Dream team

A pair of music-video makers maintain perfect harmony on a feature film.

For years, Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith have been best known as Hammer & Tongs, the collaborative team behind music videos for everyone from R.E.M. to Vampire Weekend. Because the movie industry is a bit more uptight about credits, on their new film Son of Rambow, you’ll see Jennings credited as the director and Goldsmith as producer, as they were on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005). When we sat down to talk with them recently, it quickly became clear that they have their own rather distinctive definition of those job titles. Not that they can agree on what that definition is.…

Though his name is on the screenplay and he gets the director credit, Jennings likes to stress the collaborative nature of their working relationship. “It was a very conscious decision to have the very first thing you see when the movie ends be ‘A Hammer & Tongs Film,’ ” he explains. “That sort of tells you everything about how we work; we do it all together.”

Goldsmith, as befits someone who does the logistical work of a producer, is the pragmatist. “But you need to be clear on who does what,” he insists. “We don’t direct together, and we didn’t cowrite the script. Garth wrote the script. But we worked it out together.”

Jennings seems uneasy, as if he’s still getting too much credit. “What a producer does is work from the beginning on the idea with the director creatively,” he stresses. “There are films—I’m not going to name them—which are wonderful directing flights of fancy and that’s all, and I think they’re like that because they didn’t have a strong producer on board.”

Whatever their process, it works in Son of Rambow, in which two kids in early 1980s England take up a video camera and shoot a sequel to the 1982 film Rambo: First Blood. They get unexpected help from an exotic French exchange student, but the rising profile of the kids’ project nearly ruins their friendship. The movie is sweet without being saccharine, nostalgic without being a lazy evocation of an era. For Jennings, the film started from his childhood experience of loving movies and wanting to make his own. He started working on a script back in 2000.

However, Jennings found that his experiences weren’t interesting enough to sustain a movie, so he drew on people he knew as a child, including a boy whose family did not allow him to see television or films. “I didn’t come from a religious background; my neighbors did,” he notes. “I was deeply affected by movies, enough to want to start making them. That’s quite an effect to have on a kid. But trying to write my experience wasn’t working. But you move it next door—the kid’s never seen a movie before. Then the audience gets it.”

As a companion for the sheltered Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), Jennings created Lee Carter (Will Poulter), a boy with little family structure who shares Will’s creative drive. Again, Jennings drew on his past. “One kid I knew, his parents were always away, and we all thought he was the luckiest son of a bitch in the world.”

Even after the script was worked out, the film took a long time at every step. “The hard part about making the film was telling people we wanted to make a film for everyone. And they’d go ‘Sorry? How are we meant to sell a film for everyone?’ A film for everyone; is that such a ludicrous concept?”

You might expect a couple of hip music-video makers to make fun of Rambo and Sylvester Stallone, but in fact Son of Rambow approaches Rambo with respect. Goldsmith and Jennings had to license the rights to clips from Rambo: First Blood, which involved requesting his permission. “ ‘Dear Mr. Stallone…’ ” recalls Goldsmith. “It’s a good day when you’re writing that letter.”

Eventually, they ended up sending Stallone a copy of the film and were pleased by his positive response. He even started mentioning it in interviews promoting the new Rambo film. “Having his blessing is definitely a cherry on the cake,” says Jennings.

These days, when they’re not out promoting Son of Rambow, Jennings and Goldsmith are working on their next project, an animated film on which they will share writing credit, though they’ll continue to divide the directing and producing responsibilities. “It’s an interesting time; releasing this film and having started the next one. This has taken us eight years to get Son of Rambow out. I think if it were to take that long again I’d go quite mad.”

Son of Rambow opens Friday.

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