on The Bourne Supremacy for nine months, they've done it all, but these children reminded them why they got into it in the first place.

Filmmaker: If you could travel back in time and be able to make movies in a time and place of your choice, where and when would it be?

Jennings: I think I'd probably do well in about the 1950s, around the time of The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and things like that, films where “We don't care if we can see the strings.” I'd go to the Ed Wood era and try to make some ludicrous monster movie.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you wished you had a different job?

Jennings: When I saw the White Stripes playing live. I know the guy who owns their record company and he invited me to stand in the wings and watch them play live. I watched them and I really, really wanted to be in a band. I've always secretly wanted to be a rock star, and when I saw that I really wanted to be a rock star. I was really envious of that, and it wasn't because I don't like my job it's just because that looked much better at the time.

Filmmaker: What's the strangest experience you've had during your time in the film industry?

Jennings: I was a crackhead in Hot Fuzz. In the opening montage of Simon Pegg's character's reveal of his many talents, one of his talents was to shoot a crackhead who was holding a family hostage. And that's me. [I was] standing in for that, waiting all afternoon with sores all over my face with a Kalashnikov rifle, thinking “This is really weird, really, really weird.” Being in front of the camera is a lot weirder than being behind it.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 5/02/2008 02:41:00 PM Comments (0)