by SARAH ROWLAND

"What's the worst thing you can do to a headbanger? Give him nut cancer. Now what's the worst thing you can do to a DJ? Make him deaf."

So says Michael Dowse, the Montreal filmmaker who admits he borrowed a page from his 2002 directorial debut feature FUBAR and applied it to his latest film It's All Gone Pete Tong, a multi-layered comedy about a coked-out English DJ who loses his hearing at the peak of his career.

A beloved cult hit among proud Canadian hosers, the ultra-indie FUBAR was a loosely scripted improv about two Calgary rockers, Dean (Paul Spence) and Terry (Dave Lawrence), coming to terms with testicular cancer. Set in Ibiza, It's All Gone Pete Tong mixes dark humour, slapstick drollery, mock-doc trickery and kick-ass music into a brilliant combination that could very well take Dowse up another level.

And according to his director's notes (in particular the part about wanting to "rip cinema a new asshole"), he's counting on it. "I wanted to do something more with sound and music, and I think I accomplished that," says Dowse. "And I wanted to tell a story a little bit differently, and I think I did that. But a new asshole? I mean who the fuck am I? A new peehole, maybe."

But Dowse doesn't take all the credit for Pete Tong. He knows that a lot of the film's success rides on Paul Kaye's brilliant performance as the hearing-impaired Frankie Wilde.

"When I audition people, I just like to bullshit with them," Dowse says. "We did a couple of reads and then we just went completely off the page. I just kept on asking him ridiculous questions to see where he would go with it. And Paul turned out to be great at that. He just had everything - the look, the attitude. And he's tough too. I mean he really got his ass kicked during filming."

Givin'r for the role

According to Kaye, it was more than his ass that got kicked around.

"He pushed me really hard," says the gnarly-toothed Englishman, who sat down with the Mirror shortly after the 2004 Toronto film fest premiere of It's All Gone Pete Tong (the title is Cockney slang for "it's all gone wrong," and refers to the real-life exploits of '80s DJ Pete Tong, who makes a cameo in the film)."When we were shooting the scene in the padded cell room, where I throw myself against the wall, I almost broke my back. After one take, I thought I'd gotten as much out of that as possible. I was in a complete state, weeping and the whole bit. Just when I thought it was all over, Mike came up to me and said, ‘Okay, one more time, buddy.'

"I was so pissed off that I just threw myself against the wall six or seven more times just to shut him up. So in that respect, he definitely got the best from me. But when I got home, my wife said I looked like I'd been to war. I couldn't speak for three weeks. I was completely mentally and physically exhausted."

Though Kaye is a virtual unknown to U.S. audiences, he already earned a rep in the U.K. as Dennis the Pennis, a notorious gonzo entertainment reporter. In the mid-'90s, the obnoxious Jiminy Glick-esque personality was tossed out of numerous press conferences for pulling stunts like asking Robert De Niro point-blank what it was like doing comedies again. (No, De Niro wasn't there promoting Meet the Fockers; he was there to justify Frankenstein.) Legend has it, Kaye is also responsible for getting the whole British press corps banned from a Steve Martin junket.

"I pissed off a lot of potential employees during that year and a half," says Kaye. "I didn't really anticipate having a career in film. And if it wasn't for Pete Tong producers pointing Kaye out to Dowse, he may have toiled in sketch comedy obscurity.

"I had never heard of him," recalls Dowse, "just like he hadn't seen FUBAR. Which is probably a good thing because we both realized that we hate each other's work. When I finally saw his Dennis shtick, I was like, ‘This sucks,' and he said the same thing about FUBAR."

Coke, rock and cochlea

In preparing for the role of Wilde, Kaye had a DJ adviser on hand to make sure he pulled the fader up and down convincingly. And to make his hearing loss look realistic, he wore earplugs throughout the five-week shoot in Spain.

"I thought I might as well bug up me hearing for real," says Kaye. "I even got into the habit of sleeping with them and waking up not being able to hear a fucking thing throughout the day. It was particularly terrifying in the club environment because my balance was totally gone."

While the snorting, spinning and hearing impediment may have been synthesized, the rock-star attitude is apparently authentic. When Kaye met me for the interview, he swaggered through the hotel lobby like he's Liam Gallagher trolling for underage girls after playing a gruelling 15-minute set.

"There's a Frankie Wilde side to my nature," admits the 40-year-old east Londoner. "I'm mean I'm getting on now. But I behaved a bit like him in my 20s. I was a frontman for a band for six years [TV Eye, as in the Stooges song], and I used to jump around like a lunatic, so I have all the moves. And I suppose my attitude is a hangover from that."

Also giving a superb performance is Canadian stand-up comic Mike Wilmot. He plays Max, Wilde's sleazy manager. Even though he had zero acting experience previous to Pete Tong, Wilmot says that after years of working on the comedy circuit, he had more than enough inspiration to draw from for his character.

"I'll run into one of these guys maybe once a month mostly in Europe and America - not so much in Canada," says Wilmot. "There's not enough industry here to warrant that kind of attitude. But you'll see them at Just for Laughs, and they seem to me just like vacuous pimps that don't exist without other people in the room to push around and bully. In any other profession, they would be punched in the mouth by somebody every day."

Paradise or Babylon?

Together, Wilmot and Kaye were so convincing in their respective roles that some of 9,000 Ibiza locals used in the concert scenes thought that Frankie Wilde was a bona fide turntable maestro.

"We were filming one segment and as we were walking through the crowd, there was this pack behind us following Paul around, trying to get his autograph," says Wilmot, before adding, "And they weren't extras, just crazy people on E."

You'd think that being treated like a rock star on a Mediterranean island with beautiful topless extras draping all over you would be a dream acting gig, yes?

"That place frightens the hell out of me," says Kaye, referring to all memorials for DUI victims along the roadside. "You really feel like you're taking your life into your hands just driving to work, because there could be 20 people in a jeep just out of their fucking minds on fuck knows what coming right at you. Then on Sundays, you get these villagers with their crucifixes still pretending it's a good little Roman Catholic country. But it's not - it's fucking Babylon."

Dowse, meanwhile, is currently in the process of brainstorming ideas for the FUBAR sequel with Lawrence and Spence. Initially, they were kicking around elaborate plots about Deaner and Terry trying to conquer Hollywood. Thankfully, these plans were quickly scrapped.

"Personally, what I want to do is make it as simply as we made the first one," says Dowse. "I literally want it to be about Deaner losing his other nut. And I can't wait to do it"

It'S All Gone Pete Tong opens Friday, June 10

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