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After tackling a big screen adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy director Garth Jennings turned to the more modest ambitions of Son Of Rambow. But, he tells FOCUS, when he screened it at the Sundance Festival everything suddenly took off.
Garth Jennings has the look of an overgrown schoolboy, clean shaven and open faced, with a ready smile and sense of wide eyed wonderment at the success that has come his way.
With scores of acclaimed pop promos it was a quite respectable level of success even before Son of Rambow became the sensation of Sundance, sparking a bidding war before being bought by a Hollywood major - earning its shooting budget back in the process.
And it's all the more satisfying after the mixed reaction to UK hit The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy that audiences have responded as they have to this semi-autobiographical recollection of suburban life in 80s Britain.
It begins when two schoolboys - beautifully played by newcomers Bill Milner and Will Poulter - form an unlikely friendship and hatch a scheme to shoot their own version of Sylvester Stallone’s First Blood on video.
As the idyllic warm summer of memory wears on, the two of them improvise fantastic new adventures for the son of Rambow - as they believe him to be called - to endure, and all manner of terrible enemies for him to overcome. All this, Jennings explains, has its roots in his own experience.
"When me and my friends saw this film where this guy is sewing up his own arm and jumping off cliff faces," he beams, "we thought it was incredible. So we actually did make our own home version of the film."
Fast forward to January 2007 and the director and his team had this charming memoir ready to screen at Sundance, Robert Redford's highly influential festival where independent films typically court major distributors. Most leave with their desires unrequited.
"I'd never been to a film festival before," Jennings adds, "and no-one had seen our finished film bar those of us who'd been working on it. Two weeks before we were due to leave we were watching it, but we'd seen it so many times we were quite down on the whole thing.
"Six of us flew out to Sundance with a reel each, and gave it to the Festival organisers. It was all very quiet, there were no interviews or anything, we even found time to go skiing. That night I was more violently ill through nerves than I'd ever been in my life.
"But it was extraordinary, within about 10 minutes of watching it with an audience I realised it was going well. And then about halfway through it I thought 'crikey, it is going well,'. And then by the end of it I thought it had done what I wanted it to do. I didn’t know that would then lead to a big deal, I just thought 'great it worked,' and that was incredibly rewarding.
"Then it just went nuts and this crazy bidding war broke out. It was so silly I just went to bed. I thought that wouldn’t happen. I woke up at five in the morning and heard they’d signed a seven and a half million deal with Paramount. It was great, because that was exactly how much the film cost. It meant that everyone who had put money into the film got their money back that night, so I was really relieved. It was great."
Spoken with true English understatement, Jennings' pride in this quite thrilling professional affirmation is exceeded only by the fact that Sylvester Stallone himself gave it his seal of approval.
"I got a call the other day saying that he'd seen the film. I thought he should see it, it felt only right. And he really liked it, there's a little note coming through apparently. When you go and see the new Rambo film in America Son of Rambow is one of the trailers playing before it. So you've got all these guys sitting down getting ready for some Rambo style action and these two kids come on screen," Jennings lets loose a laugh he can suppress no longer. "I think that’s hysterical."
ANWAR BRETT
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