Possible New Chris Morris Project

[12 Storey Crisis]

Last para

http://www.filmireland.net/2011/02/14/bafta-winner-chris-morris-on-four-lions/

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

Ooh, radio!

[momatt]

That's such an odd way of describing the gestation of ideas, even for Chris Morris!
I hope we get to see/hear the new idea before 2015.

[Ignatius_S]

Nice find!

BAFTA winner Chris Morris on 'Four Lions'

Last night satirist Chris Morris picked up the 'Outstanding Debut by a Writer, Director or Producer' Award at the BAFTA film awards. James Bartlett talks with him about his dark comedy, Four Lions.

Even though movie fans are crying out for something original, it's hard to imagine a tougher challenge than pitching a movie about Muslim suicide bombers – a comedy about Muslim suicide bombers – but British satirist Chris Morris has pulled it off in his directorial feature debut Four Lions:

'It makes me sound like a fool when I say I had no hesitations, but after getting into the research I knew enough to feel that making this film was not taking a copy of the Koran and chucking it into a sewer. Most Muslims stare at these people (suicide bombers) in shock and dismay as much as anyone else, and the most common response I got from British Muslims when I said: 'By the way, this will be a comedy about jihadis' was that they said 'bring it on' CM:. That was what emboldened me and ushered me forward.'

Set in an unspecified town in the Northern part of England, <em>Four Lions</em> is the story of four Muslims – Omar (Riz Ahmed), Hassan (Arsher Ali), Waj (Kayvan Novak) and British convert Barry (Nigel Lindsay) – who decide that the time has come to put their plan into action; they'll attack the London marathon. Unfortunately, Omar is the only one with any real brains, and the cell quickly starts to unravel – cue the exploding crows, the bickering and the bizarre party costumes.

With the continual round of screenings and interviews, Morris admitted that he's 'sort of brainwashed himself' into a place where he can only talk about Four Lions (though 'I could be talking about giant squid in the next sentence and I wouldn't know it') and this dynamic also came into play during shooting:

'The actors and us all lived in the same hotel, and we sort of realized that we were forming a parallel cell in real life, which had morphed out of the group dynamics you see on screen. Literally, it would have been possible to convince them to do anything by the end.'

Morris was initially inspired by a story he read about a plan to ram a US warship with a boat filled with explosives. The cell loaded up the boat, launched it into the water and then watched it sink:

'And I read about a guy last week trying to deliver bombs in Indonesia. He was cycling to his target and he swerved to avoid a hole in the road, hit a lamppost and exploded. To see such frailties means that they're not hard-wired, alien, not 100% of the mineral evil – it's more complicated than that. Laughing doesn't make the situation change, but it helps to see that this stuff is often a lot more ridiculous than you think, and that these people are as capable of making the same stupid mistakes as you or I.'

Four Lions had been well–received in the UK, but coming to the US – and especially the first screening in New York – was more nerve-racking:

'They of all people have a right to respond to this in a sensitive way, but not at all. 'Yeah come on, we've got over this. This actually happened to us years ago, so we're the last people on earth to still be mithering about it – we're cool with this, it's everyone else who needs to catch up.' In screenings in Britain we had people in the army, who had lost friends in Afghanistan and Iran to suicide bombers, who laughed all the way through the film. Basically, people laugh, people get the jokes. Maybe we hoovered up the few thousands that lack that sensitivity and all the others will run screaming from the room!'

Famous and infamous in his native Britain as a comedian and broadcaster who regularly courted controversy, Morris seemed pleased not to be in that place with Four Lions:

'Pissing people off is incredibly boring, because it's just a binary switch. It's fine the first time you do it, then it becomes really dull and there's no gray area. I've just been pleased not to have to deal with idiots deliberately misunderstanding what the film's about.'

There is however the moment in Four Lions when things start to take a more serious turn, and Morris wondered if there's a scale regarding how much laughter is allowed when characters die:


'People blow themselves up, people die, how far do you go? But the explosions – we've seen them before in films. I mean really, how many of those have you seen in your lifetime? Eight million? I was obsessed with the accuracy of the explosions, and that came from a lot of clips on YouTube featuring, I have to say, mainly American kids, manufacturing TATP and blowing up microwaves in fields and laughing hysterically.'

As for the tricky question of getting funding and distribution, Morris did get asked one question several times:

'Could it be about people who are sort of like Muslims, but could you make up a religion?' But then you're doing 'Battlestar Galactica' or Dune. The most absurd thing was having a conversation with a man, on the phone, who was hiding in a stationery cupboard. He was talking in a weird, muffled, boxy voice and called from there because his board was split, and he didn't want the others to hear that they could make this happen. That was the maddest it got really – and he accepted it.'

As for Morris, he's carefully tending his next ideas to see which one is going to make it out alive:

'You get the small pets and lock them in a hot box, then see which one survives. At the moment they're rattling around and shrieking quite a lot. In a month's time or so I'll kind of know which one I'm doing. One of the pets is a little, invisible shriek radio pet. If I open the box and the others are dead, I'll know it's a radio idea I have to do.'

[Neil]

Is it actually a recent interview?  There's no mention of the Baftas, and the 'bike swerving into a lamp post' story happened before Xmas.  I guess a lot of those stories are told as having just happened, and I certainly remember him embellishing the details of the 'rocket in a tent' one as he went along, in order to give it more oomph.  Just intrigued, as I know other places have started to reprint old interviews in the wake of the Baftas.  Boycey pointed me to this one:

[noae]

Monday, 14 February 2011Interview with Chris Morris, director of Four Lions

The occasion of Chris Morris winning the Outstanding Debut award at the BAFTAs last night (13 February 2011) prompted me to revisit this interview with him, which I did on March 24 of last year, in the boardroom of Optimum Releasing's London office. There had been a slight period of Morris stalking; first I saw a private screening of his BAFTA-winning film Four Lions in January, and from there I pursued Morris to the Sundance Film Festival, where I witnessed the film's not-at-all incendiary world premiere at the Egyptian cinema. In retrospect, I was perhaps trying to persuade Morris that I was a) not a berserk fan of his iconoclastic comedy while at the same time b) not a hack reporter waiting to file a "Secret World Of TV's Mystery Man Of Macabre Mirth"-stye exposé.

The softly-softly approach paid off, and for the first six months of 2010 I actually ran into him quite a lot. The "real" Chris Morris surprised me; like many people in the public eye, Morris uses his "celebrity image" as a smokescreen. Far from being "mysterious" and "attention-shy" (the mot juste is simply "private"), he rocked up to the interview on his pushbike, wearing a ten-year-old, paint-spattered Channel 4 T-shirt, which he noted was "definitely for cycling and decorating only". The conversation was then delayed for a few minutes while he popped next door to the Costa-Starbucks to get himself a coffee; the PR and I politely declined down his kind offer of a smoothie.

If you don't already know, Four Lions is a jet-black comedy about a terror cell in the north of England. Led by Omar (Riz Ahmed), a middle-class security guard who lives with his wife and kid, the group includes the mouthy white radical Barry (Nigel Lindsay), the idiot Waj (Kayvan Novak) and the borderline vegetable Fessel (Adeel Akhtar). Recruited by Barry while Omar and Waj are away on an abortive trip to a Pakistan training camp, Hassan (Arsher Ali) rounds out this bickering yet strangely loyal quintet, and together they hatch a plan to bomb the London Marathon.

It doesn't seem like the stuff of comedy, but, like much of Morris's work on such TV shows as Brass Eye, Jam and The Day Today, Four Lions – co-scripted by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong – is about much more than surface. This interview may give you an insight into his process...

We met in Sundance. That was your first time out with Four Lions in public, wasn't it?
The first proper public screening, yes. The second one we've just done, also, in the States, at SXSW. And they did feel different. And I'm sure he Bradford one will feel different again. It's weird to do your first two public screenings in the States. But not bad at all.

It must have been quite refreshing, because all the reviews from the US are quite innocuous – there's no agenda there. Over here, there's definitely a media agenda with you.
Generally, I was very pleasantly surprised to find that they got it [in the States], in a very clear-minded way. At SXSW, the only thing in the whole film that caused a gap in an otherwise gratifyingly noisy screening, was a reference to Boots. Everything else, they got. I was staggered, actually. And I don't know why it is. I wouldn't do an amateur sociological lunge to try and assess why that is, and they do get it in a very clear-minded way. It's not that they're not getting it – their response suggests they're aware of the complexities, and you can tell that from the Q&A afterwards, or the way some people have written it up. So we've got a lot to match up to!

I was at that first Sundance screening, and I was quite astonished that there was no big reaction, nobody saying, "How can you make fun of this? With 9/11, we suffered from this!"
Maybe that's our problem. Maybe we think they would think that. But we're making a gross assumption there, because I've yet to find that. We played in Texas, but it was Austin, not redneck territory. Who knows? Although there was a screening in New York, but that was a very small-scale industry screening, not the same thing. I don't know! I think... I think this... I think it's... I think... (Pause) Before you've seen the film, it's easier to make that prediction, that erroneous prediction, than afterwards, maybe. I think people seeing the film don't find the footholds towards that kind of reaction very easy.

I think most people are surprised that there's a story, that the terrorism is kind of a subplot to a human drama about somebody trying to find some worth in themselves. I wonder if that's how you saw it. The second time I saw it, I switched off from the "controversial" element and just enjoyed the personal journey, so to speak.
Well, you don't set off to make a film without knowing that it's going to be a story. You spend years with people saying, "When are you gong to make a film?" and you say, "When there's a film to be made." Y'know. I knew with this that it had to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It always did. It was always going to be a roughly three-act structure. I wanted it to be 87 minutes. (Laughs) I failed. It's 94. Unless you watch it at 25 frames per second, in which case it's... 90, I think. But it has to have that. You have to be interested in the people. But, also, that's not a mechanistic thing, that is – I felt – the best way to tackle the subject. Because that's one of the many aspects that's missing from the general perception of the way this whole subject operates. The level of ignorance is extraordinary. So, in a way, if you drive a beginning, a middle and an end through it – if that's how you're going to approach it – you will accrue various elements of what's going on, sort of subconsciously, as you're going along. (Coughs) Excuse me! But you see what I mean?

When you made your short film, My Wrongs, you talked to The Guardian and they said, "Would you make fun of terrorism?" And at that time you said you weren't sure, it would have to be the right thing. So when did you decide that there was enough material for a movie?
That was 2002, and clearly, back then, there was a lot of fun to be made of the way the story was told in the media. And I had a go at that. But I felt that that was a layer, and it wasn't the the same as getting to grips with the issue. I suppose I was just reading, generally, about the subject, because I was interested. And really amazed at the feeling you got of the dominance of the kind of terrorism stories: this very, very brightly coloured surface covering a vacuum. And it seemed to be enough that if the discourse was dramatic enough, you could obliterate thought completely by just activating fear or similar responses. And that's enough. The whole canvas is just coloured: scary! But you knew, really, that there was something beyond that. And you also knew that nobody knew anything about it. Or very few people. So it becomes interesting because there's so much to find out.

So how did you start?
Well, I was surprised by what I discovered, because I was reading some pretty serious and informative books. Jason Burke's book Al Qaeda, which was a very good primer, and also a book by a psychologist called Marc Sageman, called Understanding Terror Networks. Oh, and Masterminds Of Terror by Nick Fielding and Yosri Fouda, and Perfect Soldiers, by Terry McDermott, about the Hamburg cell... You keep finding things that are silly in that context. And what a silly thing does, what a silly moment does is... I'll give you an example: there were some guys who wanted to blow up an American warship. The plan was to ram it with a launch full of explosives. So they took it down to the quayside at 3am, the boat was moored offshore, they put their launch in the water, filled it up with the explosives... and it sank. That gives you five guys standing around a sunken boat, and you think, Right, that's a comedy scene. Somebody's got to say something. What are they going to say, and who are they going to say it to? There were lots of little examples like that. And what they do is give you an entry into a completely different way of seeing it. It doesn't say that an explosion doesn't happen some way down the line – the explosion may or may not happen. But what's the process? And what are all the belief systems that feed into that process? And you find that nothing is as you thought it would be. And then it gets really interesting.

Were you inspired simply by reading that anecdote?
I had a building sense of "How do you get to grips with this?" I had a strong sense not to do to something about this. But, really, what else was there to do something about? Of course there are other things, but... but.. but... everything else really seemed trivial.

Did it become a challenge in the same way Everest is, because it's there?
Because it was massive and no one knew anything about it. There are other massive things, like the banking crisis and so on, but this was turning the whole wheel, and in such a mindblowing way, because it was such a powerful thing that was happening and so little was understood about it. All sorts of our comfortable ideological positions started capsizing, or bending, or splitting, and it did seem that to do anything else, at all, would be trivial. But how to do it was not an easy one to crack. So the question was born a long time ago, and you can't spend every minute of every day pursuing that question, but it had a constant gravitational force. You knew you were going to fly into its orbit at some point. So the anecdotes were the spark. I'd already gone there in a way – I was already reading about it. But they were a clue: 'Ah, OK, there is a way of getting at this.' It was something that needed proving, and it only became really clear when I went from reading about it to meeting people, and meeting a great deal of people just for context, just to understand what is meant by erroneous terms like 'The Muslim Community', which, of course, is not a single community at all but a very complicated and highly differentiated one – anywhere – but particularly in this country, with all the geographical influences that there are. Then there was the Crevice trial, which was a very long trial – conveniently long, at least eight months. There was tons of MI5 surveillance evidence of these guys who were borderline – they were right on the borderline of being berks and being dangerous. Six out of seven went down. They knew the Leeds bombers, two of them. So there was a sense that you weren't dealing with people who were just idiots. And what the surveillance gave you was just endless insight into how they talked, how they thought, how their lives worked, what the things were that concerned them. When you get an absolutely undifferentiated mash-up between the highly trivial – someone complaining about their socks, or the washing machine waking them up at night, or saying, "Who's not done the washing up?", "What does this dream mean?", "Have you fed your rabbits on the balcony?", and calling each other "Hairy Hobbits" – and it's all caught up. Then you get a rounded moment of wrestling, or praying, and then someone says, "Wouldn't it be great if we pulled a plane out of the sky?" And then it goes back into, "Look at my video camera", "Did you see Richard Littlejohn on the television? He's a berk, but I like Jeremy Clarkson..." You can really build a very different picture. And one that tells you a lot more.

Do you feel burdened by being 'a satirist'? Going into the movie, that was my preconception, that it would satirise the subject. But I don't think it's a satire. In The Loop is a satire, but Four Lions is a comedy about human failings, so to speak.
I'm always burdened by satire. I'm always burdened by comedy. I hate comedy, I hate satire. I've never liked COMEDY in capital letters – I've always liked things that are funny. Those two don't match for me. 'Satire' sounds boring. But... a comedy which says something doesn't. So maybe I've got an erroneous categorisation system. Or maybe... Satire feels to me to be pre-programmed, polemical and utterly predictable. Preaching to the converted.

What does the word "comedy" say to you?
"Comedy" says... People gurning, trying to make me laugh, all of that kind of dreadful, secondhand... "Oh, we're recapitulating the current dealt hand of comedy mannerisms that denote 'funny' to make you laugh"... Things that have no true life. It's always the exceptions that are funny, it's never the rules. I guess it's the rule that I'm getting at. In The Loop was brilliant. But you could have sold it to me very badly by saying, "Come and see this great satire about politics." I would have thought, Oh God, here we go... So it's not that you can't find funny things within those categories, but they're always the exceptions. Maybe I just travel in too much hope and then get disappointed. I think it depends what you want to do.

"Satire", to a lot of people, is a bit of a 60s, black-and-white David Frost thing...
I think, with notable exceptions, that something which is a 90-minute strip of satire will miss a great deal of what's interesting about a subject. Now, you could make exceptions, and so could I, and we'd agree on what they were. But I think to get at something in a particular way... For example, take the subject of jihadi terrorism, or radical jihadi action. The easiest thing in the world is to say, "That's bad for this reason." To put them at certain safe distance and parade a conveyor belt of jihadi activities past the viewer, for 90 minutes, and point at each action, saying what's ridiculous about it. But what the heck would that tell you? Since everyone's predisposed to find anything wrong with all of these people and all of these actions all the time – how revealing is that? You got to go against the flow, otherwise you might as well just stop and shut up.

You were blessed with a great cast on this film. Did you have to look far and wide?
Lots of different directions they came from, and a great deal of time it took. (Laughs) I'm sounding like Yoda now! But they came from all sorts of different directions. Riz Ahmed I'd just seen around and about; I knew of him and I thought he was brilliant. In fact, I met him during the research and he put me in touch with one of the guys who became one of the associate producers. Riz is a man about town – you bump into Riz. Nigel Lindsay I'd worked with a long time ago. I first saw him in Dealer's Choice, in the workshop version, yonks ago – 94? Something like that – in which he was brilliant. I mean, I remember the first time I saw Mark Heap. These actors just sort of lodge in your head, and at some point, way down the line, you go, "That's the guy." So he came from that direction. Other people came from casting. I knew Kayvan Novak a little but but he came in for a casting on a friend's recommendation. Arsher came out of the casting process – Des Hamilton found Arsher Ali. Adeel Akhtar... By degrees. Obviously, I knew Julia Davis and Kevin Eldon, those kinds of people, but. really, they came from all over. And you want to see a lot of people, because you know what you've got to get, and you know you've got to get it right. Almost as soon as an audition's started, you think, OK, we're here now.

And did they audition using the finished script?
We sort of had a a run-up period, so, in a way, the audition would be a little bit like rehearsal. We had two or three scenes. And some scenes were written early on – I wrote the "punch yourself in the face scene" as a sort of demonstration scene as to how Barry's character might work. So that was available for auditions. So it kind of meant that when people came in – because there was a delay in the funding, people had come in some time before we started our rehearsals in earnest, which meant they could sort of be cooking away. You could have meetings and say, "What about this?" and "What about that?" in downtime. Then we'd have intensive rehearsals.

Was there any improvisation?
As for improvisation... I'm really suspicious of things here people say, "Yeah, it's great, it's so loose, it's all improvised," because that normally means it's just shit and nobody's thought it through. There are so many ways in which the looseness of something hides the incredible amount of care and precision behind it – Curb Your Enthusiasm being one example. So it was a schizoid approach, really. I'm very specific with scripts. I get very specific about rhythms and certain things that I know will feel funny if they're... I don't know what it is, I just feel it, it's rhythmic. And then the entire opposite. So there are bits where you'll just say, "Say this now..." You've got your safety version, and because the actors are so good, you know you can play around with it. So there's two versions. I think we'll be putting out an unused version of the scene where they're recording their jihadi videos at the start, because we'd visited so many funny points in that, and in the end you just have to pare it down brutally to what you need. But there's all sorts of things that were just put in. There's a bit where Barry's telling Waj to sit properly, and he says, "Come and have a look." So Waj gets up and tries to look at himself! I just thought that would be funny. Then Kevin chucks in, "Aw, you've knocked over the camera." There's such an intelligence among them that you can start feeding extra things in. That's when you know you're really cooking.

Talking about the funding process, did you ever find that people were taking meetings with you just to meet you?
Didn't occur to me.

You've said that a lot of people danced around the script and then said no.
That's a BAD idea that you've put into my head!!! It hadn't occurred to me that way! But I felt it was more like people knew, at some level, that this would be a good thing to do. And then, out of ignorance, they then failed to see the way forward from there. I like to think it was...

The material?
Exactly. Or the lure of the idea.

You do come with a lot of baggage. I wondered whether people were thinking, "It's bound to be trouble"...
That may have been what bounced them off. I don't know, I really don't know. How do you know? Sometimes there's just sort of an awkward silence, or a funny look in someone's eye.

I suppose that sometimes the thing that gets you through the door is the same thing that doesn't get you the funding. There's a paradox there...
Definitely. You could caricature my career as just donning an increasing number of very loud fluorescent jackets, when my whole job is to be covert and creeping in unnoticed. And, of course, that's how it started. Y'know, inside the vast BBC, if you were in radio, one, you were invisible anyway and, two, nobody knew who you were and you could just creep through the gaps in the matrix and then you'd have done something before anyone knew it. But... Maybe. I don't know. You just have to keep going. You know you're gonna get there, you just have to keep going until you do.

There's a book coming out about you, and it's interesting, all the phrases that are used to describe you. You're "media-shy" and you "shun" celebrity events – you don't just not go to them!
(Laughs) Yes, I shun them! I shun them! That's good! We don't use that word enough in conversation, do we? We only see it written down. That's a peculiar thing with the media. You can tell someone in an interview that you don't do interviews and they'll write it down and so will everyone else. That's how that impression was caused. (Laughs) I hate hanging around with 'people'; it just absolutely depresses me. I like hanging around with friends. There may be an intersection between those groups, but I think the process, the funfair, has never appealed. It's never appealed. It's not that you don't know how to have fun, you have your own kind of fun. Why the fuck let that bunch of clowns determine your agenda, or what you're gonna do? So I don't.

Another word is "enigmatic". I've met you a couple of time and you're one of the least enigmatic people I've ever encountered!
I'm very transparent! I know! Maybe it's useful for me to be thought of as enigmatic, because I'm so appallingly transparent that we'd be done in seven minutes.

Did any of that baggage get in the way when you were making Four Lions?
Which baggage?

You reputation, as this kind of shady provocateur...
Those terms, words like "shun", come in unbidden. The fact is, we always used to laugh about this, and then we got bored even thinking about it. I remember having discussions with Peter Baynham and Armando Iannucci and those kinds of people – you can do something that is 99.7 per cent purely silly, but if the last 0.3 has some kind of flint in it, suddenly the whole thing is controversial. Now, you may feel that's disingenuous in light of having done a programme about paedophilia, but actually it feels like that. You do things because they're funny, and if you see something that everybody else tells you is a stop sign, but you don't see it as a stop sign, you carry on driving. It's as simple as that. If you set out to be provocative you'll end up being a crashing bore almost as soon as you start. You have to be interested, and you have to think something is funny. And I don't think that involves having a sick sense of humour. So I sort of feel a complete continuum. I don't feel the controversial thing at all. I really don't. That just looks like somebody outside, pointing through the window, being a bit silly.

It's interesting that the most disturbing thing for everybody who's seen the film is the family scene, an otherwise quite jolly scene except for that fact that the family is united behind Omar's jihadi mission. Is that the nub of the movie, to say that terrorists are people too, to paraphrase Sting?
(Laughs) That was Russians, wasn't it? I hope the terrorists love their children too! I think the nub will be discernible about a year after the film comes out, because it's hard to define what something's about from within it. Basically you're in a travelling storm, so you don't have a perspective on yourself. I'd be foolish to try to direct thoughts in that way, not least because thoughts are so heated and confused when they're expressed verbally on this subject that, having made a film that works on a totally different level – it's not a polemic, its an experience – it could be perverse to try to define it as a series of soundbites. But also, I just think it's part of the spectrum of the film. In a way, I don't see it as any more or less important than any other scene. It's part of the balance. (Pause) Maybe people talk about that because it contains a challenge. Here's a challenge: what do you find easier to understand? This is in relation to the film Precious. Somebody who rapes a child of a couple of months – or a suicide bomber? What would you find easier to understand?

(Laughs nervously) Er... The suicide bomber?
You see what I mean? Because of the political loading, the answer to that question feels like a paradox. But it shouldn't do. So I think that's part of why that scene, possibly, resonates.

Thinking about your reference to being in the eye of the storm, would you agree that, in way, the storm about the paedophilia show hasn't really gone away? It's still quite fresh, and the things you were getting at are still around – that hysteria still exists.
Well, hysteria will always exist, won't it? These things, you approach them... With something like Brass Eye, you sort of think you're up against anomalies, and you push them to the point where you think, This has got to capsize, and if it doesn't capsize, it will be hilarious. But you think that's because you're dealing with an anomaly. But then you realise, horribly, you're actually dealing with an endemic phenomenon. The hysteria will switch, maybe it'll change its colours, but it'll always be there, there will always be that component in a society. It's just that you've blown the whistle and pointed at the thing that everybody's worried about at that point. But it'll change.

Did you literally get called "Britain's Most Hated Man" by the Daily Mail?
I can't even remember what, because I was actually on holiday. They'd delayed transmission, so it coincided with an absence. Which was probably quite convenient. (Pauses, sighs) Chances are, yes. I can't remember. Once I'd seen that it was the front page story on the Daily Mail, I just thought, This is so silly... The thing that I remember most is that the Daily Mail had taken the trouble to print almost a complete transcript of the programme. So I read it, and in the nonsensical storm that there was around the programme, I thought, Oh yeah, that's good... That's funny, that's funny, that's funny... It was kind of like a relief. I wasn't expecting to be presented with it, so it was like an unbidden script-editing session. And I thought, Oh good – we'd actually made a good programme, regardless of what the Mail was saying! So that was the thing I remember, which may have made me incredibly smug. But I can't remember what they said. I think it was "The Sickest TV Show Ever", but whether I was hated, I don't know. These words, they're part of a game, are they?

It also seems to be the case that the media has become self-aware – everything you were doing with Brass Eye and The Day Today has kind of been embraced by it...
Yeah. It was happening even then. You started to realise that no one could exist in the job that they were doing without letting you know that they knew it was silly. So you then get a sort of hybrid form of presentation which has to self-ironise the whole time. And that reaches a kind of bizarre and mind-splitting state in someone like Glenn Beck on Fox News, who is literally like a sort of quantum entity – he occupies two totally different spaces at the same time. And he'll be saying, "What do I know? I'm just a normal guy. BUT I'M SERIOUS ABOUT THIS, WE ARE GOING TO THE WALL. THIS WHOLE COUNTRY IS COLLAPSING. BELIEVE ME, WE'RE GOING TO BE EATING DUST, AND WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO EAT DUST JUST LIKE OR GRANDPARENTS DID. But what do I know? I don't know anything! I'm just a guy, just a normal guy, I'm just a talk-show host. LISTEN TO ME!!!" And you just think... (His jaw drops). You wonder, or you fear, that people are reading it without splitting it, left and right. Without unpeeling it. Maybe they are, or maybe I've just got an old brain that can't handle that kind of schism.

Has it made your job harder? Four Lions is very in tone different from your TV work – is that significant?
There are so many things involved in that. I mean, you'd be foolish, if you wanted to tell an involving and funny story, if you made the surface of it repellent in any way. If you're doing a TV programme which parodies a form, and a form you're being critical of, one of the great, inspiring, fun elements is that feeling of having hijacked what's pouring into someone's sitting room and turning what's just a bit of background into a rollercoaster ride. So it's very different. I think in terms of making my job harder... Well, you'd have to be mentally ill not to get bored of repeatedly saying, "Certain aspects of media representation are ridiculous." You can feel it. It's very subjective, rather than a kind of, "Oh, I say, making this single point that I find endlessly fascinating again and again and again has suddenly become difficult because the world has shifted..." Well, if you reach the point where the world shifts before you notice it, then you're in the wrong job anyway.

In that sense Four Lions is not an ironic movie...
I hate those! I mean, God almighty, how dull is it? What that does is, it just puts a ceiling on what your film can say. If the whole thing is in inverted commas, what is the point? You are literally opting out of being able to say anything. Now, I'm sure we can find exceptions, again, but if you're looking for something real, you really don't want to enshrine it merely in references to other aspects of the form. An act of madness! And also you become... You recognise a phase in your life when you were fascinated by form. I wouldn't want to criticise someone who's still in that phase, but if you're not in that phase, you won't be able to do it. So it's a number of things. It's whether it's appropriate, whether it's interesting, whether it's going to produce good work. I mean, Pulp Fiction was brilliant, messing with form. But perhaps you feel that Quentin Tarantino is entirely trapped in that mindset, and is trying to break out of it, but, really, that's what he's actually good at.

So are you smitten with film? Will you do another one?
I might do. But I feel in the same position I was before this – yes, if something feels like it should be a film. It's a great process, and I'd like to be able to dial up the experience again, but you realise that's ridiculous. I think things just dictate what they are, rather than me saying, "Right, now I'm making a film and that's it." It could be that one podcast that takes seven years to make and lasts for 12 minutes might be the next thing I do.

Do you have any plans?
Lots of plans. I'm still in a box [with this film]. Sometimes I think it's a bucket with sides that are so high that, regardless of the mechanistic finishing of the film process, mentally, I need a jet pack to jump out of it. But, yeah, there are lots of other plans. I'm not sure which one will go live. I wish, in a way, that I did. But I'm not made like that.

Have you ever thought of doing anything not in the bounds of comedy, or relatively serious, like a documentary?I suppose you have to consider that, at some level, what you're doing is serious, even if its presentation isn't serious. Yeah. Something, what, really dour! An epidural procedural! (Laughs) I'm not considering it right now, but who knows?

One of my pet hates is interviewing comedians, so I clearly don't consider you to be a "comedian"...
Thank God for that! It works both ways!

But it makes the interviewer's job really difficult: am I the straight man? Will they tell me the truth, will it be interesting or just a stream of gags?
Well, it could be brilliant! You could interview someone who's just hilarious and think, God I just got a free show! But, I mean, normally, you're more likely to get a confused, rather horribly composed cocktail of soul-searching, jokes, slagging somebody off... That's what you're more likely to get with a comedian, isn't it?

Yes! I always find them to be quite dark...
Well, it depends, really. It really does. I don't think you can generalise at all. You can find anybody who's dark. You can find a newsagent who's dark. Some people are great company and some people aren't. (Pause, laughter) That's like "War is stupid", isn't it?' I've reached a Boy George moment now!

One last question about Four Lions. I was very impressed that every bomb goes off: if there is a bomb introduced, it will explode.
Yes! This a spoilery question, and one which I haven't really dealt with before. (Pause) What's the general version of that question? The general version of that question is, presumably, about confronting the reality of the subject. So, being entirely coy, hoping you'll excise the spoiler thing... There are bombs, and what are you gonna do with bombs? You have two options: you go towards them, or you go away from them. What are you gonna get more out of? What's going to tell you more? I feel that to contrive a narrative that takes you right up to it and pulls you away is like going on a expedition to jump down a waterfall, going up to the waterfall, looking at it, and then going back home. The next day, someone says, "What did you do?" "I went to see the waterfall." "Did you jump down it?" "No. But I saw it. I was really changed by the journey!" "Has it changed you as much as if you had jumped down the waterfall?" "Yeeahhhh...." (Laughs) No, it hasn't!!! So I kind of think there's a let-off in all sorts of films. however, um.... I'm talking about this in a guarded and faltering way. I don't know. What do you think about spoilers? It's a many-headed monster. Basically, there's no point in making a film about bombers if you're not dealing with bombs. The easiest film to make is the one where these guys say they're jihadis – perhaps a little bit like these people who've just gone down, who called themselves The Blackburn Resistance and filmed themselves crawling through in the woods. The easiest thing to do is to make a film or a comedy sketch about those people, because what they are is a friendly, easy-to-deal with version, because they pretend that they are these things, but they're not, and they could never get round to it. But... Why bother? You'd run out of gas. I'd run out of gas. I wouldn't even start that. So you have to keep the strong elements with you, because they force the jokes to be good. They force the story to be the only one you could tell.

[/noae]

Must finish reading that now.

Anyway, very exciting news.  Hilarious timing, as my latest update says I was going to stop whining about 'when's he goooing back to the raaaadio?'  I'm very interested in whatever he does next, regardless of medium, but...we'll see.  I did kind of sense someone who was really getting into performing again, so that's intriguing too.

[Ambient Sheep]

What a terrific interview that Damon Wise one is!  I've rarely if ever seen him so relaxed and chatty.  Great stuff.