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Morris interview for Eye Weekly

Started by weirdbeard, February 24, 2011, 09:05:19 PM

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weirdbeard

http://www.eyeweekly.com/film/interview/article/111184--chris-morris-suicide-mission

QuoteChris Morris' suicide mission
British master satirist makes his North American debut with Four Lions a comedy about... Muslim terrorists?

BY Philip Brown   February 24, 2011 12:02

For years, Chris Morris has been the mysterious dark lord of British comedy, a man equally revered and reviled. He shot to stardom in the early '90s with the groundbreaking radio-news parody On the Hour and its television spin-off The Day Today, created with Armando Iannucci (In The Loop) and featuring a talented cast led by Steve Coogan. Morris split from the group in 1997 for the solo news satire Brass Eye, which mocked media sensationalism while also causing a great deal of it by duping popular political personalities into backing ridiculous causes (most notably getting an MP to discuss a fictional drug in parliament) and notoriously mining controversial topics like pedophilia for laughs. The show made Morris a UK comedy legend and a tabloid sensation.

Morris slowed his pace in the 2000s, creating the almost indescribable series Jam (imagine sketch comedy written by Todd Solondz and directed by David Lynch and you're almost there) and the hilarious skewering of web culture Nathan Barley. Sadly, his TV work has never officially been released in North America, but he developed a cult audience through bootlegs and imports. This week, Morris makes his official debut across the pond with Four Lions, a film that he wrote and directed about five Muslim suicide bombers. Yes, it's a comedy.

Though a hit at last year's Sundance Film Festival, Four Lions' incendiary subject matter delayed its release and a new distribution company was formed—by the popular Austin, Texas-based art-house cinema chain Alamo Drafthouse—just to get the film on US screens. When it finally received a limited release in the States last fall, there wasn't much controversy because, while the film turned unspeakable tragedy into comedy, there was no gratuitous button-pushing. Instead, Four Lions is possibly the most enlightened movie to made about the subject to date, humanizing its terrorists without condoning their actions or condescending to the audience. Eye Weekly got a chance to speak with Morris about his remarkable directorial debut, his television news satire legacy, and what makes terrorism so damn funny.

Four Lions was inspired by some surprisingly funny stories about terrorism that you discovered through years of research. Could share some of them and discuss how they inspired you?

Yeah, there were some amazing ones. For a start there was quite a big cell who were plotting various nefarious activities, including assassinating the Canadian prime minister, but then forgot who he was and what city he lived in. They also designed a remote-controlled detonator to protect themselves from their own bombs and there was an amazing surveillance recording of the bomb designer pitching it to the rest of the cell. One of the guys asked, "Well what's it's working range?" and he was told, "Well, it's about 10 feet." The same cell took themselves out on a training camp in the woods, but spent the night in a van because they got scared by a mouse. These stories are a kind of low-level guide to not making the grade.

On the other end, you've got people behaving in just basic human ridiculousness. Like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attack, who did a TV interview in which he wasted an hour looking for costumes that didn't make him look fat and, when he finally went on camera, he started spouting Koranic quotes as you're given to do. The journalist was a Muslim and saw very quickly that he was making up half the stuff and wasn't getting his Koranic quotes right and had to call him on it. He said, "Do you want me to put this on camera because that's not in the Koran," and then other guys who were also co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks all started laughing at him. Suddenly, you've got a very different dynamic to the one you imagine when you just think singularly about the man who planned the 9/11 attacks. I mean, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's court depositions for the 9/11 attacks in Guantanamo Bay actually contain jokes. He says that one of his big heroes is George Washington because George Washington would be classified by the Brits as a enemy combatant. That's a joke. It may not make you or me laugh. You may just think, "Yeah, this is not the right place for making jokes," a bit like Milosevic when he was in The Hague. Don't use a court to be self-aggrandizingly humorous mate, you bastard. But on the other hand, he is making a joke. So, surprising as it may seem, the commission of terrorist plots overlaps with the Venn diagram of humour.

Part of what's so impressive about the film is how you were able to make the audience sympathize with these guys rather than simply mocking them. Was that always central to your conception of the movie?

Well, I think you empathize with some of them, those of whom who you see at least trying to make a right decision. You empathize less with those who are all-out wrong. But it's not like you're persuaded by their aims or their ideologies. You just empathize in much the same way I did with people that I've met who have been radical, or maybe I disagreed with, or people who I saw in court. They weren't detestable people and, of course, that gives you an insight. So that's the real-world reason.

But the internal logic reason is that in a film you're bound to be interested in somebody who, just for one moment, looks like they're trying to do the right thing. If you're taking your characters seriously, you cannot paint them in a monochrome way. The characters in my film are probably more sympathetic than maybe all but one or two of the characters in a film like Sweet Smell of Success. Even in that film, which is brutal in many ways, you've got Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster behaving like prime shits, but you've also got other people who are at least trying. So, you only need one redeeming feature and then suddenly you're ahead.

It must have been difficult to finance this movie. What was the quickest anyone turned you down?

You know, straight away. But in a way, the people who turn you down straight away aren't as frustrating as the one company who said, "We love it, we want to give you the half a million pounds to complete your funding, let's meet on Tuesday." Our producer turned up and this company said, "OK, here's a half a million pound cheque, now all you've got to do is change the ending." Those sort of conversations are much more frustrating, where you think you're there and then you're not. 

Were you ever concerned about being monitored for exchanging emails with your co-writers while trying to dream up plausible terrorist plots?

Well, I joke about that and it's a serious joke. I think if us three writers [Morris, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong] had been brown, you probably wouldn't be talking to me now. I mean, there are Pakistani guys doing PhDs on radicalism who suddenly find that their computers are impounded by the police and they have some very awkward questions to answer. Indeed, Riz Ahmed, who plays Omar, felt uncomfortable when I was kitting him up with Jihadi videos, radicalization literature and things that are actually readily available on the internet. Each time I gave him a new delivery, he was saying, "Chris man, are you trying to get me arrested?" It became a joke, but there's a serious undercurrent there. 

This movie is an interesting case because some audiences feel uncomfortable about laughing at the material, but still appreciate the film because of what you have to say. How do you feel about that?

I'm not going to tell people what noises to make with their own mouths and vocal mechanisms. I think here in Britain the most gratifying audiences were a mixture of brown and white, all of whom were laughing vociferously. That obviously makes you feel good, because you've written some jokes. But I quite understand when people don't laugh. It just depends on your disposition. You tend to find in London there's a reserved laughter where people aren't sure whether they should be laughing. They'll be subconsciously checking their neighbors for permission to laugh. Quite often people would say, "I saw it a second time and I really laughed." This is not some cheap trick of suggesting that people should go and see my film twice, but quite often people do feel that way. A terribly, terribly liberal audience will think, "Oh, I'm laughing at some brown people, am I being racist?" or "Should I be laughing as much as I am, oh dear." I say, have a couple of drinks and then go.

Since you set the bar pretty high for television news satire with The Day Today and Brass Eye, I was wondering how you feel about shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, which have become so successful in recent years.

I think sometimes I get asked that [by interviewers] wondering if I feel any sense of propriety over the format and, I mean, no. Come on! The shows that I did are really different than The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. Actually, they're more similar to The Onion News Network. But you know, I love The Onion, it does seem to be quite a long time since we did our version, and even there, there are differences. I think once you're talking about Stewart and Colbert, you're talking about something very different. They're doing topical news comedy and although they have an awareness of the language of news/current-affairs presentations, they aren't taking it on the same way that I did. They are doing a commentary piece. It just depends on the standard of the gags on the day and whether they've got an insight into something and whether the show is mainly filler, paper rattling, and pulling faces. Obviously, on a daily show, it's going to be better some days than others. But I never feel a sense of my toes being trampled on at all. I feel that they are doing something very different. 

Four Lions opens in Toronto on Friday (Feb. 25)

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Thanks! Fantastic!

Still can't get used to him talking so openly these days. It's like a different person altogether.