Hammer & Tongs duo Nick Goldsmith and Garth Jennings on the set of Son of Rambow.
The moniker Hammer & Tongs may not sound too familiar, but chances are, you’ve seen or heard some of the duo’s ingenious comical work through music videos, commercials or their feature film debut, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The two blokes behind the pseudonym are director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith, who have worked together since art school.
Their new coming-of-age indie Son of Rambow took eight years (that’s right, eight!) from the time they wrote the script to its release, having been put on the backburner while they made Hitchhiker’s Guide. Jennings and Goldsmith share why it took so long and how they enjoyed bringing to life the story of two boys, Will and Lee, who make a film after being inspired by Rambo: First Blood. Before the boys can kill themselves with their foolish stunts, the cooler kids at school get involved, including an exotic French exchange student.
Q: What contributed to Rambow’s delayed release?
Goldsmith: We’d written Son of Rambow and we were trying to get it financed. No one would give us any money because we’d say it’s a film for everyone. And ‘everyone’ is obviously something that people don’t like to invest in. Then we made Hitchhikers and thought, this film’s been a financial success. It’ll become very easy now. It wasn’t. We eventually managed to piecemeal the money together, so when Rambow played at Sundance and sold for a good amount of money, it was amazing. We thought, “Oh, we’re not mad, not insane.”
Q: Many filmmakers whose films come out only a year later get frustrated. Yours was eight. Didn’t you have that experience?
Jennings: No, the opposite. We’d spent so long getting this film made and we were so proud of it; it was even nicer to have this little life within the film festival circuit. There was no pressure of performing at the box office.
Goldsmith: Weirdly enough, when we started writing the script eight years ago, if someone had said, “You’re going to be coming out a few months after Rambo 4," we probably would’ve laughed because we thought there’s not going to be a Rambo 4. The fact that we actually ended up this way was ridiculous.
Q: Why did you misspell the title? Was it to acquire the rights?
Jennings: We were trying to let people know it’s not really Rambo’s son, and we don’t want people coming to the cinema thinking, “That’ll be a child ninja.” Also, it’s a phonetic misspelling that a child would make, and it’s a polite way of saying, we’d like to use your title because we love it.
Goldsmith: We’re not trying to trade off it.
Jennings: It’s like a little offering. Here’s a ‘W.’ Thank you.
Q: Are you being offered a lot more scripts with kids’ parts?
Goldsmith: With W’s in them. [Laughs]
Q: What’s the most ludicrous thing that you’ve been offered after Hitchhiker’s?
Jennings: Not after Hitchhiker’s, but before. It was brilliant. I remember getting offered Anaconda 2. Could you imagine us doing that? These things get offered to lots of people, so it’s not anyone’s fault for sending it to us. [Laughs]
Q: How did you find the two boys to play Will and Lee?
Jennings: It took us five months of casting, and we used every single day. Eventually, we found these two that had never ever acted before, except one had been in a school play as a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. They had no idea how good they were.
Q: Was the androgynous French exchange student from your own personal experiences?
Jennings: He was based on our French exchange program. Whenever that coach would pull up, we would be standing there in our boring little school uniforms, and these exotic creatures would get off. They had much more interesting clothes and hairstyles, the boys already had little mustaches, and they always seemed more mature and interesting smoking. He (actor Jules Sitruk) was one of the boys who came to the audition with his own cigarettes!
Q: How did you have the boys smoke in the film?
Jennings: You give them fake cigarettes. The boy who had to do the smoke scenes hated doing it so much. His father is a cardiovascular surgeon. As a director, I was sticking a cigarette into a kid’s mouth, then I would go back to where the parents are standing...I felt a little like I was corrupting their kids.
Q: Were the stunts also based on your childhood?
Jennings: It’s how we remember things being, rather than how they necessarily really were. When we started developing the script, I went back to the places I grew up. The school was tiny and boring, like someone had shrunk it in the oven. And that’s not how it felt. We wanted to capture how it felt, so the stunts are bigger than the things we used to do. It’s only now you think, “We could’ve blown the house up!” Or in my case, burnt the whole shed down.
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