A submitted 'Son of Rambo' illustration

'Son of Rambow' feature

Time Out gains an exclusive insight into Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith's nostalgia-tinged follow-up to 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'

I recently met with Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, aka Hammer & Tongs, the creative visionaries behind some of the best music videos and adverts of the last decade and the makers of last year’s very British sci-fi blockbuster ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’.

Garth wanted to tell me all about their next film, ‘Son of Rambow ’, an ‘80s-set coming-of-age tale about two boys attempting to make the ultimate action prequel in their backyard.

First up we discussed my aborted attempt to make ‘ET2: Son of ET’ back in 1986, but you don’t want to hear about that, so without further ado, here’s what Garth had so say about his new movie (and before you ask, yes, it is supposed to be spelt 'Rambow').

Time Out: Where did the idea for ‘Son of Rambow’ come from?

Garth Jennings: I sat down with Nick one day to talk about films we’d like to make and I started talking about the films I used to make when I was a kid. When I was about 11, my dad inherited a video camera from a friend. My dad was crap with anything technological so I immediately commandeered the thing and started making little films with my friends, and the wonderful thing about it was that back then, anything was possible as far as we were concerned. We were influenced by the Spielberg and Lucas movies and the Vietnam films like 'Rambo' and 'Uncommon Valour' and stuff like that. We wanted to capture the time when you are that age, anything is possible and you’re all pulling together. You have no fear – you’re quite happy to do your own stunts, and you become very resourceful, coming up with all these weird and wonderful solutions for your story and your special effects.

Is it right that you were planning to make the film before ‘Hitchhiker’s’?

We developed it for years and even started casting, then ‘Hitchhiker’s’ literally came through the post and we switched gears. So all the people we were working with on ‘Rambow’ then suddenly had to switch to working on a sci-fi movie. It was like ‘John, you know that barn I asked you to work on? Well now I need you to make a spaceship’. So it stopped for two years, and we were worried that when we finished ‘Hitchhiker’s’ and opened up the ‘Son of Rambow’ script, that we weren’t going to like it any more. But the great thing was we still really loved it, and in the course of ‘Hitchhiker’s’ we’d learnt a lot about script editing and other things we could apply to ‘Rambow’ to polish it off and get it ready to go. So we did some commercials and videos to pay for our initial pre-production, then found enough people to help us finance the movie and now it’s ready to go.