As he old adage goes: You can’t exhume Ealing comedy without burying a few pensioners. Or so Alan Butterworth, Tobias Tobbell, and Sam Forster would have you believe. The trio are the creators of the dark comedy, THE DRUMMOND WILL, a first time feature that has turned heads at festival screenings across the USA.
The film’s story tackles a familiar ground, but as it opens by a graveside with the priest quoting a little known comedic passage from the bible, we see that the director holds his tongue firmly in cheek. The key double act, Danny and Mark, have returned as prodigal sons to a tiny village for their father’s funeral. The brothers are poised for an immediate Withnail escape, but when an inexplicable bundle of money appears, the greedy hands of the locals send the characters on an accidental killing spree.
Eschewing the usual format of graduate-shortfilm-moreshortfilms-failedgrantapplications-poverty, THE DRUMMOND WILL boys bundled together their resources to make a funny, ambitious feature film. And if the slew of festival credits are anything to go by, it seems to have paid off. During a very confusing conference call, THN with caught up with Alan, Sam and Tobias about the story behind their feature, and found out just why philosophy students should collect successful friends:
THN: So The Drummond Will is due for DVD release on the 8th of August, how was it received during theatre screenings?
Alan: Yeah we’ve been playing festivals mainly in the US, for pretty much a year, I think in total we’ve played about 30 festivals, nearly all have been in the US aside from a couple of European ones. A few little UK ones, we also had an opening weekend in America, so that has been going quite well as well. We’ve had a really nice reaction, especially from America, and it’s been going down really well thankfully.
Sam: Americans seem to really love the Ealing comedy nature of the film, and all of our audiences, I’d say the average age of people that enjoy it the most are people about the age of 60. They all absolutely love it, well everyone that’s seen it anyway.
THN: Ealing comedy seems to be having a bit of a revival at the moment, WHISKY GALORE is being released again, for example, was this just good timing?
Alan: Well, when we were shooting, they announced BURKE AND HARE, at the time we were shooting, so we thought that was going to be a bit of a problem but I don’t think, in the end we ended up being very similar to that film. There were lots of rumours circulating of all sorts of Ealing projects being looked at by all sorts of people but when we came up with the concept, we hadn’t heard of any of these, to it was sort like, oh right, no one makes one for 30 years and then they are everywhere! Luckily nobody has really beaten us to the punch, but it’s at the back of our minds, certainly.
THN: Are you all big fans of Ealing Comedies then?
Sam: I wouldn’t say I am to be honest, I’m not a great fan of the genre there’s a core sort of 5 or 6 films, like WHISKY GALORE and THE LADYKILLERS, there’s something at the heart of it that I think is terrific, we are poking fun at it, affectionately but for good reason. We doing think it’s the archetype of great cinema by any means, but there’s a lot of fun stuff there to work with.
THN: So Alan, yourself and Sam wrote it together, what was that writing process like between the two of you?
Alan: Surprisingly fine, we’re all friends, but this is the first time we have written together and you never know how these things are going to work . Em, it just actually gelled really well we just found a project we can both get behind, we had a different way of coming at it, Sam writes a lot of narrative ficition and can be quite verbose, so it was quite a nice counterbalance. My background is short films so I like things to be snappy and I like more modern filmmaking so it just seemed to gel really well which was an amazing piece of fortune. Sam is now going to say it was a disaster.
THN: What pushed you to move away from doing shorts and take on a feature film like this?
Alan: I’ve made a lot of shorts and I just got bored of them. I have never made shorts for a lot of money, it seems a disincentive to get investors to put money up to make a short film. You’re never going to get it back, so you’re just basically getting other people to pay for your work experience. Which is I think is, not so fair. A feature is a lot more work but there is a much bigger chance of investors actually getting money back. I was learning as I went quite a bit, but to me it’s more constructive than a series of short films.
Sam: I mean he had done it, I mean Alan and Toby won an award for a short film before we started working on this, but there comes a point where you just have to bite the bullet and make something that’s exciting.
THN: What were the high points of THE DRUMMOND WILL?
Alan: Hmm, I couldn’t name you a high point in the process of making it, writing, and filming and editing I find incredibly painful process. But actually, the high points were probably the special effects, I enjoyed blowing things up. That was a real treat we had towards the end of the shoot. There was a great deal of faction, but I can’t say that any of them were my favourite days. The high points have been showing it to audiences.
THN: This is probably more of a question for Tobias, how did you manage to generate funding for a feature film like this?
Tobias: Funnily enough I didn’t come on board until the script was written and the funding was already in place, so that’s probably more of a question for Alan. The people who put the money up were actually old school friends who have had very successful careers and put the money up.
Alan: Well actually, I can give that as advice for Philosophy graduates: choose your friends wisely. Yeah, at least have a couple of friends with real jobs, in case it all goes wrong. So we raised the money by having very modest expectations of the amount of money we needed to do it, by doing it for not much money at all, we just tried to write something we could do for not very much at all, and then we could raise the money. I had the confidence that people would see it back, so I didn’t feel too bad about asking people for money.
And have they all seen it , how did they feel about the investment?
[at this point an automated voice chimes in, ‘the caller, Alan, has gone’]
THN: I guess he didn’t like that question….
Sam: Yep, you’ve offended him, that’s it.
[Alan pings back in] Sorry!
THN: Moving on now we’re all back together, tell me a little bit about why you decided to shoot in black and white?
Alan: We have to go back in time for that one. Well, to make something different. I suppose the short hand is the fact that we were referencing an older genre. Playing with something in an older style.
Not all audiences will go for it, but certainly not many people have been put off by it. It has been one of the main talking points, a lot of people have commented on the quality of the cinematography.
THN: So, honestly, what do you have against the elderly, why do you kill off all your pension age actors?
Alan: [laughs] Oh right, I don’t know, it was obviously something deep seeded. I’ll have to talk to a therapist about that in later life.
Sam: Well, if we’re going to get meta about it, the boys represent the modern, and our lovely older actors represent a different era. But I suppose we were being quite destructive in our loving parody. You can’t help it.
THN: So what is next for the three of you, do you intend to do other projects together?
Alan: I’m working with Sam on another dark comedy at the moment called Conspiracy.
Tobias: I’m working on a little hostage thriller called Confine at the moment, which is getting into pre-production for, around about now actually. We’re just kicking off with it, so it should be wrapped by the end of the year. I have nothing against working with these two guys again.
THN: So, having been through the process with THE DRUMMOND WILL, what advice would you give to fledgling filmmakers?
Alan: Em, just make lots of films, just shoot more. I learned more making The Drummond Will than I would have in 9 years making shorts. I think that doing things on a larger scale is the best way to learn.
Tobias: Just keep making things that are just out of your depth, that’s the only way your really going to keep learning through your, hopefully small mistakes. And big success, hopefully big successes. We both did a lot of short films before this. Do a couple of short films and then just get on with it (the feature film) really.
THN: And finally, how would you describe THE DRUMMOND WILL in a sentence?
Alan: A light hearted comedy about murdering old people.
THE DRUMMOND WILL is out on DVD and Blu Ray, August 8th.
