Amateur hour

>>Moviemaking duo Hammer & Tongs on
Sylvester Stallone, homemade movies
and Son of Rambow, their homage
to the action flicks of the 1980s

JUNIOR AUTEURS: Will Poulter and Bill Milner

by MARK SLUTSKY

If you ask me, there was never a better decade to be a kid than the 1980s, at least from a pop culture point of view. It seemed like everything in those days was aimed at children, or at least at recapturing their sensibility. You had The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Spielberg in his prime: the Indiana Jones movies and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The golden age of the WWF (back when that meant World Wrestling Federation). Ghostbusters. The A-Team. The Goonies. Explorers. Everything and anything to do with Eddie Murphy. Back to the freaking Future.

And, of course, it was the age of Sylvester Stallone, who bestrode the world of American entertainment like a curl-lipped colossus. Whether he was fighting the Russkies in the dusty basins of Afghanistan or in the boxing ring, he represented a Reagan-era American bravado and scrappiness that now seems inseparable from the spirit of the decade—for better or worse.

Like so much from that decade, Stallone has had a resurgence as of late, reviving his two most popular franchises with the movies Rocky Balboa and Rambo. But he also appears on screens this month in a very different way, in a film that’s less about his iconic characters than it is about growing up with them.

Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith grew up in those days, and with their new film, Son of Rambow, it shows. The two are best known as Hammer & Tongs, under which name they made videos for Radiohead and Fatboy Slim, as well as the recent adaptation of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Their newest is set in the England of the early ’80s. Bill Milner plays Will, a creative kid repressed by his stifling Brethren (an Evangelical religious movement) family, who forbid TV and movies. This changes, however, when he befriends troublemaker Lee (Will Poulter), who introduces him to First Blood. Will’s mind is blown, and his creativity unleashed: the two set out to make their own Rambo movie, with their limited resources and boundless imagination.

Much like Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, it’s the story of a group of inspired amateurs competing with Hollywood on a shoestring. It’s a sweet and frequently hilarious film that overflows with the spirit of childhood derring-do.

CHILDREN OF THE ’80S:
Nick Goldsmith and Garth Jennings

First time for First Blood

Goldsmith, who produced the film, and Jennings, who wrote and directed, spoke to the Mirror at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival. Jennings makes no bones about the fact that Rambow is very much inspired by his own experiences as a child of the ’80s—and specifically of seeing First Blood for the first time.

“It was the first film I’d seen with my friends that was rated much older than we were allowed to see,” he says. “We were far too young to really be watching it—it was a pirate copy. In the film, Rambo hasn’t got loads of ammunition. He’s got a knife and some wood. And he manages to deal with everything, and not really kill anyone, but do things that you could almost do yourself. He’d make traps out of the wood, and you could chip away at a stick and suddenly you’ve got yourself this trap!”

One of the great things about Rambow is how it shows the kids achieving the crazy things they set out to do, via a slightly heightened sense of reality—blowing things up and using a see-saw to fling each other into the air, stunts that any kid might try but would never actually work. It feels like Jennings is finally making his childhood fantasies come true.

“That’s pretty much exactly why I wanted to make it,” he says, laughing. “No, absolutely, that’s the end of the interview right there, isn’t it? We set out to try and capture how we felt in that sort of period. First Blood blew our minds, and we started making our own versions of it. You know, action movies. We did one that was like Rambo, but with kids and BMXs. Our movie was born out of Nick and I sitting down and discussing those stories.”

In the film, Will fills his Bible with elaborate drawings and plans, and these spill out onto the frame as if they’re drawn directly on the film. “Even though this is a Brethren child who’s been brought up in a very morally strict house, he can’t help but let this creative streak come out of him,” Jennings says. “When Rambo comes along and it’s the first film he’s seen, you can see why that would light a fuse in a way. It was ripe for the picking! It just so happens that the first television or film experience he has is Sylvester Stallone sewing his own arm up!”

“A week later, it would have been Yentl,” Goldsmith jokes.

Culture Club condensed

One of the movie’s funniest sequences takes place in the Sixth Form Common Room, an unattainable hangout for the older students that, when we finally see it from the inside, is like a New Wave nightclub dance party—and which divides the two main characters when Will is seduced by its allures. It might be the only scene where the film really succumbs to straight-up ’80s nostalgia.

“We didn’t want to get bogged down with trying to make ’80s jokes, we didn’t want to go ‘Oh look, isn’t it funny how we used to wear this and that?’” Jennings says. “What’s nice with the Sixth Form Common Room is we were able to do a whole burst, where it was like a full-on Culture Club, Siouxsie and the Banshees dance sequence, in a condensed three minute chunk.”

“It sort of—very, very loosely—had a bit of inspiration from that scene in Midnight Cowboy when they go to the psychedelic party, and Joe Buck’s completely taken by the whole thing, and Ratso’s kicked out on the stairs,” Goldsmith says, laughing.

“We love Midnight Cowboy, and we were often comparing the movie to it,” Jennings says. “Which is a ludicrous comparison, isn’t it? New York, male prostitutes... maybe not the ideal thing to put into print, but to be honest, it was that classic sort of love story, and a great moment where you can see people pulled apart and seduced by the wrong things and your heart goes out because you’re thinking ‘You’re both doing the wrong thing! Go back to each other!’”

Sly’s side

The two managed to secure the rights to use footage from First Blood in the film, though they were by no means assured of that from the get-go. “Garth wrote a letter to Sylvester Stallone, because you have to get the actors’ permission, who were in the scenes that we were using,” Goldsmith says. “So we had to write letters to Brian Dennehy and Sylvester Stallone and get permission from the Richard Crenna estate. It was quite nerve-wracking, waiting to see if we were going to get a reply from Sylvester Stallone! In many ways: one, whether or not we could actually use it, but two, because Sylvester Stallone was actually corresponding with us! When he said yes, it was kind of like a double woo-hoo, because it was great to be able to use the clips, but also... He knows we exist!”

“I don’t think he’s seen it yet,” says Jennings. “But I’d love to show it to him! It would be fun. We never set out to send up the film in any way. Because that’s not how we felt about it. Hopefully, he’ll see it as an affectionate take on that. It’s not being condescending in any way.”

That was of course, last fall, and since the Mirror spoke to the filmmakers, it would seem that Stallone has had a chance to screen the film—and happily, he agrees with the filmmakers’ assessment. “I assumed it was going to be a very broad and stylized joke-a-minute comedy at Rambo’s expense,” Stallone told the L.A. Times last week. “The fact that it was so heartwarming is the result of brilliant filmmaking by its creators.”

Son of Rambow opens
this Friday, May 16

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