Teenage Kicks: Richard Ayoade Interview

22 October 10

Words by Quentin Falk

In front of the camera, Richard Ayoade first turned heads as the insidious gent Dean Learner in Channel 4’s sci-fi spoof Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and is now best-known for playing loveable computer geek Maurice Moss in BAFTA-winning comedy The IT Crowd.

However, Ayoade, 33, a former member of the Cambridge Footlights and a Perrier Comedy award winner in 2001, has also been more quietly building up an impressive CV as a writer-director. Alongside directing and co-writing several episodes of Darkplace and its spin-off Man to Man with Dean Learner, he’s also directed music promos for Kasabian, Vampire Weekend, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Arctic Monkeys.

His debut feature, Submarine, is a coming-of-age comedy adapted from Joe Dunthorne’s novel, and deals with 15-year-old Oliver Tate’s adolescent agony of losing his virginity and dealing with his parents’ marital problems. Ayoade cites The Graduate and Zazie Dans Le Metro among its influences.

How did you come to choose Submarine as your debut feature?
It just so happened I was doing music videos at Warp Films; they’d optioned the book and thought I might be a good person to try and adapt it. I guess I’ve always liked the subject of adolescence, and I think that I also thought that if they liked the script I’d also get to direct it.

This is the first script you’ve adapted. How did that differ from penning original scripts?
You just hope it’ll be operable in a way that allows you to move forward. However, you tend to be so enmeshed in the problems of simply trying to squeeze out the writing you tend not to look past the end of any particular draft.

There were quite a number in this case, at least 10. It becomes difficult to know just what is a draft after a while because you never really stop tinkering with it; you change stuff up until shooting, then during shooting. We’d even film something, look back at it, tinker, then film again.

How does your experience as an actor affect your approach to directing?
You’re certainly mindful of what can be undermining to you as an actor. When you’re directing there’s so much hyper-oxygenated fizz going on around you all the time, whereas as an actor there are often great waves of inactivity while you’re hanging around.

It can be a maddening process to try and act on a film set after you’ve been waiting around in the drizzle for seven hours and then suddenly you’re on for two minutes in front of 50 people before the light goes.

As a director you must try and think about that: to try if possible to understand the actor’s way of going about stuff and not just focus on your own problems at the time. One of the worst things you can say as a director is when an actor asks, ‘was that OK?’ you simply reply, ‘I’ve got to move on.’

Actors are often treated like idiots who are able to do something but are still felt, essentially, to be in the way. Acting is potentially a very humiliating and exposing thing to do, and you should try to avoid making them feel that.

Was it a big leap from writing and directing for TV to film?
In terms of writing, I suppose it was a big jump… well, different simply because of the demands between the two. In the film, it’s much more about the pace and weight and having to be more structured so it’s sustained for longer.

As for directing, I don’t really know. As with TV, it’s often just a response to the writing. It’s been different with all the various things I’ve done so this time round hasn’t felt like a particular sea change.

It’s perhaps different for other reasons. For instance, we shot the film with all natural light which you just wouldn’t do for TV; another one was that with TV you normally have a transmission date so you’re always hurtling towards that with people editing as you go along so they can get out the first episode in a block.

With a film, there doesn’t seem to be quite that sort of pressure and you can keep the thing as a whole. In a way, TV is harder because of the volume and how quick you have to be.

Richard Ayoade’s Top Tips for aspiring writers/directors

1. Trying not to get depressed definitely applies to both. You need be healthy so don’t get a cold.

2. Noah Taylor [who plays Oliver’s father in Submarine] told me the main thing as director was to get comfortable shoes because you don’t sit down for two months.

3. The best tip for directing I ever heard came from Roman Polanski who apparently said: You rehearse a scene, then you stand where you want to see it, and that’s where you put the camera.

Gary Williamson

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