Every childhood has its rites of passage. For some, it’s that first ride on a bike after the training wheels have come off. For others, it’s the first night spent in a tent in the backyard. For still others, it’s that first rope swing over a 200-foot gorge while heavily armed law enforcement officials try in vain to end your brutal one-man campaign of vengeance in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.
That last one is, of course, the most touching. Anyone who experienced it (or at least imagined it) will be thrilled by the very special story of boyhood in Son of Rambow. An irresistibly sweet, funny and inventive movie by the British team of Hammer & Tongs (a.k.a. writer-director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith), it shows how young imaginations can be fired up or even freed by dramatic early encounters with the movies.

In the case of Will (Bill Milner), it’s a pirated copy of First Blood, shown to him by Lee Carter (Will Poulter), his school’s would-be auteur. A sheepish boy in early-’80s England whose overactive mind is a source of concern for his sternly religious mother (Spaced’s Jessica Hynes), Will is awestruck by the sight of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. He becomes Lee’s eager helpmate — and, more importantly, stuntman — as they commence the summer-long production of a homemade sequel that could very well turn out to be more exciting and action-packed than the original, at least in their estimation.

In an interview together last September at TIFF, where Son of Rambow made its Canadian premiere, Jennings and Goldsmith brimmed with the same kind of excitement displayed by their young characters. Seven years in the making, the movie is very clearly dear to their hearts. Indeed, the duo — famed for music videos such as R.E.M.’s “Imitation of Life,” Beck’s “Hell Yes” and Radiohead’s “Nude” — initially planned this as their feature debut, before getting the offer to get good and geeky by making the screen adaptation of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“This was the film we were trying to make before Hitchhiker’s Guide,” says Goldsmith. “To come back to this and it be everything that we wanted it to be was really special.”

As a lad, Jennings really did spend a day making a sequel to First Blood. (He may include it on Son of Rambow’s DVD). Though his script is rooted in his memories of such early filmmaking ventures, he says, “It’s absolutely a rose-tinted view of that. This is by no means realistic.”

What the film captures so vividly is the manner in which a child’s own fantasy world can be fuelled and twisted by what they see onscreen. Likewise, the events in Son of Rambow often have only a tangential relationship with reality. What you see here, says Jennings, “is far better than my own personal experiences but it’s exactly what it felt like to me as a boy seeing First Blood.”

It certainly wasn’t the only film that really affected Hammer & Tongs — they also cite such generational touchstones as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark (see sidebar). “But the effect of First Blood was very strong,” says Jennings. “I grew up near a forest and my friends and I played there all the time. Suddenly we see this movie and this guy comes jumping through the trees and he’s able to make traps in the forest, catch a boar and take on the army. It felt like all we had to do was run back into the forest with headbands on and we’d be that guy.”

“We thought, ‘I can sharpen a stick!’” says Goldsmith.

Jennings laughs. “‘And now it’s a trap! Now we can officially kill a boar!’ It’s absolutely true. But it wasn’t very removed from your own reality. Also, it was the first time I think a lot of my friends had seen a movie that was too old for us. We had a pirate copy of the video so there was a danger aspect to it as well.”

It’s easy to understand why the Rambo mythos was so intoxicating. And while Son of Rambow obviously has some elements in common with Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry’s fond remembrance of VHS tapes past, Hammer & Tongs’ efforts yield something deeper. It’s less of an exercise in nostalgia (though the film is equally savvy with its references to ’80s music and fashion) than a surprisingly poignant celebration of the imaginative powers of very impressionable young minds. And such is the boys’ doggedness to realize their fantasies, they think nothing of the attendant perils.

Says Jennings, “One of the nice things about that age — certainly in how we remember being at that age — is we had no regard for consequences whatsoever. It didn’t bother us that something we were doing might be a bit too dangerous or was a ludicrous idea. It was just fun.”

“And because we were wearing those rose-tinted spectacles while making this film,” adds Goldsmith, “we get to blur the lines between reality and fantasy as well. Like if you did a rope swing when you were playing in the woods, it would probably look quite pathetic if rendered for real. But it felt incredible. What we can do in the film is show what we imagined, which was this huuuuge rope swing.”

“It’s funny,” says Jennings, “because when we did the rope swing in the film, every time we tried to tie a rope to a tree, it looked so underwhelming. In the end, that rope swing is hanging off a 50-foot crane. It’s one of the biggest effects in the movie.”

Ironically, the defiantly low-tech-­looking effects in Son of Rambow may evoke more authentic wonder than anything in Hitchhiker’s Guide, which was nonetheless a marvellous showcase for Hammer & Tongs’ visual ingenuity. “These movies are totally different,” says Jennings. “In that one you’re dealing with science fiction and robots and Vogons. In this one, it’s about two boys becoming friends. We didn’t want it to be over-quirky.”

As for Son of Rambow’s young cast members, they clearly relished the chance to be in this playground, even if it did entail being tossed around or thrown into the sky on occasion. “The kids are always happy to be thrown,” says Jennings. “We threw them into vats of oil or across a field, all kinds of things with jerk-back rigs. But they were having the time of their lives because they were sort of doing what we wanted to do at that age. I would’ve killed to do what they do.”
“It’s a pretty good summer holiday,” adds Goldsmith.

The most indie Indy

As a tale of boys who set out to pay cinematic homage to their favourite flick, Son of Rambow is reminiscent of a real-life story that has already taken on mythic dimensions among movie fans. In 1982, three pre-teens in suburban Mississippi began work on a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Despite every conceivable problem and the occasional brush with death, they kept at it over every summer holiday before finally finishing it in 1989. After showing it to family and friends, they put it behind them.

In the ensuing years, bootleg copies were traded among cine-cultists. The movie began to get wider notice when Eli Roth’s weathered copy reached both Steven Spielberg and Harry Knowles, the latter screening a clip at his film fest at Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. A feature in the March 2004 issue of Vanity Fair revealed the story in full, and with Spielberg’s blessing, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation circulated to festivals all over the world. (It played at Sprockets in Toronto in 2005.) Since any official video release would have to involve, as the actor who played Indy said in an interview, “armies of lawyers,” it’s otherwise only available only in samizdat form — see YouTube and Indiana Jones fan sites for clips.

Rights to the kids’ story were bought by producer Scott Rudin, who commissioned a script from Ghost World’s Daniel Clowes. Alas, little has been reported about the project — tentatively titled Backyard Resistance — since 2006. What with the imminent arrival of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, surely viewers should be offered a lower-tech and Shia-free alternative.