Remember life is nonsense so wear silly shoes x
Interview conducted with Julian Barratt on 11 August 2009. (с)
читать дальшеHow’s your day so far?
I’m in SOHO, London, [and] it’s nice and sunny. I strolled in this morning, got a coffee, [and have] talked about myself for a couple of hours. It’s been a nice morning.
What are you working on at the moment?
We’re writing a Boosh film treatment, [and] I’m working on some other film outlines with other people. We’ve just done this American tour sort of thing - well, some shows out there - and we’re trying to make the right step in what we do next, so we’ll probably try and get this film going, and then film it next year, and then tour again, maybe do something in America, and possibly Australia next year.
I’m writing, really, at the moment.
The third season of The Mighty Boosh has recently screened on Adult Swim in the United States, and judging by your recent trip there, is it safe to say the show’s a success?
It went really well, yeah. We didn’t know it was going to be what it was going to be. We went out there just to do some press, and some shows - some DJ sets - and the reaction was such that we thought we’d better do an actual show there of some sort, so we cobbled together a show when we were out in New York. We were pretty jet-lagged, and we were building props and I was trying to do the music, [but] we made a show that we strung together and we did that in the Bowery Ballroom in New York. It was rammed and people were queueing up, [so] we thought we’d better do a show in LA as well, and so we did it in LA, we flew our band out to play - a bit excessive, but who would’ve thought we’d end up playing LA? For some reason we just never thought we would, so it was exciting. It went really well, and we realised we could probably tour a bit around America - especially the student towns, and places like Nashville and Chicago. So we’re going to try and figure out a way to do that in the States.
But yeah, the next thing is to make a film, really.
Are you just plotting ideas for the film at this stage, or is production well and truly under way?
So far it’s a ‘how we met’ [story], about us meeting and gathering this group of people that the Boosh are, and then [we] go on an adventure. So it’s going back in time a little bit.
An ‘Origins’ story?
The origins, yeah, a little bit like that…the origins of how Howard became a jazz superhero. [Laughs]
Will you be revisiting the Zooniverse?
I don’t know about that. We moved out of the Zoo and it wasn’t really talked about, and it’s not in a George Lucas universe of trying to track logic back. I think we’ll do whatever works in a film, and it’s almost like if you saw the TV show, great, but actually forget the TV show as we’ll re-calibrate things and rejig things in order to make it fit in a film on itself. If we can make it tie into the universe that’s already existed, you know, fine, but I think it’s almost like I just want to ignore the TV show, and imagine we’ve just been asked to make a film and what would that be? I don’t want to make it an in joke with people that know the TV show, because I think that’s a mistake a lot of people make when they try and do the transition [from TV to film].
Is that what you do, with the TV show you say forget the radio show, then with the live show you forget everything else, and now with the film…?
One side of it is maintaining a ‘world’, because that’s what the Boosh is - this sort of group of people and they travel about. There’s on-going relationships, and there’s that aspect of it. Specifically what we wanted to make, rather than a Python-esque thing, we were more interested in creating a group of people, especially a double act at the heart of it, because we like that kind of humour and banter - and from that the madness comes, and rather than just saying, ‘OK let’s make a really insane-’ I mean, we have a lot of weird ideas, which you could just put together in a Python-esque stream of consciousness kind of way, but we’re much too interested in the relationships of the main characters. We’re in the middle ground between trying to maintain all the things that we’ve done and trying to reinvent it all the time. [The] thing with a film is you can make that leap or adjust things, readjust the dials.
So will the film come before the fourth season of the TV series?
I suppose so, yeah. These things take time. This is my ultimate ‘what we would do now’: We’d write the film, and we’d get moving on it, we’d make a pilot for a TV show - another series, perhaps, in America - and then we’d do the film, and then we’d do the series, and then…and then we’d retire. So that’s hopefully what we’ll do.
Maybe we won’t do that in reality. Maybe I’ll move into the world of sculpture, or macramé. [Laughs] You never know what happens…
The idea, though, is a film. I’ve wanted to make a film for so long, now.
You’ve just made your first film, Curtains, haven’t you?
Yeah, that was shown at Edinburgh Film Festival, and I’m making another one with the guy I made that with, Dan Jemmett. That’s a different side to what I do, something a bit more serious. I mean, it’s funny still, but it’s darker, it’s not quite the relentless comedic stuff that we do. But I want to do other things as well, as does Noel, so we always have worked with other people, but because the Boosh is the highest profile thing I do, and he does, people seem to see anything else we do as some sort of betrayal to the fans. Like we’re having an affair with another comedian or another writer…
We’ll, you’ve been doing the Boosh for ten years now…
That’s right. It’s a bit of an open relationship. [Laughs]
Is it hard to tell where Howard Moon ends and Julian Barratt begins these days?
No. You just cut off certain aspects of yourself in order to exaggerate the more manic and more obsessional and more comedic versions of yourself. I mean, it’s not that hard for me, because I am obsessed with certain things - jazz and stuff - and always have been. But the characters have always been just what we’re interested in, [so] it’s always been quite easy to write.
To step back for a minute, you’ve said in previous interviews that stand up comedy was never something you wanted to do, and yet that’s how you meet Noel, and how you got involved in the Boosh, wasn’t it?
Yeah.
So how did you get into the comedy scene?
I was at university. I was studying American Studies actually, and I was studying American film, literature…and I wanted to go to the States. So I had a year abroad. I went over to Washington DC, and there was a stand up competition over there. I’d been massively into comedy when I was a kid, but I never thought of doing it, but while I was at university a lot of comedians came to the college and did gigs, and it was a revelation to see close-up. I’d never seen stand up, I think on TV I’d seen Robin Williams do one - live at the Met or something - seen some DVDs of Richard Pryor, and obviously I was aware of it. Then I started seeing these performers close up and seeing Jack Dee and Eddie Izzard and Sean Hughes - really amazing people - and I was thinking ‘I can see how you do it’ - you stand up with a microphone and do it. So I stared writing stuff at university, and then in America I did my first gig, in a competition - and won it. I wanted to do something away from my hometown. I would never tell anyone when I was doing it, because I was a bit afraid I’d die and I didn’t want my friends to come and see that. So I would do it a bit secretly, I would go out at night and do my bitter trade - ply my grisly trade - and come back sort of like a murderer from my gigs, and no one knew where I’d been…
With Noel it was much different, he’d take an entourage of people along - there were always his friends. His way of doing it was much different to mine.
But I suppose from doing stand up I got that confidence of ‘Oh, right, I’m funny then’. You never know straight away, but when there’s a room of people laughing and go, ‘Oh right I can do this’, it encourages you. It’s very easy to understand how you do stand up, it’s not like TV, like, ‘How do you do TV?’ when you’re not in TV. You just think it’s this labyrinth of people and meetings and a whole maze of places. So [stand up] was a very easy thing to do: a microphone and a stage and you’re there. So that was the way in, and I met Noel pretty quickly; he saw me do a stand up competition on TV. I won a competition in Edinburgh, an open mic competition, and he had it on tape, he liked what I did. I think he liked that I was new, and that I was in the scene. He’d follow me in Time Out, the listings, he’d find out where I was and he came and saw me do a few gigs - he turned up at a few gigs I was at, actually. I was at the Hackney Empire once, and he turned up, I was on the bill with Simon Pegg, who was just starting out then as well - he was doing stand up initially. He won the competition - I remember that. We were in the same heat together, me and Simon, and he won that one and I was quite annoyed. [Laughs] We’re friends now.
A lot of the people I did stand up with initially - Sacha Baron Cohen, Mackenzie Crook (Gareth in the UK version of The Office) - we would do gigs with these people quite often, and get to know them, and it’s funny, you don’t see them for a while and then suddenly they’ve got a hit show and a film in the States and you go, ‘Oh my god, I played the Chuckle Club with you, to ten people!’
One of the great things about the new crop of British comedies is that there’s a whole community of people working together on shows, such as The Mighty Boosh, Nathan Barley, Snuff Box, The IT Crowd, etc….
I always liked that. We always try and get the Garth Marenghi lot into our show. Originally Richard Ayoade was going to be in ours, he was in the pilot playing Bainbridge, and Channel 4 wouldn’t let him come do our series, you know, so we had to cast Matt Berry as Bainbridge, and that was when we realised that the people in charge are more interested in the money and the ownership of you than the ideas, and that was a bit of a rude awakening. But in the end it didn’t matter because we’ve used Richard in lots of different ways and it’s since blown over, but it’s the enemy of art, really, a lot of that stuff. It’s hard because they give you a chance, and then they give you a chance with rules attached, and then you feel like you need to be thankful that you’re on TV, but you don’t really want to… So you have to swallow it a little bit to begin with, you have to take one for the team, you have to do one for them and then you can do what you want, which, once you’ve got an audience they can’t do anything about.
We got through the net because they didn’t understand it, but it got enough people for us to carry on, and it went under the radar for a bit. When the gigs started happening they saw that we were very popular with a certain group of people who they wanted to appeal to, so that allowed us a few more chances to get what we were doing right. It’s always a lot of luck involved, I suppose, you know, but me and Noel were still going to do what we did no matter what happened, because we could do live shows, so we could carry on between getting commissioned, we could carry on and tour, go to Australia - which we did. We had such a great time in Australia, we’re desperate to come back, but we kept getting things commissioned just when we were going to come out there, so we’d say, ‘No we can’t do it, we’ve got to do the show, it’s important.’ We got so frustrated doing all these live shows and not having a record of them, and everything was going into the ether, so we thought we’ve got to try and put something down on tape, so the radio show was the first attempt at that, and we haven’t looked back since, really.
Can we expect you in Australia anytime soon?
Yeah. It’s always part of the plan, really. We can tour out a bit more now, which I love to do because we have such a great time in Australia. I’d love to come out there - I think maybe next year is the idea. We’ve got to do other things, but I think it’s on the agenda. We’d be stupid not to come out there. It’s just a matter of finding the time when we’re all ready to go, and [deciding] what kind of show we’d do out there - whether we’d write a new one and come out there with it, or [if we’d] do some sort of hybrid of what we’re working on at the moment and some bits from the old stuff. If we’re to write a whole new show it’d be next year, but we could come out sooner with something else.
Finally: Nathan Barley. Will there be a second series?
We did some work on on it initially straight afterwards, and planned a possible way forward for the series, and then we sort of… He [Chris Morris, co-creator] parked it for a bit, he said to me he ‘parked it’. So if it’s parked, you know, I suppose it can be driven off at some point, I guess. He’s making a film at the moment. I don’t know, Charlie Brooker [fellow co-creator] and him are both busy on other things, so it’s not as if it couldn’t happen again. But I’m waiting to hear.
Your Dan Ashcroft character is a hero of mine and a few of my journalism friends; is there a bit of you in there?
[Laughs] Well, I guess in everything you do there is, I suppose. It was quite a difficult thing to do, that, actually, because … initially he [Chris Morris] wanted a very verbal character - a witty, sort of vicious character who would let fly with lots of verbal pyrotechnics and sort of destroy people in this way. And I’m not that kind of person, I couldn’t play it like that. [His character] came out of when I was improvising in sessions, and then they [Morris and Brooker] would go away and write it. My stuff was more sort of painful looks, inner crumbling, so I found it actually quite difficult to do. [Laughs] It’s quite a painful part to play, in a way. I haven’t done lots of acting. I think when you go to drama college you learn how to deal with that sort of stuff a bit more, and I felt it was a bit of an ordeal. It was good fun, but my part was quite hard to do.
Would you be interested in channelling something similar in another project?
I’d love to, yeah. You hope that the Boosh allows us to do these other things that we want to do, so when we have breaks from doing what we’re doing hopefully I’ll do some, uh, I’ll do Hamlet. Think I’m getting a bit old for Hamlet, maybe I’ll do King Lear…
читать дальшеHow’s your day so far?
I’m in SOHO, London, [and] it’s nice and sunny. I strolled in this morning, got a coffee, [and have] talked about myself for a couple of hours. It’s been a nice morning.
What are you working on at the moment?
We’re writing a Boosh film treatment, [and] I’m working on some other film outlines with other people. We’ve just done this American tour sort of thing - well, some shows out there - and we’re trying to make the right step in what we do next, so we’ll probably try and get this film going, and then film it next year, and then tour again, maybe do something in America, and possibly Australia next year.
I’m writing, really, at the moment.
The third season of The Mighty Boosh has recently screened on Adult Swim in the United States, and judging by your recent trip there, is it safe to say the show’s a success?
It went really well, yeah. We didn’t know it was going to be what it was going to be. We went out there just to do some press, and some shows - some DJ sets - and the reaction was such that we thought we’d better do an actual show there of some sort, so we cobbled together a show when we were out in New York. We were pretty jet-lagged, and we were building props and I was trying to do the music, [but] we made a show that we strung together and we did that in the Bowery Ballroom in New York. It was rammed and people were queueing up, [so] we thought we’d better do a show in LA as well, and so we did it in LA, we flew our band out to play - a bit excessive, but who would’ve thought we’d end up playing LA? For some reason we just never thought we would, so it was exciting. It went really well, and we realised we could probably tour a bit around America - especially the student towns, and places like Nashville and Chicago. So we’re going to try and figure out a way to do that in the States.
But yeah, the next thing is to make a film, really.
Are you just plotting ideas for the film at this stage, or is production well and truly under way?
So far it’s a ‘how we met’ [story], about us meeting and gathering this group of people that the Boosh are, and then [we] go on an adventure. So it’s going back in time a little bit.
An ‘Origins’ story?
The origins, yeah, a little bit like that…the origins of how Howard became a jazz superhero. [Laughs]
Will you be revisiting the Zooniverse?
I don’t know about that. We moved out of the Zoo and it wasn’t really talked about, and it’s not in a George Lucas universe of trying to track logic back. I think we’ll do whatever works in a film, and it’s almost like if you saw the TV show, great, but actually forget the TV show as we’ll re-calibrate things and rejig things in order to make it fit in a film on itself. If we can make it tie into the universe that’s already existed, you know, fine, but I think it’s almost like I just want to ignore the TV show, and imagine we’ve just been asked to make a film and what would that be? I don’t want to make it an in joke with people that know the TV show, because I think that’s a mistake a lot of people make when they try and do the transition [from TV to film].
Is that what you do, with the TV show you say forget the radio show, then with the live show you forget everything else, and now with the film…?
One side of it is maintaining a ‘world’, because that’s what the Boosh is - this sort of group of people and they travel about. There’s on-going relationships, and there’s that aspect of it. Specifically what we wanted to make, rather than a Python-esque thing, we were more interested in creating a group of people, especially a double act at the heart of it, because we like that kind of humour and banter - and from that the madness comes, and rather than just saying, ‘OK let’s make a really insane-’ I mean, we have a lot of weird ideas, which you could just put together in a Python-esque stream of consciousness kind of way, but we’re much too interested in the relationships of the main characters. We’re in the middle ground between trying to maintain all the things that we’ve done and trying to reinvent it all the time. [The] thing with a film is you can make that leap or adjust things, readjust the dials.
So will the film come before the fourth season of the TV series?
I suppose so, yeah. These things take time. This is my ultimate ‘what we would do now’: We’d write the film, and we’d get moving on it, we’d make a pilot for a TV show - another series, perhaps, in America - and then we’d do the film, and then we’d do the series, and then…and then we’d retire. So that’s hopefully what we’ll do.
Maybe we won’t do that in reality. Maybe I’ll move into the world of sculpture, or macramé. [Laughs] You never know what happens…
The idea, though, is a film. I’ve wanted to make a film for so long, now.
You’ve just made your first film, Curtains, haven’t you?
Yeah, that was shown at Edinburgh Film Festival, and I’m making another one with the guy I made that with, Dan Jemmett. That’s a different side to what I do, something a bit more serious. I mean, it’s funny still, but it’s darker, it’s not quite the relentless comedic stuff that we do. But I want to do other things as well, as does Noel, so we always have worked with other people, but because the Boosh is the highest profile thing I do, and he does, people seem to see anything else we do as some sort of betrayal to the fans. Like we’re having an affair with another comedian or another writer…
We’ll, you’ve been doing the Boosh for ten years now…
That’s right. It’s a bit of an open relationship. [Laughs]
Is it hard to tell where Howard Moon ends and Julian Barratt begins these days?
No. You just cut off certain aspects of yourself in order to exaggerate the more manic and more obsessional and more comedic versions of yourself. I mean, it’s not that hard for me, because I am obsessed with certain things - jazz and stuff - and always have been. But the characters have always been just what we’re interested in, [so] it’s always been quite easy to write.
To step back for a minute, you’ve said in previous interviews that stand up comedy was never something you wanted to do, and yet that’s how you meet Noel, and how you got involved in the Boosh, wasn’t it?
Yeah.
So how did you get into the comedy scene?
I was at university. I was studying American Studies actually, and I was studying American film, literature…and I wanted to go to the States. So I had a year abroad. I went over to Washington DC, and there was a stand up competition over there. I’d been massively into comedy when I was a kid, but I never thought of doing it, but while I was at university a lot of comedians came to the college and did gigs, and it was a revelation to see close-up. I’d never seen stand up, I think on TV I’d seen Robin Williams do one - live at the Met or something - seen some DVDs of Richard Pryor, and obviously I was aware of it. Then I started seeing these performers close up and seeing Jack Dee and Eddie Izzard and Sean Hughes - really amazing people - and I was thinking ‘I can see how you do it’ - you stand up with a microphone and do it. So I stared writing stuff at university, and then in America I did my first gig, in a competition - and won it. I wanted to do something away from my hometown. I would never tell anyone when I was doing it, because I was a bit afraid I’d die and I didn’t want my friends to come and see that. So I would do it a bit secretly, I would go out at night and do my bitter trade - ply my grisly trade - and come back sort of like a murderer from my gigs, and no one knew where I’d been…
With Noel it was much different, he’d take an entourage of people along - there were always his friends. His way of doing it was much different to mine.
But I suppose from doing stand up I got that confidence of ‘Oh, right, I’m funny then’. You never know straight away, but when there’s a room of people laughing and go, ‘Oh right I can do this’, it encourages you. It’s very easy to understand how you do stand up, it’s not like TV, like, ‘How do you do TV?’ when you’re not in TV. You just think it’s this labyrinth of people and meetings and a whole maze of places. So [stand up] was a very easy thing to do: a microphone and a stage and you’re there. So that was the way in, and I met Noel pretty quickly; he saw me do a stand up competition on TV. I won a competition in Edinburgh, an open mic competition, and he had it on tape, he liked what I did. I think he liked that I was new, and that I was in the scene. He’d follow me in Time Out, the listings, he’d find out where I was and he came and saw me do a few gigs - he turned up at a few gigs I was at, actually. I was at the Hackney Empire once, and he turned up, I was on the bill with Simon Pegg, who was just starting out then as well - he was doing stand up initially. He won the competition - I remember that. We were in the same heat together, me and Simon, and he won that one and I was quite annoyed. [Laughs] We’re friends now.
A lot of the people I did stand up with initially - Sacha Baron Cohen, Mackenzie Crook (Gareth in the UK version of The Office) - we would do gigs with these people quite often, and get to know them, and it’s funny, you don’t see them for a while and then suddenly they’ve got a hit show and a film in the States and you go, ‘Oh my god, I played the Chuckle Club with you, to ten people!’
One of the great things about the new crop of British comedies is that there’s a whole community of people working together on shows, such as The Mighty Boosh, Nathan Barley, Snuff Box, The IT Crowd, etc….
I always liked that. We always try and get the Garth Marenghi lot into our show. Originally Richard Ayoade was going to be in ours, he was in the pilot playing Bainbridge, and Channel 4 wouldn’t let him come do our series, you know, so we had to cast Matt Berry as Bainbridge, and that was when we realised that the people in charge are more interested in the money and the ownership of you than the ideas, and that was a bit of a rude awakening. But in the end it didn’t matter because we’ve used Richard in lots of different ways and it’s since blown over, but it’s the enemy of art, really, a lot of that stuff. It’s hard because they give you a chance, and then they give you a chance with rules attached, and then you feel like you need to be thankful that you’re on TV, but you don’t really want to… So you have to swallow it a little bit to begin with, you have to take one for the team, you have to do one for them and then you can do what you want, which, once you’ve got an audience they can’t do anything about.
We got through the net because they didn’t understand it, but it got enough people for us to carry on, and it went under the radar for a bit. When the gigs started happening they saw that we were very popular with a certain group of people who they wanted to appeal to, so that allowed us a few more chances to get what we were doing right. It’s always a lot of luck involved, I suppose, you know, but me and Noel were still going to do what we did no matter what happened, because we could do live shows, so we could carry on between getting commissioned, we could carry on and tour, go to Australia - which we did. We had such a great time in Australia, we’re desperate to come back, but we kept getting things commissioned just when we were going to come out there, so we’d say, ‘No we can’t do it, we’ve got to do the show, it’s important.’ We got so frustrated doing all these live shows and not having a record of them, and everything was going into the ether, so we thought we’ve got to try and put something down on tape, so the radio show was the first attempt at that, and we haven’t looked back since, really.
Can we expect you in Australia anytime soon?
Yeah. It’s always part of the plan, really. We can tour out a bit more now, which I love to do because we have such a great time in Australia. I’d love to come out there - I think maybe next year is the idea. We’ve got to do other things, but I think it’s on the agenda. We’d be stupid not to come out there. It’s just a matter of finding the time when we’re all ready to go, and [deciding] what kind of show we’d do out there - whether we’d write a new one and come out there with it, or [if we’d] do some sort of hybrid of what we’re working on at the moment and some bits from the old stuff. If we’re to write a whole new show it’d be next year, but we could come out sooner with something else.
Finally: Nathan Barley. Will there be a second series?
We did some work on on it initially straight afterwards, and planned a possible way forward for the series, and then we sort of… He [Chris Morris, co-creator] parked it for a bit, he said to me he ‘parked it’. So if it’s parked, you know, I suppose it can be driven off at some point, I guess. He’s making a film at the moment. I don’t know, Charlie Brooker [fellow co-creator] and him are both busy on other things, so it’s not as if it couldn’t happen again. But I’m waiting to hear.
Your Dan Ashcroft character is a hero of mine and a few of my journalism friends; is there a bit of you in there?
[Laughs] Well, I guess in everything you do there is, I suppose. It was quite a difficult thing to do, that, actually, because … initially he [Chris Morris] wanted a very verbal character - a witty, sort of vicious character who would let fly with lots of verbal pyrotechnics and sort of destroy people in this way. And I’m not that kind of person, I couldn’t play it like that. [His character] came out of when I was improvising in sessions, and then they [Morris and Brooker] would go away and write it. My stuff was more sort of painful looks, inner crumbling, so I found it actually quite difficult to do. [Laughs] It’s quite a painful part to play, in a way. I haven’t done lots of acting. I think when you go to drama college you learn how to deal with that sort of stuff a bit more, and I felt it was a bit of an ordeal. It was good fun, but my part was quite hard to do.
Would you be interested in channelling something similar in another project?
I’d love to, yeah. You hope that the Boosh allows us to do these other things that we want to do, so when we have breaks from doing what we’re doing hopefully I’ll do some, uh, I’ll do Hamlet. Think I’m getting a bit old for Hamlet, maybe I’ll do King Lear…
@темы: цитата, The Mighty Boosh, Julian Barratt, Noel Fielding
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