When Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith were first drawn together through a shared love of the grotesque and gothic, they pooled their most disturbing nightmares and the bizarre parallel comedy universe that became 'The League Of Gentlemen' was born. First came the stage shows, then the radio programmes, but it was the all-conquering success of the TV series which furnished the UK with some of the most warped new catchphrases to bounce around classrooms, student bars, offices and homes. Now the demonic denizens of Royston Vasey, that grotesque gaggle of cannibal butchers and sadistic shopkeepers, that have proffered such queasy laughs, finally arrive in the form that most inspired their creation - the cinema.
Close-Up Film met the four furtive imaginations behind these twisted tales on the day of the West End premiere of The League Of Gentleman's Apocalypse and asked them if a feature film had always been part of the master plan.
MARK GATISS: The thing is its never been planned. We had a sort of five year plan in the way that everybody does but things always go wrong. You can't predict it, it's just something we always thought would be lovely to happen. You can't plan for these things.
JEREMY DYSON: We've always been led by doing what we want to do. Not in a random formless way - we have a kind of strategy about when it's the right time to do something and the film was very much a case in point. We'd always wanted to do a film. I think we'd talked about it in some way shape or form from the very beginning. It was always an aspiration but we did consciously want to wait until we felt we were ready to do it. We could've actually done a film off the back of the second series - we had an interview at BBC films. But we wanted to wait until we actually had the ability to do it.
MG: Like Clint Eastwood with the script of Unforgiven !
CLOSE-UP: Having played these characters on stage, the radio, TV and now the cinema, is there a form that you think they are most suited to?
STEVE PEMBERTON: I think the characters are adaptable, and that's what we've proved if anything. We started off doing the live shows and the characters there were intended to be self contained sketches - there were was no interconnectivity between them. And then obviously on the TV series we decided to put them all in the same place, and so we had to adapt and leave out certain characters that wouldn't belong there. And of course, a film makes totally different demands. Where a sketch show character has to be the same week in week out for people to enjoy, a film character has start in one place and end in a different place. So what we found was that with over one hundred characters to choose from you're always going to be able to cherry pick the right character for the medium you're working in and the story you're trying to tell. So, yeah they're an adaptable bunch.
CLOSE-UP: You've always said you were as influenced by film as you were by comedy. Do you see The League fitting into a tradition of British horror of the grotesque?
JD: Its always been a big part of it, one of the things that drew us together as friends, the fact that we had a shared love for that particular sensibility. We were kids in the 70's in the days before video, when you had to wait for this stuff to come on television so there was a real special-ness about the Friday night horror film when it would come on. They were some of the things that bound us together in the early days and still bubble up all the time.
MG: I remember looking at the monitor on the set of the graveyard conclusion and the particular way it was lit. I could see the gravestones through the fog and there was a kind of blueness about it. It was just so like an Amicus horror movie. And then David Warner walked into shot and suddenly it WAS an Amicus horror movie! It's amazing to get to that situation when you're actually allowed to play with all your dreams.
CLOSE-UP: So you always wanted to cast David Warner because of the associations he brought with him?
JD: It was written for him actually - it says in the script, right from the first draft: 'David Warner in a hat'
MG: He just lost the hat. The funny thing about David is he's done hundreds of films and he doesn't join the dots between his genre periods the way we do. For us, it's The Omen , its Time Bandits, Tron, From Beyond the Grave , all these things in an enormous illustrious career. But he's always been one of those people
JD: He's like one of those unspoken things that if you know it, you know it. If you're one of those people then you love David Warner.
MG: It was either him or Christopher Lee. David is a very underrated comic actor. Its really only in things like Man with Two Brains and Time Bandits that he's been allowed to show it, but he has this extraordinary gift of being very scary and very funny.
CLOSE-UP: The movie references a lot of other films, most apparently in the film-within-a-film 'The King's Evil', with allusions to everything from Peter Greenaway to Harry Harryhausen.
SP: When it got to that part of the filming it was nice because it was all so fresh. There were new characters, a new scenario and we really enjoyed doing that. We had to do it on a budget, but it felt cinematic, it felt like it gave it some scale and it's pretty ravishing to look at really! We wanted to do something like Powell and Pressburger as well as referencing Barry Lyndon and The Draughtsman's Contract . So yeah, it was tremendous fun to do and we could have done a whole film like that. It was our original intention but then our existing characters kept forcing their way into our minds and so to do it like this gives you the best of every world..the best of three worlds!
CLOSE-UP: With three parallel realities - Royston Vasey, the 'real' world, and the world of 'The King's Evil' - the movie has a touch of the mind-bending structures of Charlie Kaufmann about it. You're effectively having your cake - three cakes - and eating them all!
SP: Absolutely. I hope it doesn't give you indigestion
REECE SHEARSMITH: It's like a rich pie, isn't it? With a cherry in it. I hope you don't have an allergic reaction to it.
MG: We'd just started writing when Adaptation came out. Rather than thinking 'Oh Christ - someone's done it, it was more like an reaffirmation of the fact that its in the air. There's a lot of deconstruction these days. I think that's a lot to do with the fact that the audience has become very, very sophisticated.
JD: DVDs go a long way towards it. You buy a product now and its kind of eviscerated for you at the same time as you consume it. You get to see the guts of the thing
MG: Which in some ways is bad, but at the same time the fan in all of us wants the extras. You're only really interested in the extras not the film - it's a mad thing. You get this beautiful print of Lawrence of Arabia - well, it's not enough anymore!
JD: And you never watch it, you just like the idea of having them on the shelf. How many commentaries have you listened to?
MG: Only The Life of Brian and The Holy Grail . Not even our own, obviously I'm too scared of what we said!
CLOSE-UP: With over one hundred Royston Vasey characters to choose from, how did you decide ones to pass over into 'real' world?
RS: Initially when we decided it would be a Royston Vasey film, we thought we had to put all of them in. That would be the challenge, the thing we hadn't really done. Imagine if there was a scene with every character we've ever done in it. It proved impossible. We got to the point where nine of the characters all played by the three of us are all together and that was conundrum enough to get everyone there and get it all filmed and have the special effects and green screen to get us all in the same scene. So we had to narrow it down. We put the big names in, the characters that are the most popular in peoples minds, but then let them take a back seat and went with probably more unusual choices.
SP: But they are all still popular characters, we've not gone really obscure. Hillary Briss, Herr Lipp and Geoff Tipps are very popular, they're just not the name headline characters who are better as cameos really. We've given those other characters a lot of screen time already in the series so therefore you run out of possibilities, whereas the other characters seem to offer up a lot more.
RS: But it was borne out of the story We thought we needed three characters that can lead this mission into the real world and be able to operate there. And we wanted to play those three characters as our main principal characters in the film.
CLOSE-UP: There's a very funny moment in the film where Papa Lazarou illustrates why he can't represent Royston Vasey in the real world - by coughing up a hairball!
SP: He couldn't go walking around Soho and take over Reece's life and say 'Hallo Dave!' without attracting attention.
CLOSE-UP: Whereas Herr Lipp manages to insinuate himself into the life (and wife!) of his creator. He actually becomes quite sympathetic.
SP: That became part of what the films about. How do you take a sketch show character, a one-dimensional character and turn him into a real humanised character.
RS: He wants to change, and that became the idea for the film. Herr Lipp embodies the conundrum of the film where he becomes self aware of being a pun, a sketch, and that was interesting to us. We could spot funny possibilities and also a new thing for the characters to do, a new situation to put them in.
SP: The problem became the solution in a way. In the TV show, like many of the characters, Herr Lipp begins by repulsing you. But if you look at the Christmas special, you can see the beginnings of the pathos of that character. What's interesting about the film is as the audience you're totally on the side of the characters. When you watch the TV series you wouldn't want to be hanging around with them for too long! But in the film you're really rooting for them and we as the writers and the actors have come to love these characters. We can't get rid of them and we do have great sympathy for them.
CLOSE-UP: You play yourselves in the film as arrogant, self obsessed, media types. You seem quite happy to ridicule that type.
SP: It was a way of feeling that we could get away with it so that the audience was completely on the side of the characters. We certainly weren't going to self aggrandise ourselves. We had to be the villains of the piece. We don't swan around Soho like that in real life!
CLOSE-UP: Royston Vasey has always struck me as a scarily accurate, if grotesque, caricature of many small English towns. In this film it seems almost homely.
RS: We feel like we're going home when we go and film the series there, because it's near where we all lived up north. We don't live there now so there's a familiarity, a cosiness about going back. It's a funny feeling, its kind of love-hate.not hate but love-strange.
Once you're there, it feels funny about being there for any length of time. It's always nice, but it's work. I've got a card from Mark from a few Christmases ago, and it says 'see you in Royston Vasey'. It's funny because we go back and it's dressed as Vasey and you think 'is this shop one of our sets, or is it just a shop in the street.' The lines between reality and the pretend world become blurred - even more so in the film.
CLOSE-Up: The film is subtitled 'Apocalypse'. Is this the end of the League of Gentlemen?
SP: No, it's not going to be the end. Whether we carry on with these characters is something we don't know yet. All that we know at the moment is that we're doing the live show at the end of the year. But there's so many things you can do within this scenario. Within the Christmas special and the third series and the film we haven't stuck rigidly to what the series was to begin with. It feels quite fluid, like we're able to take different forms and different stories and even if you take the characters out of Royston Vasey, it's still the characters that it's all about. So whether we move on to a whole new set of characters or use just some of the characters we've got.we really don't know. We like to give ourselves the time not to make any snap decisions.
RS: With us behind it, it'll always have that flavour, whether or not it's set in Royston Vasey or with those characters, our shared humour comes out in a certain way. We'll never escape that as long as we're writing together as a troupe, so that's always going to be there and we definitely keep working together.
CLOSE-UP: I suppose, with the unique nature of the League of Gentlemen, you could make ten different films with ten different sets of characters.
SP: That's the plan! Carry on The League of Gentlemen!!! The characters in this film, you wouldn't necessarily want to work with on the next project. You can give them a rest, it's like picking a football team, you can rotate your squad. Tubbs and Edward come back in all glory in our next project. They didn't do much in the Christmas special and were hardly in the third series but people are always wanting more of them and we've held back and held back. So who knows, we can't say at the moment what will be the next thing, but as long as we keep writing together and enjoying it and people like what we do then...
RS: ...there's no reason to stop.
GUS ALVAREZ
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