Page 15 - Fujifilm Exposure_11 Blackadder_ok

“Harry Enfield has the exceptional
knack of never becoming crass with his comedy.”
in production
Could we carry that for 90 minutes? Finally, these are obviously older people playing younger people. As an idea, this could prove to be triple jeopardy.
“Then, as soon as I read the script, you think either you’re going to buy into this concept straight- away or you’re not. That’s the gamble you take. Once we started working on the script and getting into the characters, I could see how Harry and Kathy were really good at hanging on to Kevin and Perry and building comedy on them all the time. They work so well together, this gruesome twosome and are larger
than life in a reality-based world. I’ve worked with Harry before on bits and pieces but never grappled with him for an entire series which is quite a good thing in a way because there’s no pre-history in that we might get stuck into the way we had done things before on television.
“We’re both coming at this from a fresh angle. When we first got together on this we danced around each other rather warily. Then we had to sit down together for a couple of weeks and rework the script to a point when we could both feel happy with it - and satisfy any concerns of the backers. What was good was how we both tuned in on the same sort of things.”
Bye, married to Ruby Wax (whom he indicated might just pop into shot as Bathing Beauty In Ibiza Background), agreed that moving from small to big screen also set new potential comic problems with explicit films like There’s Something About Mary and American Pie establishing new gross-out bench-marks.
“I do keep thinking, have we been filthy enough? Seriously one does get a little nervous about whether we’re being too tame. We’re more concerned, though, with the fact that on the big screen there’s the danger everything goes a bit flat, too slow and pedestrian. One of the things that seems to make TV comedy ham- mer along are the gales of laughter filling those gaps all the time. So that when a performer stops for a reaction five or six seconds off the back of a gag it’s because the audience is screeching and they can’t speak. That gives the illusion it’s all going very fast. For a film, you have to chuck all that out of the window to keep its internal pace moving so it’s fast and funny.”
Jolyon Simonds, representing a bevy of produc- ers including Tiger Aspect Productions, Fragile Films and Mel Gibson’s company, Icon Entertainment, adds: “Harry has the exceptional knack of never becoming crass with his comedy. There is a broadness and uni- versality with teenagers - which is why this is Kevin And Per r y and not, say Tim Nice-But-Dim. ‘The gross- er the better’ is something we’ve heard from our friends across the Atlantic. Certainly this is unlike any British comedy I’ve seen.. but then I would say that.”
Kevin And Perry marks cinematographer Alan Almond’s seventh feature after a recent run including Greenwich Mean Time and Guest House Paradiso: “This film needs a lot of colour and the new Fuji stock seems to deal with that very well. I like the way it resolves colour. It doesn’t separate them as much as let them work together.”
The “look” is also very important to Ed Bye: “This is a particularly good stock; it gives depth and shape. One of the things I dislike about British movies, especially British comedy movies in the past, is that they all tend to have that flat ‘ooh, it’s just a big telly show’ kind of look. We’re trying to make this not distinctly English, more a sort of heightened real- ity like the nature of the people in it. Mind you, it’s not helped that it seems to have rained every day apart from when we were indoors... and then it was about 110 degrees!” ■ QUENTIN FALK
Kevin And Perry is originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photos: scenes from Kevin And Per r y on location in Ibiza with Harry Enfield, Kathy Burke and chums.