Chris Morris Four Lions Podcast Interview [split topic]

[DuncanC]

Chris Morris interview podcast here: http://daily.greencine.com/archives/007714.html

[Neil]

Gosh, thanks Duncan, and huge thanks to weirdbeard for all the articles, I'll archive this all before the end of the week, hopefully.

[hoverdonkey]

Listening now - it's excellent. Thanks very much. He sounds ominously like Simon Cowell

[Lord Mandrake]

Thanks that was great.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

'smeeeeeeeaaaaaarred'

The genre for the podcast file is: Terror :)

I got the impression he was still putting on an act a little bit there. His voice sounds slightly affected.

Haha, ice burn on Martin Amis...

[Neil]

I got the impression he was still putting on an act a little bit there. His voice sounds slightly affected.

Probably playing up to the mic, slightly, but generally I'd imagine that's just how he is, after years spent learning to express himself on (and for) the radio. 

I liked that a lot, and it was actually full of lots of questions I want posted, but which never seem to get asked.  I enjoyed his approach to seeing what comes next - it's been really enjoyable to see him out and about, this past few weeks, but I'm happy enough with the long gaps between projects if they're things that just really engage him.  A nice insight into how he directs, too. 

And the 'I've translated that to English' aside makes me think what I was told about him learning Arabic was true.  Certainly, the amount of time and thought he puts into a project is painfully clear.

[Johnny Townmouse]

Yep, he it is really to tell how much he is pissing about here, or is being serious. I imagine this is a problem for him when he really is being genuinely serious.

"He's been hit by a tractor."

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

Chris Morris interview podcast here: http://daily.greencine.com/archives/007714.html

Wonderful, thanks Duncan. Interesting stuff, of course, but I was slightly weirded out by the odd moment of tape glitch which made Morris sound as though he was reviving the funny voices he used to inject into Speak Your Brains and so on.

EDIT: Ah, I see you lot have already mentioned this.

[gloria]

"Jewish doors"

Nice interview.  Thanks for posting.

[boxofslice]

Thanks for posting that Duncan.  Interesting stuff and comes across as open and quite affable.  Agree with the statement made above that he sounds a bit like Simon Cowell albeit a more intellectual one.

[weirdbeard]

Thanks for posting that, nice to listen to.  I'd like to hear more interviews from him, but understand his reasons for not doing many. 

[boxofslice]

Be interesting to see when the film's released how much, if any, publicity Morris will do for the film or whether he'll leave it all to the actors or Sam and Jesse who've done that kind of thing before with Peep Show and the like.

[An tSaoi]

Very interesting listen, CM sounds brimming with ideas and things to talk about. He said one of the actors was in Brass Eye. Which one and what character?

[Paaaaul]

Very interesting listen, CM sounds brimming with ideas and things to talk about. He said one of the actors was in Brass Eye. Which one and what character?

I haven't listened yet, but Kevin Eldon's a copper innit, inne?

[An tSaoi]

*smacks head*

[Edley]

I haven't listened yet, but Kevin Eldon's a copper innit, inne?

Yeah but it's Nigel Lindsay he's talking about.

[An tSaoi]

Aah.

"Brass Eye" .... Peacecap Johnson (1 episode, 1997)

Wait, who was that?

[Tiny Poster]

The "mentally subnormal" bloke who is used for sex on Apollo 11.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

The "mentally subnormal" bloke who is used for sex on Apollo 11.

Ah, of course. "Buzz gonna come and clean mah durrty".

[An tSaoi]

Oh right. Well that's my curiosity satisfied.

[Hitler]

Ah, of course. "Buzz gonna come and clean mah durrty".

...with his .. soapy fish.

[DuncanC]

Here's a transcript from the Q&A after a screening: http://festival.sundance.org/2010/news/article/qa_four_lions/

[JPA]

Thanks for this Duncan. Any chance of CaB snaring him for an interview Neil?

[Glebe]

Excellent, thanks. Yeah, it does sound like he's taking the piss with his vocalisations once or twice.

[jennifer]

Just listened to Jordan Jesse Go, Jesse revealed Morris turned down an interview with The Sound of Young America - shame as Jesse Thorn is always so good at these sorts of things.  Who are Green Cine and what do they have on CM?

[weirdbeard]

Seeing as this seems to be the Morris Four Lions interview thread...

SPOILERS ARE LIKELY.

http://www.ifc.com/news/2010/02/chris-morris.php

Chris Morris and the Roar of "Four Lions"
By Bilge Ebiri on 02/01/2010

Perhaps one of the most unusual sights of the Sundance Film Festival was seeing British comedy legend Chris Morris walking around and doing Q&As after screenings of his "jihadi comedy" "Four Lions." Infamous in Britain for his shows "The Day Today" (which helped launch the career of Steve Coogan) and "Brass Eye," Morris is generally regarded as something of a recluse, and rarely gives interviews.

Not that he's shy. Dear god, no. To say that Morris's work has flirted with controversy is a bit of an understatement: A "Brass Eye" TV special he once did on the pedophilia scare reportedly broke records for complaints it generated. And back in early 2002, he penned, with fellow Brit satirist and "In the Loop" director Armando Iannucci, "Six Months that Changed a Year," an "absolute atrocity special" satirizing the response to 9/11.

Telling the story of a group of hapless terrorists plotting a coordinated suicide bombing, Morris's feature directorial debut "Four Lions" takes his work in a decidedly new direction. The kind of film that can use someone blowing themselves to bits as a punchline for a gag, "Lions'" tone is darkly ironic rather than confrontational. It's also the product of years of scrupulous research, which resulted in a surprising degree of cooperation from the British Muslim community. During his visit to Sundance, I spoke to Morris about bending genres, preferring Howard Stern to Jon Stewart, and the psyche of suicide bombers.

This film is a very strange hybrid -- it's got a lot of broad comedy, but it's also very serious and tragic in some regards.

I think the appropriate word for it is "tragicomedy." If you just made a film that said, "Guys making these kinds of plots are ridiculous," you'd be lying. After the research I did, which included going to court cases and talking to loads of people, I wanted to convey the point that a terrorist could also be a humorously flawed person. But the companion thought to that is, of course, they're also people, which in itself is subversive to the notion of what a terrorist is. A lot of films I like bend genres as well. "Dr. Strangelove" is really a half hour thriller stretched out to give you enough time to include lots of comic routines. If you look at the film, the seriousness of the mechanics of what's going on -- the assault on the airbase, the detail inside the airplane -- that's definitely transgenre. Those could be outtakes from a serious war film. And I think comedy can be left frivolously flapping about on the high tide end if it doesn't dig in somewhere.

In some ways, this is a much darker film than "In the Loop," which, despite being about the run-up to a war, makes it quite easy to sit back and watch and enjoy without feeling at all uncomfortable.

I absolutely adore "In the Loop" -- I laughed from beginning to end -- but it's affirmative, basically. It's a universal rallying cry to say, "Fuck politicians!" and "Aren't they a bunch of conniving gits?" It's never going to rip the carpet off from under your feet. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, 'cause I'm fairly intolerant of stuff that calls itself comedy. How rare is it to laugh at all at a film that calls itself a comedy, let alone to laugh all the way through?

Some would say that satire is a dead art nowadays.

There's satire out there. "South Park" is satirical. "Team America" is pretty satirical of genre. But satire in itself, as a raw element, can be pretty dull. "Dr. Strangelove" could be dull without some sparked up performances and its beautiful tone. I actually do think satire can get formulaic: "It's a satire so I don't really have to have any jokes." There's a certain Route 1 satire shape you can fall into, and I'm really concerned about that, actually. It's a formula that is given too much license.

For example, I prefer Howard Stern to Jon Stewart. There's something innately, intuitively subversive about his take on things. Really, really funny, without rules. You wouldn't call it satire -- I'd say it's better than satire. And I often think of films as comedies when they're not comedies. "Festen (The Celebration)," I thought, was very funny. It had much more value, because it kicked hard. Whereas something that comes along and says, "Hi, I'm a comedy," like "Tropic Thunder," makes me want to rip up the whole cinema -- just a godawful waste of money and time.

Tell me about the "fatwa-proof research" that you did for "Four Lions."

That's an unfortunate non-quote that's being spread around. It's attributed to my producer, but I'm pretty sure it's a journalistic product. I did do a lot of research. I wanted to make sure the scenarios in the film came from a real place. I met lots of Muslims who had nothing to do with anything radical whatsoever, which gave me a fair sense of how the landscape lay in Britain, and all the differences between the different village communities that ended up in different mill towns. That puts into sharp relief what happens in these tiny radical pockets. Making this film [had] nothing to do with attacking the Koran or casting aspersions about the Prophet or anything like that. 99.99% of the people I met shared those precious things but weren't remotely interested in blowing up anyone.

I was impressed that the film also didn't offer up a list of grievances -- some obligatory, politically correct scene where we see all the horrible things that the West has done in Muslim countries, or something like that.

There are works of fiction which seek to explain jihadi terrorists as the militant wing of Amnesty International. I don't buy that. I wanted to avoid it for dramatic reasons as well. I didn't want some scene where Omar was confronted with terrible footage from an Afghani school that had been blown up by a drone or something. In a way, that would be too specific. We know that this sort of thing happens, of course. I thought with all the characters you could basically pick up why each of them would be involved with this and to categorize them. The "Black Widows" [Chechen female suicide bombers in Russia] were very different than some lads in Surrey planning to blow up a nightclub, for example. And it's not fair to pretend they're the same.

A guy who fought with the Mujahideen against the Russians, who's now 40-something, told me that the only way he could understand someone wanting to blow up a busload of civilians in a country where there was no turf war being fought is that they're living a very abstracted form of existence, which is very modern. They can place themselves somewhere thousands of miles away, and then harden themselves as if they're somewhere they aren't. It's the dream of being a soldier. That romantic notion is very important. But this film is not a guidebook to jihadi motivation. It reflects some of the realities one encounters.

I spoke to a guy who fought with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance -- which is an interesting moral quandary, because the Taliban are obviously "bad" -- but he told me, "When you come across a farm that's been massacred by General Dostum's people, the whole family eviscerated and the grandmother left sobbing in a chair, then you know you're on the right side, because you're against the people who did that." It blows your sense of right and wrong. He left that world long ago, but he talked about that band of brothers feeling, almost like a fratboy with a gun in his hand.

Can you discuss the character of Omar's wife? She seems like the scariest character in the film, in a way. In one scene, she's progressive, fun-loving, etc. and then in another, she's totally behind the idea of her husband blowing himself up and killing tons of people.

The non-comic, factual explanation is that I felt there was a myth about terrorist bombers being medieval-minded, "fundamentalist, primitivist" people. There seems to be a lot of evidence to contradict that, especially in Britain. Some of the ideology behind what has become modern jihadism was socially progressive, certainly in Egypt, for example.

When we see Omar's brother, he's the one who insists that women be in separate rooms -- but he's also the one who's not a terrorist. The character of the wife is deliberately given not much space, but I wanted to show that someone like Omar would need support. There was a video recorded by one of the London bombers back when he thought he was going to Afghanistan, where he was certain to wind up dead, and he'd recorded the video with his nine-month-old daughter in his lap, explaining why he'd gone. He thought he was going to fight the good fight, and wanted to make sure she knew that when she was older and could understand. Obviously, I haven't hung out much with a family that's plotting this kind of thing, but that was an imaginative leap where the wife would be included in the discourse.

What was the response of the Muslims you interviewed to the fact that you were making such a film?

Weirdly, the common response was: "Oh great, about time, bring it on." Which I wasn't expecting. I remember when we were making the film, we had to shoot in a halal kebab shop. The owners asked to be there while we were filming, and I told them they could. But we eventually had to remove them from the room, because they were laughing too hard. Muslims in Britain like the idea that a lighter note might be introduced into the discourse. That's not why I made the film, but I was surprised to find that was their general response. Maybe it's cause I was mostly talking to younger people. The older ones might take a more dim view of some of this stuff.

"Four Lions" does not yet have U.S. distribution.

[ColinBradshaw]

Has this one been posted?

Chris Morris and the Roar of "Four Lions"

http://www.ifc.com/news/2010/02/chris-morris.php

"For example, I prefer Howard Stern to Jon Stewart. There's something innately, intuitively subversive about his take on things. Really, really funny, without rules."

:O)

[A.A]

Morris' description of Tropic Thunder is both hilarious and spot-on. Unlike the film...

[weirdbeard]

Another Morris interview, this time for the Daily Telegraph.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatlife/7196487/Chris-Morris-in-the-lions-den.html

Chris Morris in the lion's den
The creator of Brass Eye is back and this time his subject is Islamic fundamentalism. Expect trouble.
By Sebastian Doggart
Published: 9:01AM GMT 10 Feb 2010

The most controversial film of 2010 is almost certain to be Four Lions. This is the first feature film by Chris Morris, who was voted "most hated man in Britain" in 2001 for his Brass Eye TV spoof of the media's obsession with paedophilia. He is also widely hailed as a comic genius and one of Britain's finest satirists.

Four Lions is the fruit of three years' research into Islamic extremism. In a rare interview given at the Sundance festival, where the film was first screened, Morris told me about that research. "I spoke to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims. I wanted to understand the wide context of Muslims in Britain, which is complex and very balkanized. Every place you visit has a different tone, and each Pakistani village has settled in a different town. Within that generally benign setting, you find tiny pockets of fierce radicalism."

Morris was determined to do his homework after a public spat with Martin Amis in 2007 over Amis's attack on Islam: "I lost my temper with the idea of making bold pronouncements on such thin research. It was pretty unbecoming and not very accurate."

Morris's research yielded a massive arsenal of real-life stories. "The unfathomable world of extremism seemed to contain elements of farce. People go to training camps in the wrong clothes, forget how to make bombs, fight with each other and then fight again over who just won the fight. They volunteer for the mujahedeen and get told to go home and 'do the knitting'. They talk about who's cooler – Bin Laden or Johnny Depp.

"Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce. On Millennium Eve, five jihadis planned to ram a US warship. In the dead of night, they dropped their boat into the water. They stacked it with explosives, and it sank. At that point I thought, 'What was the look on their faces?' This was a Keystone Cops moment.

"The more I looked, the more reality played against type. Then the penny dropped. A cell of terrorists is a bunch of blokes. A small group of fired-up lads planning cosmic war from a bedsit – not a bad pressure cooker for jokes."

With his two co-writers, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, whose other credits include Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno, Morris started to explore real-life terrorist interactions. "Small group dynamics have been identified by intelligence agencies as the way to understand how a terrorist cell works. If you look at them from the inside, you find petty behaviour. Terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohamed spends two hours looking for a costume that won't make him look fat on camera. In the Hamburg cell plotting 9/11, members of the cell would tease Mohammed Atta because he was so uptight. They would make fun of him for p---ing too loudly, and Atta would blame it on the 'bloody Jewish doors'. Sometimes reality was almost too ridiculous."

Specific characters emerged from his research: "I met one white guy who used to be in the BNP and went around beating up Pakistani lads. He then decided he was going to get more subtle, and mess with their minds. So he bought a Koran so he could beat them at their own arguments. But he accidentally converted himself, and that guy ended up being a poster boy for a Muslim radical organisation. I came back to Sam and Jesse and said: where can we go with this?"

The result is the character of Barry, played by Nigel Lindsay, who worked on Brass Eye. Barry is one of the "four lions", whom Morris describes as "a bunch of jihadis who set off on an ill-advised course and then watch the wheels come off their wagon, one by one."

Barry competes for leadership of the cell with Omar (Riz Ahmed, star of The Road to Guantanamo), whose disillusionment with the treatment of Muslims by the kafir (unbelievers) has led him to become a soldier of the mujahadin – or, in his own words, "a p**i Rambo." The two lads quarrel like seven year-olds fighting over a Playstation console: when Omar gets to go off to training camp in the desert, Barry tries to stop him by swallowing the key of the car taking them to the airport.

Morris shoots the film like an observational documentary, with two hand-held cameras that make us feel, as in The Office or The Thick of It, that we are watching everyday life, in this case in Tinsley, south Yorkshire.

Morris directs the action confidently, managing complex tonal shifts seamlessly, and eliciting superb performances from all five of the principal actors, Riz Ahmed, Arsher Ali, Nigel Lindsay, Kayvan Novak and Adeel Akhtar. "We'd run long takes," Morris says. "The actors got so tightly wound with the rhythms in their characters, that you could play around with it a lot. I would call action before people were ready, and if something occurred to me whilst something was going on, I would chuck something in – 'Say this', 'Punch him'. Everyone thought I was a royal pain in the arse."

I saw it twice at Sundance, and both times found it laugh-out-loud funny from start to finish. It's the wittiest satire of religious extremism since Life of Brian. It's not a film for everyone, though. There were some baffled American viewers, one of whom inquired what the fertiliser-like biscuit being held up as evidence by an interrogator was (Weetabix). Another asked me what was involved in the jihadi initiation ritual of "wizzing in your own gob". The LA Times critic Kenneth Turan told me, "It'll have to be subtitled, just like they did with Ratcatcher [about striking dustmen in 1970s Glasgow]." I hope Morris has some fun mistranslating it into American.

The people behind the film are convinced there is little risk of the movie provoking anger from extremist Islamist factions. Mark Herbert, the producer, says: "Chris's research has been meticulous." Morris himself points out that the film never mocks Islam. "People would only think that if they haven't seen the film. Terrorism does matter. We're trying to make you laugh – to entertain – to surprise – to move even. You don't have to mock Islamic beliefs to make a joke out of someone who wants to run the world under sharia law but can't apply it in his own home because his wife won't let him."

This is a historic movie: the first feature-length comedy ever to make jihad its main theme. It is a tribute to Morris that he has taken on the hottest potato of our time – and in the process, he has created an important milestone in British cinema.

His next steps? "My plan is to have a lie down and see what bites me on the arse." Let's hope that bite doesn't come from any lunatic lions.

* Sebastian Doggart is a writer and film-maker. His last two films, Courting Condi and American Faust, can be see at www.indiesdirect.com. Four Lions will be released in May.

[kittens]

Festen made me properly cry. SILLY CHRIS ITS NOT A COMEDY