Are you ready to meet The Greasy Strangler? If so, you better be prepared for off-the-wall humour, prophetic appendages and – you guessed it – a considerable amount of grease. To find out more, we spoke to the brains of the bright-pink ill-fitting outfit, Director Jim Hoskin, about repetitive comedy, working with Elijah Wood and what a greasy Star Wars movie might look like…
We saw an interview where you said the idea for the film came via an off-hand joke made in an email. How did you develop a joke into a full feature film?
JH: It came out of a desire to write something that was going to be as self indulgent as possible and really just feel like a contrary script and film that subverted convention and normal expectations. I think we just went with whatever felt like would be the funniest thing to do at any particular time. I was wanting to write a script that didn’t have any tension or surprise and felt like it was laying out the plot from the first scene. I felt like I could write anything that I wanted to and it didn’t really matter what it was so if I wanted to write really repetitive, maddening dialogue then that’s what I would write. I was trying to write a script for some very socially inept, frustrated, boring, annoying people. It feels a bit like you’re trapped at a party in a corner of the room with two weirdos who haven’t had the opportunity to speak to anyone for about three months and they just want to keep ranting at you.
Pitching this film must have been tricky. Did you develop a go-to pitch line?
JH: No, I didn’t have to pitch this to anybody actually. I showed it to Andy Starke who runs a company with Ben Wheatley called Rook Films. I think having known that Andy was quite into peculiar material and unconventional filmmaking I just sent him the script saying “Have a read of this and see what you think”. It’s got a very straight forward title and I think that if you like the title then you might like the film but if you’re not intrigued by the title or think “That sounds stupid”, then you’re not going to read the script. It’s a strange opposition. It’s the kind of script that you would read and feel either “Oh, I really have to make this” or “I really don’t want to be involved with this and I never want to see it if anyone else makes it”,
A lot of the film’s humour comes through repetition. How do you know when you’ve reached peak funny?
JH: I don’t know if you do know, really. Actually, if I’d had a long time to shoot those scenes they would’ve just ended up a lot longer. I used everything. I think I cut the scenes longer than other people wanted them, for sure. I felt like I wanted them to outstay their welcome completely and then come back. With the ‘Potato’ scene, I just kept cutting that longer and longer and then I actually wasn’t able to cut it any longer because I used all of the material that I had for it to still work.
Were your cast on the same comedic wave length?
JH: Maybe one or two of them might have been on my comedic wavelength but I don’t know about the rest of them. I don’t know if they had any idea really what it meant or whether it was funny or not. They were performing it with real sincerity and I don’t know that any of them really quite knew what the intention was. Some of them I’ve worked with a lot so they definitely knew the tone of the film but when I’m thinking about Sam Dissanayake who plays the Indian tourist in the film, I have no idea. He’s a very sweet, genuine guy and I don’t know what he finds funny. I know that he listens to a lot of Celine Dion so that makes me think that maybe he doesn’t understand the humour.
Andrew Hung’s music is simple but catchy – how long did you guys spend working on it? It adds a lot to the tone of the film…
JH: There’s probably about 20 different tunes in the film, some of them are just played more than others and some of them repeat more than others. We put in as much thought and effort as we could within the time that we had. Andy works very quickly and he’s very instinctive but I definitely gave him a direction as far as wanting it to feel like a demented video game soundtrack, like Big Ronnie and Brayden were characters in a video game. I talked to him about using animal sounds within the music and he created these little chipmunk noises when they’d get quite excited at pivotal moments. I wanted it to feel like it was as much of a peculiar character as all the other characters in the film. It was almost as if the guys in the film had been asked to create a soundtrack for somebody. This is what it would have sounded like.
Michael St Michaels, that’s a great name…
JH: It’s not his real name…
And Sky Elobar….
JH: And that’s not his real name either…
How much of their dialogue was improvised?
JH: They tried to stick to the script as much as possible. There was some improvising just because I would get them to try certain lines. So for example, when Janet looks at Ronnie’s penis under the sheets and he says to her it looks like a massive mouse’s head – that’s something that I told him to say at the time but generally we stuck to the script. There’s a line that comes to me now – the thing with the tourist at the beginning of the film, where he’s asking them if they like the Bee Gees and Ronnie’s saying that they came up with the tune for a song when they were going for dinner for somebody’s birthday and they were going to a Chinese restaurant – that’s something that I made up on the spur of the moment but it’s kind of in keeping with the script.
Big Ronnie and Brayden are quick to call bullshit. What was the inspiration behind their use of the term ‘Bullshit Artist’?
JH: We were trying to write a script for a film that would be set in the US but knowing that it was being written by two Brits who find the way that Americans speak quite funny. I suppose we wanted to have some fun with that and the phrase ‘Bullshit Artist’ – that’s just something you say to your friends when you’re a kid and it’s just very childish. We were just making each other laugh with different phrases like that and thinking of American actors who were going to be forced into using these stupid phrases. It just made us laugh.
What about their fashion sense?
JH: I just wanted them to not have changes of clothing really. They had their work clothes and then they had their normal life clothes, so they would feel like cartoon characters. I found an old picture of some strange looking guy in some grey flared lounge-wear and I showed it to my Costume Designer. We talked about adding some stripes to it and we ended up making this costume for Ronnie. When we made the clothes for the disco tours, I think we were just trying to make something that felt like it was out of step with the real world and how calculated everybody is with fitting in and needing to look fashionable and be acceptable. Their clothes were really just like a weird expression. They just make me laugh. Let’s put them in quite tight shorts and shirts where the arms are too short and and stuff like like that. Just uncomfortable and slightly demeaning. Just stuff that makes me laugh really,
Prosthetic penises feature prominently. How many of those did you go through before deciding on the right one?
JH: I went through all that they had. We were having meetings every day and they were the most intense meetings where people would ask which scenes we see his penis in and then I’d say, “I want to see his penis in this scene and this scene and this scene,” and then I’d be told, “Oh, so you basically want to see him naked in every scene?” It was difficult because we only had about seven of Ronnie’s penises and they weren’t that reusable – they could only be reattached once or twice – so there was a certain amount of tactical deployment but Brayden just had the one. His was a different kind of attachment. His was reusable.
How did the film land on Elijah Wood’s radar?
JH: He was given the script by the producer, he runs a company called Spectrevision. I had a short film that was part of a film called The ABCs of Death 2 and I heard that he’d seen that.
Did he offer any feedback that ended up in the finished film?
JH: He just supported my point of view really. I remember on the first call that we all had the first thing anyone said was “If we don’t make this film nobody else will”. With casting, I wanted to cast unknowns – I thought they’re the only people who would go all the way and I wanted it to feel like you don’t know any of these people and you don’t know this world and it felt like something else entirely and he was the first person to say “I completely agree”. It was just really nice to feel supported.
How do you follow The Greasy Strangler, what do you have planned next?
JH: I’m shooting something in the States. I suppose it’s a comedy, maybe it’s a bit more of a romantic comedy. Maybe The Greasy Strangler was a bit of a romantic comedy but it’s definitely different. As much as I want to make films that I feel like nobody else could make and I want them to be distinctive, I also don’t have a desire to make something that’s similar to something else I’ve made. If there’s something that I love about The Greasy Strangler it’s that it’s got some really strong memorable characters in it and that appeals to me.
There’s a trend at the minute where indie directors are paired up with big franchises…
JH: I don’t think that’s going to happen with me.
What do you reckon it would it look like if you landed the likes of Star Wars, The Avengers or Jurassic Park? It’d probably be harder to get a prosthetic penis into any of those films.
JH: I don’t know. They might be more interesting films if they had an intergalactic prodding probe or an intergalactic sex probe but don’t know what they would look like.
It would be great to see Big Ronnie in the next Star Wars film though…
JH: It would be good, yeah. He’s got a good leathery face, he could withstand the sand storms. I don’t really watch much Star Wars. Maybe if I’d watched more I could have made a film that would’ve lined me up to make the next Star Wars film.
We could totally see them in the next Avengers, too. They’d look good in those costumes…
JH: It would be good yeah. They could do a naked Avengers, as well.
Want to find out more? Listen to our review in the October film podcast, greasy chat starts at 8.32…
Interview by Simon Bland.
The Greasy Strangler opens on Fri 07 October. To find out more and book tickets, head here.
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