April 6, 2008
SON OF RAMBOW IN CINEMAS NOW!
AND I’M (BRIEFLY) IN IT!
My friend Garth Jennings’s film Son Of Rambow, which was shot back in late summer 2006, is finally out in the UK so why not go and see it? Garth is part of Hammer & Tongs, an independent production company run by Garth and producer Nick Goldsmith who made their name making wonderful pop vids like this Fatboy Slim one. I pop up in the film for a few minutes as a chemistry teacher who suffers a painful nose injury (my third big screen head trauma in recent years). If you watch the film carefully you’ll see that the staff common room is populated not only by Garth’s friends and family (which you wouldn’t know unless you actually were one of Garth’s friends and family) but by the members of Travis (who wore the same sort of teacher costumes in the Hammer & Tongs video for Driftwood years back) and Nigel Godrich (Nigel has produced albums by Travis as well as Neil ‘Divine Comedy’ Hannon who provided a song for Garth’s directorial debut Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy). Here’s a few pics from our day on set.
There’s been a highly efficient publicity campaign for the film off the back of its success in Sundance last year that’s brought it into the public consciousness extremely effectively with all the good and bad that entails (comparisons to Hot Fuzz and Be Kind Rewind are misleading), but overall the reaction from people who’ve seen it has been amazingly positive. Very heartening considering how long Nick and Garth struggled to raise the finances for it. Here’s hoping it does BOFFO B.O! Good luck Garth & Nick!!