Ah, Hammer & Tongs. I like them. I always thought of the video making gang they managed to fix a nicely English sensibility to the cornucopia of promo making tricks. And whilst their vision of The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy was needlessly spoiled by Douglas Adams vision of the same, you could tell the best bits in the film was theirs. And their new project: Son Of Rambow sounds very promising.
This Time Out interview runs the usual questions by them and tries not to call Hitch-Hikers a failure to their face (it wasn’t their problem). But luckily beyond the terrific picture to the left and the slightly worrying air of a big budget kids film/nostalgia fest – it does raise much more of a question. Those days as kids when we thought we could make blockbuster movies.
The usual Lucas/Spielberg influences are noted. The Goonies were just an American version of The Famous Five really, and our youthful imaginations often cast ourselves into movies. But unfortunately i never got my hands on any equipment. (My Dad did buy a shonky video camera from a “bloke in the pub”, but the battery never worked and “bloke in the pub” neither offered guarantee or money back. Or forwarding address beyond the bit we could guess: HMP). But like Chris Tilly who interviews H&T for Time Out above, I had my version of the ET sequel all prepped to go. Though my version was clearly Elliot sent to ET’s planet and had remarkable parallels to the original (with a clever twist when all the ET’s were shocked that Elliot rode his bike on the GROUND). But you get the gist, I think a lot of people had a Super 16 go.
Those cans of film are rotting in attics now, where the new generation go out and make films and slap ’em on YouTube. So lets use the YouTube of the mind, what were your schoolkid film projects, and did you ever get to make them?