I’ve done another interview! I’m like the Piers Morgan of the non-popular film blog world..
This time it’s with Paul King, director of The Mighty Boosh, about his new film Bunny and the Bull (in cinemas now). It follows a similar format to the In The Loop interview from earlier this year; basically I spend a couple of minutes cobbling together some asinine, trying-to-be-funny questions and they respond with thousands of words of interesting and hilarious anecdotes. Pretty happy with that arrangement.
If you really want to, you can find the interview in this month’s issue of Notion Magazine. Quite a lot of effort though. I’d just read this if I were you:
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- The film looks amazing. The way you’ve recreated epic sweeps of Europe using paper-mâché and lo-fi animation must have saved, like, billions of pounds. Did you get to keep the money?
Sadly the producer and I weren’t even paid to make the film! We certainly saved money by not going round Europe and shooting in dozens of different countries – but the down side is that every single thing you see in the film is created from scratch. A lot of the sets were made out of weird objects – like there’s a world made of clock parts and another one of newspaper – so it wasn’t like we could film in our mates’ houses. We had an amazing group of volunteers from the art school in Nottingham where we shot (Britain’s cheapest studio) who worked for weeks on end. We couldn’t even afford to buy them lunch. So it was a labour of love for a lot of different people.
- It must have taken literally ages to do? How did you find time to fit in important things like watching TV and going to the pub?
Nottingham’s pretty good at providing late night drinking anyway, but we had a cast of die-hard drinkers who always made sure they found somewhere. Noel Fielding came up to film for two days but was so committed to his character (an alcoholic ex-matador) that when he discovered everywhere closed by three, he sweet talked a bar owner into opening up for him and Simon. They stayed out all night and then – for good measure – the night after, even though Noel had finished filming. We began to wonder if he would ever leave.
Simon also comes from a long line of drinkers so he was pretty good at sniffing out the real boozers. His granddad wasn’t allowed to drink in later years and was confined to the house but somehow still managed to get sozzled. It wasn’t until after he died they discovered (and this I promise you is true) that he had TUNNELLED through from the back of his wardrobe to the pub next door. He would go there during his long afternoon naps and any time he turned in early. Only a truly committed drinker goes through a Shawshank amount of effort for a pint.
- Simon Farnaby’s character gets fully nude several times during the film. Was that something he was pushing for or was it a mutual decision?
This was never the idea. I wrote a tasteful script but it all went to pot during filming. The first nude scene we did was in the corridor. I faithfully promised him that we wouldn’t use the bit of the scene where you could see his old boy – just the bit where he is facing the other direction. On the making of you can actually hear me saying “I promise the last thing I’m going to put on a sixty foot screen is your penis.” I was lying. At the premiere I was sitting next to his parents and I’ve never been more ashamed.
- Veronica Echegui (who plays Eloisa) does some spectacular Spanish swearing. Is ‘are you fucking my face?’ an actual phrase people say in Spain?
It’s just something Veronica came out with. The film is about someone reconstructing his memories of a trip from old postcards and souvenirs so it’s pretty exaggerated throughout. You know how you tell stories from your past and you embroider it a little (or lie, to put it another way). Well that’s what Stephen is doing throughout. So when they meet Julian’s character, he’s become an exaggerated version of what really happened. But the closer the characters are to him, the more honest he is with his memories. And because Veronica is his true love, he remembers her more accurately.
So I wanted a real Spanish actress. Veronica was someone a cameraman had recommended to me and she just blew us out of the water. She swears constantly, improvises amazing jokes in her second language, takes the piss and knows how to have a great time. We laughed so much at the way she phrased stuff naturally that we ended up raiding her own speech to make Eloisa’s lines. The trick was not to tell her why she was getting things wrong. She was getting better and better at English all the time and we kept trying to make her sound like she barely spoke it. Cruel, but fun.
- I detect a virulently anti-seafood theme running through the film. What exactly is your problem with shellfish?
It’s not just shellfish. It’s anything from the ocean. Never trust anything that swims in its own waste. I had a traumatic experience as a six year old. My parents had taken me to Rome and they’d not really been abroad much before and had no idea how things worked. We went to this seafood restaurant where there was a lobster tank and I asked why it was there. My parents insisted they were just for decoration but then this evil grinning Italian child came along and pointed out his favourite lobster to the waiter who fished it out with his tongs. I started bawling – and the lobster started struggling – and somehow it managed to smash a halogen lightbulb with its claw which sent shards of hot glass showering all over me and my dinner. I’ve never touched fish since.
- So, the Netherlands Shoe Museum and the German Museum of Cookbooks: are those actually real literal places?
They are all real and I love them. I’ve got a bit of a fetish for alternative museums. The Museum of the Polish Postal Service is a personal favourite. The highpoint is a room dedicated to ‘post-boxes from around the globe’. The German Cookbook Museum also has to be seen to be believed. I wanted to see the Museum of Locks and Hardware but ironically it was shut. One I’d really like to go to (but haven’t seen myself) is the German Museum of Health and Safety in the Workplace.
But my favourite fact about these museums are that there are three Aparagus Museums in Europe. One of them only has white asparagus, to be fair, but still. Oh, and the Museum of Birds’ Nests and Feeding Troughs in Brussels isn’t really a museum – more of an exhibition attached to a restaurant – but is well worth a visit.
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