Paul King is a sprightly fellow. Upon being told that he was on the screen in the building where we met him he jumps into view and bemoans his lank hair and the fact that he’s wearing the exact same jacket today as he was in the video. But if lank hair and a fondness for frayed tweed is his only downfall then he appears to be doing alright.
After graduating with honours from Cambridge University in 1999 along with fellow boffins Richard Ayoade, Matthew Holness and Alice Lowe, he went on to direct the trio at the Edinburgh Festival in Garth Marenghi’s FrightKnight, followed by Netherhead the following year, which won the coveted Perrier Award. But despite those accolades and working on a six-part series for Channel 4 it was directing the BBC’s surreal cult comedy The Mighty Boosh that honed his skills and landed him a Bafta nod.
Bunny and the Bull is his first feature as writer and director, and although there are similarities with the Boosh, it does not include the surreal mania of a world of bubblegum and neon pop stars but is instead a buddy comedy-slash-road movie set entirely in one flat. We got exactly 12 minutes with him on the eve of its release to talk about the idea, the sets and an intriguing phobia of fish.
LWLies: Firstly, how did this all come about? I read that you were travelling when you got the idea to do a buddy road movie that doesn’t leave a flat.
PK: Yeah, I’ll quickly run through. So part of it was going on holiday and having a terrible time. I think it was just after The Motorcycle Diaries came out and I sort of felt, ‘Why is it these road movies are always gorgeous sunset, beautiful landscapes and everything’s amazing and my experience was not that?’ It was very much being stuck in a luggage locker, I don’t know if you’ve done the InterRail thing, but you kind of just end up going, ‘Right, there’s nowhere to have a piss and I’m going to need to sleep, I’m going to be sleeping in the station.’ It was all going a bit wrong. It’s such a Euro rite of passage for people to do this thing and it felt like quite an interesting area to explore.
And then I kind of heard… Somebody told me about this turn of the 17th/18th century writer, there was lots of big, grand travel writing at the time apparently telling people to journey to the Americas and he was getting really pissed off and he wrote Voyage to the End of My Room. He was stuck in prison and he was going, ‘Why do you need to go to Tibet to find spiritual enlightenment, can’t you have that standing on the top of your sofa?’
I don’t know if the answer’s yes or no but it felt like an interesting way of exploring those things and I like this kind of anecdotalisation of your life and, I don’t know, maybe this is just my egomania, but you know when you have a relationship and it goes wrong or something and people ask what happened and you go, ‘Well, I was too busy at the time…’ whatever and you just turn it into a one sentence thing? It’s infinitely more complex than that but you sort of need to write your own autobiography as you go along. Just like when you think, ‘Why am I now making films?’ and you say, ‘Well, I did a play…’ and you go, ‘Well, it’s probably not that, it was because I happen to have seen Brazil aged eight and went, ‘Fucking hell, look what cinema can do.’’
And I like the idea that holidays, especially through holiday snaps and those Martin Parr Boring Postcards books which I think are amazing, you don’t even necessarily remember the place. I’ve got pictures from when I was a kid where I go I don’t remember that because I’ve seen the picture on my parents mantel piece and you go ‘Oh, I remember that mary-go-round’ and it’s like do you, or do you remember the picture. So it was trying to do that. Sorry, is that like four of the 12 minutes?
LWLies: No, you’re alright, you’ve got time.
King: I’m trying to get it all in. So yeah, I thought it would be really interesting to basically make a road movie that was set in one area and it kind of grew out of that. Then I found techniques I wanted to use and thought I might be able to do it comparatively cheaply but, I sort of, I wanted to make… Lots of British films, beautiful and amazing but lots of budget, debut British films tend to be very camcorder-y and you know, shot round friends’ houses. Obviously, many people make great virtues of that, like, Shane’s made some films like that but I didn’t want to hide behind the budget and I wanted to go, ‘Well, surely we can make a glamorous effects-type movie.’
LWLies: Just get creative with it.
King: Yeah, exactly and so many people want to help if you go, ‘I want to make a world of newspaper’ you suddenly find it’s easy to get volunteers than if you say, ‘Can you lift all of this Ikea furniture into that 8th floor flat?’ They’ll say, ‘You know what? I’m busy.’ But if it’s a bit more fun people get really into it. They were great, we had amazing volunteers and great crew and no one was really paid. I’m sure all cheap films say that but for us it was really true. We had, like, 30 volunteers from the Nottingham Arts School who were building models and stuff and we couldn’t even buy them lunch, it was really awful, it was like sending them out to get a sandwich after they just did six hours of free work and you feel like such a wanker but they were great.
LWLies: Obviously you and some of the actors are so associated with The Mighty Boosh, how do you go about letting the fans know that this is not a Mighty Boosh film and also getting people who maybe haven’t seen the show…
King: Or they don’t like the show. Obviously, I’m as big a fan of the Boosh as anyone but it’s not a Mighty Boosh film, it’s not written by those guys. They are in it because they’re friends and really nice and I think they’re brilliant but it does come from a different place although there’s some shared aesthetic because I did direct them both. I dunno, I suppose you tell people and hope that they get it. I think that people are quite savvy to the ‘From the director of…’ thing, people know that it means, ‘if you like that you might like that’, but it’s not a sequel or ‘their’ movie, otherwise we’d call it The Mighty Boosh.
So I don’t know. It is really tricky and I hope it doesn’t come back to haunt us because obviously the Boosh is really specific and really amazingly surreal. It’s got a world made of videotape and bubblegum and neon pop stars and it’s not really set in the world as we recognise it and this is; it’s more hopefully about human emotions that you might recognise and they kind of have issues as to whether they can tag enough pop stars, it’s a different genre. I hope Boosh fans will like it along with everyone else, you can’t really… I dunno what do you think?
LWLies: Well I’m very aware of the TV show but I’ve never actually seen it, although a lot of my friends are quite obsessed with it. One of my friends went from London to Brighton or somewhere to see the show, she couldn’t get tickets to the Brixton Academy show so she went all the way to wherever she went and her and her friends drove back the same night, so I know it has some great fans.
King: Yeah, there are some really amazing fans who are really committed, I think because there’s not much else like it so it’s like if you like Vic & Bob or you like Python, it’s this generation’s version of that strange show that no one else likes. So it will be really interesting to see how it works but obviously there’s nothing you can do about that.
LWLies: Just hope.
King: Yeah, hope that people find it and they like it. I think if they go expecting that, they’re gonna be maybe pleasantly surprised because they’re not going to get that.
LWLies: But above all of that, the sets and everything, it’s essentially a buddy film. I don’t know if it was you or somebody else who said it, that it’s like ‘Withnail & I’ for the mentally ill.
King: I didn’t say that, it’s slightly like carrying the weight of that film, good luck measuring up to that! But yeah it is. One of the producers said that I’ve made a comedy about mental illness and that sounds wildly offensive, it’s not fair at all. Yeah, there are funny bits in it but I’m sort of hoping that it feels like, the idea is that it feels like how life is reflected. You look back on your life and you go, ‘Well that was funny’. You know, if you tell stories down the pub they tend to be either you tell a story about your granddad dying and it’s probably quite sad, but if you tell a story about that time you got really pissed and was shut out of your house and the neighbour came round with the cat, that’s what it’s trying to be, doing lots of different flavours. Some people have said, I think probably because of The Mighty Boosh, they’re kind of surprised it’s kind of moving, intentionally, and it has a big emotional heart but that’s just what it is.
LWLies: Another thing that I read whilst prepping was this piece about Brit-coms, I hate it when they put two words together but just for the sake of argument…
King: Yeah, like ‘bro-mady’ what’s that?
LWLies: I haven’t heard that.
King: Like brother…
LWLies: Bro-mance?
King: Yes, bro-mance! That’s right, makes me wanna be sick on myself.
LWLies: I can’t lie, I have used that.
King: I probably have as well.
LWLies: Basically British people, we do comedy so well but for some reason it doesn’t always go on to the big screen.
King: No. Yeah, there was this article about the film in The Guardian which was basically ‘Why are British comedy films so shit?’ and fortunately we weren’t lumped in with them. I think we do really good comedies; I thought Le Donk was really funny and I thought In The Loop was really funny, the ones that seem to work are the ones that aren’t TV spin-offs like Shaun of the Dead seemed to really work because it was Spaced: The Movie, because they’re such different concepts.
Obviously, not having written The Mighty Boosh, I couldn’t have written Mighty Boosh: The Movie; if they do write it I would love to direct it and I hope they finish it and get on with it. Richard Ayoade, who’s in it, and the script editor, who I love, and I was always going ‘This scene, should we put some more jokes in it?’ and he asked, ‘Well, how many jokes does a film need?’ and it’s really nice that film doesn’t need… Like in a sitcom I think if you don’t laugh 10 times, it’s a bit rubbish. Obviously, The Godfather is not rammed with gags and I really think things like Looking for Eric where you you can do more there and I think we’re good at that. So, hopefully it belongs to that tradition of British films and not kind of failed TV spin-offs.
LWLies: Well, some of the biggest stinkers haven’t actually been TV spin offs like Lesbian Vampire whatever.
King: Oh yeah, no I didn’t see that.
LWLies: I guess it works or it doesn’t.
PK: Yeah but they’re pretty good actors those guys so I don’t know what happened, maybe it was just very unfairly maligned. But there’s enough good ones, I think we’re doing pretty well actually, British comedies.
LWLies: Anyway, moving on to the last one, bit random but I had to ask, is it true that you have a phobia of fish?
King: I don’t like fish. Or seafood.
LWLies: So was it scary at the premiere at the London Film Festival when there was two great big fish walking around?
King: No, I knew them so they’re alright, they’re people. I can tell the difference! That should be the headline, ‘Paul King can tell the difference between real fish and…’ No, I don’t like eating them, I don’t like the taste.
LWLies: They’re very good for you.
King: I know, all their evil Omega 3s or whatever it is. No, I don’t eat anything that swims in its own faeces. That’s my rule.
LWLies: Didn’t Natalie Portman say that in Closer?
King: Did she? I haven’t seen that. I’m the most ill-informed films person.
LWLies: I think she said she doesn’t eat fish cause they piss in the sea.
King: Oh really? It’s probably a fairly standard line. I don’t eat anything with a face.
LWLies: Well you’re alright then, I don’t eat red meat. No. But I like fish.
King: Oh really.
LWLies: This conversation has gone to a random place.
King: Yes, we should leave it there.
