Son of Rambow: Garth Jennings Interview

There are some phrases that augur certain doom for this film critic, pathological misanthrope that I am: 'heart-warming', 'coming-of-age', and that hardy perennial, 'Sundance favourite' are right up there, generally accompanied by organ music, lightning flashes and the howling of imaginary wolves. Son of Rambow, the story of two schoolboys who watch a bootlegged copy of First Blood and attempt to make their own lo-fi, zero-budget sequel, is all of these things and then some, and yet it manages, through its giddy, bracingly heartfelt exuberance, to completely charm the idiomatic socks off me. The NHS should really bottle it as a prescription cure for cynicism.

It's the second feature from writer/director Garth Jennings (of music video super-trio Hammer and Tongs), after his underrated big screen version of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and was the film he always planned to make first, before those pesky Hollywood types started waving large cheques in his direction. "I'd never intended to do any big films, I didn't think it would be much fun, but making Hitchhiker's was brilliant," Jennings beams, all charmingly boyish enthusiasm, "and when I got to the end of that I just went back to Son of Rambow and spent about another two years trying to find people to give us the money for it."

The genuine, unaffected and rather gleeful sense of the sheer fun of making movies is an enormous part of the appeal of Rambow, whose two young protagonists embark upon their directorial debut with staggering imaginative zeal. Jennings is like an overgrown but not quite grown-up version of these two, only with a great cast, an 80s mix-tape and a few million pounds to play with. So, is the film based on the early endeavours of Little Garth Jennings? "Well, when I was about eleven I'd just seen First Blood with some friends," Jennings explains. "We all used to just goof around in the woods all the time, and then we saw this film where this guy, you know, he's sewing up his own arm and jumping off cliff faces! We just thought it was incredible and we started making our own little home movie versions, as a whole generation of kids did – of Rambo or Raiders of the Lost Ark or whatever, and I've pretty much being doing exactly the same thing ever since!"

The DIY spirit and unabashed cinephilia of Jennings' film echoes that of Michel Gondry's recent Be Kind Rewind, which also had an 80s feel with its riffs on Ghostbusters, Robocop etc, and its central ode to the joys of videotape. But while all the whimsical bonhomie of Gondry's film left me feeling somewhat suicidally inadequate for not being part of a community that pulls together and sings tra la la in the face of misfortunes and evil Sigourney Weavers, Rambow completely won me over with its wit and inventiveness. Brilliantly executed slapstick, plenty of visual gags and hilariously risky stunts keep things sunnily jovial throughout.

Jennings has a wonderful sense of the power of nostalgia; his is very much a heightened, comically exaggerated, child's-eye-view of life in Thatcherite suburbia. "It felt like it should be more how you remember things rather than how they were," the director says, "and I have a kind of rose-tinted-spectacles view of that time. Of course it's very seductive to go back into one's childhood and dig out your BMX and your bits and pieces, but it just felt natural to do it in that way."

The young leads are really terrific- fresh and believable, and clearly having a ball. They're an Oliver/Artful Dodger-style duo, with the guileless Bill Milner affectingly serious as sheltered innocent Will, and Will Poulter bringing real emotional range to wide-boy troublemaker Lee. Their casting was key, as Jennings affirms: "It took ages, about five months, we were going round regular schools, rather than theatre schools and really, I don't think I would be sitting here today if I hadn't found them. Even with funding and what have you, the two of them just made the film what it is."

And what is it? An 'I heart the 80s' nostalgia trip? A love letter to the experience of watching and making movies? A tribute to Sly Stallone, king of unlikely comebacks (after Lazarus, Noel Edmonds and high-waisted jeans)? Well, all of the above, but it's also a very personal story and a very universal one - about being a kid and imagining for yourself a better world than the one you're in, about dreams and friendship and spacedust. "Around seven years ago I found the tapes my friends and I made and started watching them again," recalls Jennings, " And they are ghastly, but also kind of lovely, how they remind of the way you just didn't worry about how ridiculous your ideas were, just wonderfully, stupidly ambitious, and what odd little characters we all were."