Most people probably remember the sneaky thrill of the first "grownup" movie they watched. In the case of director Garth Jennings, it happened when he was 12, and he saw a friend's older brother's bootleg VHS of Sly Stallone's First Blood - the story of an angry Vietnam vet wreaking vengeance on his tormentors. The movie had an instant effect on him and his friends.
"We lived near a forest where we used to play, and suddenly it changed our entire game," Jennings recalls. "Here was this guy who could bend trees to make a trap, saw off his arm, or kill a wild boar with his bear hands."
Shortly after seeing the movie, Jennings borrowed his father's home video camera and started making his own action film entitled Aaron Part I, in which Jennings played a minister of defence taken hostage by terrorists (in his parents' backyard shed) and is then rescued by the action hero, Aaron (named, oddly, after producer Aaron Spelling).
The early cinematic experience was obviously influential. Several of Jennings's friends went on to join the cadets and forge a career in the military, he says, "while I became a filmmaker."
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A few years later, Jennings, who is now in his mid-30s, got together with co-writer and producer Nick Goldsmith and formed the team of Hammer & Tongs, noted for a series of award-winning commercials and rock videos (for Blur and R.E.M.) before Disney picked them to direct the $45-million (U.S.) adaptation of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But that film was really an interruption in Goldsmith's and Jennings's efforts to make their personal film, a low-budget (under $8-million) story of childhood moviemaking.
The script for Son of Rambow (the name was misspelled to avoid confusion with Stallone's films) was finally finished when Jennings remembered his childhood neighbours, members of a strict Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren, who were not allowed to watch movies or television. "My own background was incredibly happy and dull as dishwater," he recalls. "It took about three drafts, but eventually I managed to move the story next door. It was the perfect way to communicate what it feels like when a movie really catches hold of you for the first time."
True to the film's amateur beginnings, Jennings used friends and family as extras, and invented the sort of homemade action film you could imagine kids trying to make. The crew flew into the Sundance Film Festival in 2007 carrying the reels of the film on their laps. The movie inspired an instant bidding war that led to an eventual sale to Paramount Vantage for $8-million, the biggest sale of the festival.
"What I want people to get from the film is to remember the way we felt in childhood when everything seemed possible," Jennings says. "You want to shoot a scene with a flying dog? You just tie the dog to a kite. Of course, it doesn't really work so well, but when you're 11, it seems completely reasonable."
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