"Please note these numbers at the beginning, because we'll pick up on this a little bit later." "This film, as you can see, is actually themes based on The Epic Of Gilgamesh." "It was a project initiated by Keith, our producer, and was originally meant to be a 52-minute project, based on The Epic Of Gilgamesh and meant to involve live action, dance and animation." "I think Channel Four was slightly leery ofthe whole project, and they gave us only development money to do two pilot films " "one a dance sequence by Kim Brandstrup, and an animation sequence." "Here we see Gilgamesh feeding his traps." "ln this case, it's the husk of a 17-year-old locust, which we carted from America in a little box." "The essential feel ofthe film is, again, playing with the dark, fairy tale-ish," "with an element of grotesquery and the pathological." "I knew also, because we have such a horror of legends, much less the whole canon of Shakespeare... that our initial impulse to sort of protect ourselves" "was to slightly subvert the original intentions and reduce it to a kind of children's sandbox." "We sort ofwanted a kind of..." "Gilgamesh would have been a bloodshot, hydrocephalic, Fascist despot, ruthlessly patrolling his sandbox kingdom, and Enkidu would have represented the contrasting element," "which would have been belonging to the realm ofthe enchanted forest." "Here we see Gilgamesh actually having... starting to set his trap, to lure Enkidu from the forest." "Now, the original story is that Gilgamesh sends a female prostitute to lure Enkidu," "and we wanted to use the idea that, in order to lure an animal from the forest, to make him feel at home, would have necessitated the sound of a cricket, for instance," "to calm this sort of urban kingdom... sort of suspended in mid-air." "I know when we started doing the sequence ofthe bird flying, that we had elaborated a huge glass sheet in front ofthe entire décor," "and we made a line, a tracing of a line and we animated the bird with heavy black sewing thread," "so that we spent about four hours doing this one sequence." "And it came back so grotesquely miserable, that we realised we had to rely on Larry Sider's sound," "and also by just showing glimpses ofthe wings in flight, and that was a good lesson for us." "The other theme that sort ofterrified us, in the original story about Gilgamesh sending a prostitute to seduce Enkidu," "was that we realised there was no way that we could create a sort offemale prostitute, and we contrived this "bachelor machine" kind oftable," "which was an elaborate trap, ingenious trap... with the secreted drawer here, which contained, ostensibly, the mysterious hidden cricket." "But when you realised that, actually, deep within the drawer... was that you felt ultimately that the cricket was secreted deep inside a vagina inside this drawer." "And here the element of luring him with raw meat - i.e. also, the flayed female figure." "I know we have to thank Alastair Brotchie's Atlas Press for having introduced us to the Austrian writer Konrad Bayer," "whose texts were incredibly ferocious, and in a way was instrumental in giving us an angle on Gilgamesh." "Now, this vagina that you see here - it was in fact a footnote that we'd read in a book" "of a young girl who was in an asylum, who was seen, or caught, having a cricket inside a glass bottle," "and masturbating with it." "And for us, it gave us..." "gave the impression that..." "Well, it gave the impulse for that scene." "Here we have a scene, essentially, with Gilgamesh." "We wanted him to work almost like the trapdoor spider, who suddenly emerges from his hole, after having set this vicious trap the table itself almost working like Kafka's table in ln The Penal Colony." "(Cricket chirping)" "And that was a genuinely, freshly-killed cricket." "As you can see, it's very malleable." "We just kept putting water on it, to keep the legs moving." "I think the next day it completely dried up." "(Hubbub of chirping)" "The other element that was was the tennis racket up on the high-tension wires here, which was an image that we had found once in our village as kids which just hung there, broken, over the wires." "And I think for us it was one ofthose absurd images that in a way, are even inscrutable to us, other than the fact that we could justify it by saying that maybe the strings were made of catgut, or hence from former Enkidus," "that had been attempting to go through this kingdom here," "which open up parentheses." "When we talked about the opening Visa de Contrôle number, these were actually the numbers of our passport." "We had by accident let our passports lapse, and we were given notice by Passport Control that we had 30 days to leave the country." "Then all-out panic set in, and we had lawyers attached to us." "But all our dealings were with passport controllers located in Croydon, which was called Lunar House, and therefore we inverted this title by calling it Hunar Louse " "hence the auxiliary title:" "Little Songs For The Chief Officer Of Hunar Louse, which was, essentially for us, this dreadful secondary role of almost like Passport Control," "patrolling the ins and outs ofthis essentially metaphysical tunnel, through which air or the wind storms through." "Here Gilgamesh has, as it were, a dream, and Enkidu is resuscitated in the dream," "and of course he has to essentially emasculate him, in order to maintain his kingdom from this..." "I know that when we started the film we had no music beforehand, and we said to Larry Sider that he had to create the most tactile sound universe," "just in case the music turned out to be bad." "So, we had the sound initially." "I mean, not initially, but Larry created this universe, and it was only afterwards that Dick Walter came in," "who was basically a commercials musician." "Here you can see many other tennis rackets hanging through the forest." "And in the end, we said all we wanted was a child's music." "Just find the instruments for a child playing..." "Almost fairground." "Drums." "You name it." "And a very sultry saxophone for the vulgar meat sequence." "And here again, you see now the innocence ofthe enchanted forest, and the extension ofthe control ofthe kingdom, even into the forest, where the animals are obliterated." "And the final victorious Gilgamesh." "After Channel Four saw this pilot, they immediately cancelled the project altogether." "The one homage we didn't get in - and it was a kind of sheer modesty ofwanting to dedicate this film to three mad artists:" "Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Heinrich Anton Müller, for whom we owe the image of Gilgamesh, and Adolf Wölfli." "But in the end we were just too shy, and we just said..." "we yanked it at the last minute." "(Siren)" "And at the end we hear the final all-clear siren - that the victim has been subdued and will be no further bother."