"Testing, testing." "One, two, three, testing." "Say hello." "Hello, hello." "Hello, hello, hello." "There are two magicians, Harry Kane and Karl Allen, who were quite a successful magician double-act." "Oh, man, we rock!" "We rock so hard." "And then they fell out because one of them was having an affair with the other one's wife." "Where's Karl?" "Oh, I don't know." "What the..." "Karl!" "Okay, look, so maybe this has happened, but let's just, for the next hour, pretend it hasn't happened." "How would you feel about that?" "Does that sound like a plan?" "When the betrayed magician finds this out, there's an awful catastrophe that happens onstage." "I accidentally cut my wife's head off in a guillotine trick." "Total accident." "But Karl, played by Rob, thinks it's deliberate." "We join the action about four years later, when they've gone their separate ways and they're both struggling slightly." "What about in the shop?" "I could dem a few tricks." "I might be something of an attraction." "Not in a good way, Harry." "Our lives are a bit screwed." "As a sort of last throw of the die, we decide to get back together to try and win a magic competition, win a bit of cash." "It would be strictly business." "In, win, split the money, goodbye." "No bar chat, bonhomie, or late-night laugh sessions." "If you're interested, please state the word "interested" at this point." "Interested." "Good." "Then, I was thinking for the prelims, we could do the cut-down routine, the 10-minuter." "If you're on board please state, "See you there, Harry,"" "and we will see each other there." ""See you there, Harry."" "Likewise." "Goodbye." "Goodbye." "Likewise." "Andrew O'Connor, the director, came up with the idea and sort of worked it out with a few magician mates." "We wrote a treatment of that over about eight months." "We really liked the idea of doing a movie about magicians." "It seemed like a very original and funny, interesting area that hadn't been done before." "It was fairly clear that we wanted to go with Robert and David as the stars." "Even though the script wasn't originally written for them, in a funny sort of way I think it probably was, because their voices were very much in their heads as they were writing the characters." "Both of us were basically half expecting Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson to step in at some point to replace us, but they didn't do that." "Fortunately, David and I are still cheap enough to be in this film." "No, that's not the truth." "That's not at all the truth." "They write for my voice very well, which is great 'cause it means I don't have to do much acting, or, you know, put on a Geordie accent or anything." "Sam and Jesse somehow manage to find real bits of Robert and David and pull those into the characters." "So, this is nice." "You've got a nice flat." "I bet you say that to all the men whose flats you go round to." "Not that you go round to loads of men's flats." "Rob and I have been working together, although it was initially just pissing around when we were students, but what we now call "working together," for maybe 13 years now." "Well, weeks go by where we basically can't stand the sight of each other." "Yeah, it's quite boring." "Yeah." "Well, actually, the hate is kind of fun, in a way." "It keeps us sort of lively." "Oh, yeah." "David is just this personification of Middle England, you know." "If you wanted to remake Hancock, I think David would be brilliant in that." "And Robert's sort of cooler, and sort of, you know, that slacker generation thing that he has." "So they're very, very different, both as people and as actors, but somehow they manage to complement each other perfectly." "It's quite a relief to hear you say that." "It's very nice to be able to know so clearly the actors who're going to be reading your lines, because then you can feel very comfortable writing for them and then know what was going to make them funny." "Sometimes people can get a bit carried away with the difference between film and TV comedy." "In general, it seems pretty similar, but you have to be aware that your face might be suddenly the size of Mount Rushmore." "You know, have to calm down the gurning." "Otherwise, it's just going to hurt people." "You'd better shut your mouth, Karl." "Just shut up and apologise." "Shut up and apologise?" "Our characters' relationship is that of two friends who have fallen out." "And they worked together for years, and so there's a lot of chemistry." "Harry is a very repressed man." "He's got deep feelings of unhappiness and unfulfilled ambitions and guilt." "A slightly autistic kind of socially-incompetent, but very technically-able, geeky magician." "And in the last five years have there been any major changes to your circumstances?" "I am widowed." "I'm a widower." "And do you mind if I ask, for the form, how she died?" "Right." "She..." "She was..." "You know." "No." "Sorry." "I actually cut her head off with a guillotine." "Shit!" "So I think he's got a lot of excuses for being a little bit tentative with the world." "A lot of double-acts, they're very different people." "Harry's much more technically minded, more of a guy who'd be more comfortable in his workshop than onstage." "And Karl's much more of a showman, much more ambitious." "You must admit, it is going well." "Maybe." "Maybe, so far, the whole thing isn't a total fucking fiasco." "I play Karl Allen, who used to be a magician, but since he split up with David's character, Harry, has moved more into mentalism." "I'm sorry, but I'm in the middle of a meeting." "I would like you to dip into your brain and think of a word." "Would you both please leave immediately?" "A word, a simple word." "Okay, dickhead." "My word is "dickhead"." "Perfect." "There's a hierarchy that, you know, people who can do very clever..." "Manipulating cards and deft things with their hands, they're sort of at the top." "And then mediums who pretend to communicate with the dead are kind of near the bottom." "Medium?" "You're going to do psychic?" "It's with a very modern twist." "Oh, my God!" "Is..." "Is there a John in tonight?" "A Mr John something?" "Seriously, no Johns?" "All of the characters in the script are so carefully written and carefully contrived that they needed to be cast with just as much care and attention as the leads." "Linda is the female lead." "And she's the girl who has to fall in love with David Mitchell's character, Harry." "She's quite, sort of, up for it." "She's quite fun." "Doesn't take life too seriously, doesn't take herself too seriously, just wants to kind of have a bit of a laugh." "Which is why she's interested in becoming a magician's assistant." "You see, I really, really want to do this." "I brought a CD to audition." "It's not magic." "It's just a dance routine me and Karen used to do in the stockroom." "She just does a dance to Gay Bar, which is kind of fun." "So, if you just want to imagine that there's two of us standing next to each other just doing pretty much the same thing." "That's my audition, basically, to try and persuade Harry to let me be his magician's assistant, having had no experience." "I meet Linda when I'm demonstrating knives in a shop." "Bloody hell!" "Are you all right?" "Of course, with a knife like this, you're never likely to be depressed or lonely." "I'm making a complaint." "Darren Boyd, who's been making me laugh for a very long time, and he plays Otto brilliantly." "I am Mind Monger, and I am about to enter your brain." "I don't know." "The beard just feels wrong." "Then let's lose the beard, man." "You're not married to the beard." "As your agent, that's why I'm here, help you make these hard choices." "He has an unbending enthusiasm and a genuine passion, shall we say, for his involvement with Karl." "Harry?" "Oh, hi, Tony." "What the hell?" "Are you off to the Shield?" "Why are you taking a ferry, you big loser?" "Steve Edge plays Tony White, the sort of lecherous comedian." "He's a card magician and just spends his time travelling the country, trying to sleep with as many women as he can." "I'm Tony White." "Don't believe the rumours." "They're all true." "Except for the duck thing." "I mean, do I actually look like the sort of bloke who'd suck off a duck?" "The marvellous Peter Capaldi is Mike Francis, the, sort of, judge of the magic competition." "This is sick." "This is so sick it might actually make the papers." "He likes to maintain the standards that he's come to expect from magicians the world over." "He's been terrific." "Had his hair sort of bouffed up, and..." "Obviously, that's not his whole performance but, you know, it just helps." "He's great." "He's very, very funny." "He's very, very right wing, which is great fun to play." "Thank you." "Tony White showing you a new flower trick and also his distinctive ring piece." "Don't worry, right over the kids' heads." "Anyhow..." "And Andrea Risborough, playing Dani, who's very funny as the slightly credulous, Geordie girlfriend of Karl's." "Dani is a really sweet and trusting person." "She's not stupid, but she can be fairly naive." "So, what would you like?" "Come on." "You know." "A pint for me, please, and a white wine for the lady." "Amazing." "White wine." "Wow." "Yeah, you got me." "That is exactly what I drink." "White wine, or red wine." "Or a lager." "Andrew, which is unusual, is an incredibly collaborative, easy-going, intelligent director." "It's very interesting when you work with, essentially, first-time directors." "They're enthusiastic about what you're achieving, they're incredibly thankful for what you're trying to do." "I'm much more involved with things." "Rather than somebody saying to me, "This is what I'd like to do,"" "it's much more like, "Hey, James, how do we achieve this?"" "He knows what he wants and he knows when he's got it." "And he's very good at conveying how to give it to him." "And cut." "Not bad." "We're going to do one last take." "He's just very good at talking to actors, it turns out." "He gives you very detailed notes." "He is more or less at one with the funny bit in every scene and how to bring that out of you." "He also loves the gags." "Andrew comes from a magic background." "Was, as I'm sure he'll tell you in his interview," "Young Magician of the Year when he was 18." "Have I mentioned that I was the Young Magician of the Year at 18?" "Andrew is a walking magic encyclopaedia." "From the ages of 14 to 22, I earned a living as a professional magician, doing sort of working men's clubs and theatres and tours and hotels." "And I was sort of cocky and, you know, got people up and took the mickey out of them." "And I even spoke with a Northern accent, and I wasn't even Northern." "It was mental, you know." ""Take a card, put it back." "Is it the six of clubs?" "Thank you very much."" "It was ridiculous." "The year I won it, Noel was second." "That man there's called Scott Penrose." "Scott is our magic consultant on our movie." "We managed to make the film authentic." "Quite simply, we have a fantastic magic consultant on the film called Scott Penrose, who is there to make sure that everything we do is good and correct." "So, every trick that you see in the film," "Scott has either built, designed, looked after, taught magicians." "So if the magic isn't very good in the film, it's absolutely Scott's fault." "This looks amazing!" "The tricks that you will see in the Magicians movie..." "A lot of classic tricks." "The guillotine illusion, where a blade passes through someone's neck." "Or not, as the case may be." "We're going with the guillotine, Harry, because I want to win, yeah?" "I'm not messing about." "A lot of smaller magic as well." "As I said, David is doing the multiplying billiard balls, which is a classic trick." "I learnt how to make them turn into three and then four." "But that very simple, not very spectacular thing, the joke of which is that it looks a bit shit, actually took more practice than all the levitation, guillotining, sub trunk stuff all put together." "You'll see some dove productions, linking rings." "You'll see some card manipulations." "You'll see Jessica levitated." "It feels very uplifting." "Yeah." "Actually, it's a bit tight round my bum, Harry." "Could you just get a finger in there and give it a waggle?" "Under the strap, obviously." "Not in my bum!" "Sure, yes, I'll just get my hands in there, under there." "The guillotine illusion is quite a scary prop." "It's designed not to cut anybody's head off, although, at the same time, it will cut things as well." "Well, as you know, the actors have learnt some tricks." "The movie's peppered with some real magicians." "There's a character in the movie called Wolfgang who puts out a cigarette on his tongue." "And that is played by a guy called Pat Page." "He's 74, one of the world's greatest magicians." "And Pat sold me my first magic tricks when I was 13." "He came into a magic shop I was working in at the time and bought some tricks, and I've known him ever since." "He gives me the odd job occasionally for old time's sake, you know." "Nice work, Wolfgang." "It's the kind of trick that no one would ever dare do today." "There's no method to that, apparently." "He just takes the pain." "Sick bastard." "People don't know that there are things called magic conventions where you can go and buy tricks." "So we set up a magic convention in the movie, and we invited real magic dealers from around the country to come and set up their real stands and demonstrate their real tricks." "One, one, six, take two." "And background action." "Action!" "Linda, Jessica Stevenson's character, is strolling around the convention, checking out some tricks." "She finds the fake turd." "Genuine fake turd based on the 1947 Ted Krueger original design." "It's a classic." "Is it magic?" "It's on the borderline, where magic meets novelty." "This whole world, this whole magician's world, of not-the-best-taste kind of presentation and clothes and all this sort of stuff," "I thought was just a great world to explore." "And also it has this slightly geeky kind of element to it." "I just thought that they caught that perfectly in the script." "It's great to see the very strange and secluded world of the magicians and the amateur magicians doing their, frankly, terrible tricks." "Quick shake." "Turns white." "It is a real community of people who are obsessed with one thing." "And they come apart as if by magic." "The thing that struck me particularly down there was that magic, in some ways, is show business for people without any charisma." "You know, these are people with no natural talent, but they've found a way to be onstage." "I didn't realise the Magic Circle is actually a place." "They go down..." "They've got a club there, and they go down to the bar, and they talk to each other about magic tricks." "It's not like Stonehenge." "No, it's more of a pub." "Stonehenge, some people believe, is an actual magic circle." "Those people are morons." "One, two, three, four." "We've gone as far as we possibly can with two comedy actors that aren't magicians." "So we have spent a couple of months training them to do magic, and they've worked out surprisingly well." "Really, the essence is just getting the persona as magicians rather than just the successful execution of the trick." "The real challenge was to get them into the mindset of a magician and acting like them." "It's very funny watching everybody learning how to do the magic because they all look vaguely nervous." "I mean, it's not exactly like Keanu Reeves, spending three months to learn karate, or kung-fu, or sword fighting." "But it..." "Yeah, it is a bit like that." "The trick I have is the Flowers of Love, which is a vanishing bouquet of flowers." "The Flowers of Love." "And much like human love, one minute it's there, but by morning, 'tis gone." "David was given much easier magic tricks to learn than I was, and so it looks like he picked it up quicker." "I had to learn the rolling-a-coin-across-your-hand thing." "Bend the knuckle, that's a tip, that's the first tip." "And then I spent four weeks practising this." "And the idea is to get the coin to roll gracefully across your knuckles, pass it under and then transfer it, and it goes round in an even circle." "After four weeks, this is how well I can do it." "The evidence is we were both given some tricks," "I mastered the ones I was given, Rob didn't master the ones he was given." "All of them." "I honestly gave up." "The people who can do it are freaks." "And then it turns out that most magicians are only good at it because they practise for hours and years." "I mean, where's the fun in that?" "Yeah, Gandalf doesn't practise." "Oh, my God!" "You are kidding!" "Well, we're here in beautiful Skegness, looking at the pier, which stops as soon as it gets to the water." "We got to film in the fantastic Nottingham Theatre Royal." "Gorgeous theatre." "We did all of the final magic show there." "The theatre world in Nottingham, where we are today, is amazing and looks brilliant on film." "We got a whole audience of local people to come in and be the audience, and they were very well-behaved." "I started to get quite badly heckled." "I went out and started chatting to them all." "Nobody else did." "I was the only one who fell for it." "Poor bastards had to stay there for about eight hours, clapping and doing various things they were ordered to do." "It became quite addictive actually, after awhile." "It was really quite fun chatting to everyone." "And I thought I saw Johnny Depp in the audience, but it wasn't him." "It wasn't him." "We are on a lovely beach called Queens Park Beach in Mablethorpe, on the east coast of England." "Most of the scenes on the beach were fun." "It's a nice working environment." "Who wouldn't want to work on a beach most of the time?" "I suppose that's the attraction of being in Baywatch." "I'd have to ask the Hoff." "I love the scenes on the beach, where Harry tries to piss on Karl's head." "No, I don't like that." "He's buried up to his neck in sand, on the beach, for some sort of trick." "He's carrying out a Blaine-style stunt." "The Sandathon, or Sandurance, as I think he calls it." "Here's the pitch, you don't need food." "You are living off your brain." "The first thing that occurred to me was wasps." "And that if I was buried up to my head, there would be wasps around." "That was my first thinking." ""I hope they're going to have some expert swatters."" "It turned out to be okay." "I was actually in a wooden crate on a stool." "So my head was poking up, but I was actually sitting down fairly comfortably." "But it wasn't very nice to be in there for very long." "'Cause the wind gets up, and then you got sand whipping in your face." "And then the sun's boiling you." "Harry, David Mitchell's character, is furious with him, and comes storming down to the beach." "Dirty tricks!" "You had to resort to dirty tricks." "Harry?" "I come, and shout, and scream at him and threaten to piss on his head." "Urine." "How's that?" "Lovely warm urine, all over your head." "And I didn't even have to get my real knob out." "He did get a fake knob out." "A huge, stunt, Hollywood knob." "Just to try and put me off." "'Cause obviously my own penis..." "It didn't work." "It's too funny." "It's too funny." "...it's not very filmic." "Harry, look, don't." "Just let's talk about this." "Damn!" "I can't go now!" "I think that's a richly comic moment and I enjoyed playing that." "Well, it's funny." "Just a funny British film." "The little details and nuances are deeply embedded within the film." "I think what you have in the two central characters is..." "Are two characters that you can really invest in." "Hey, Harry!" "It's a really warm tale, you know, and it has a great, filmic story." "Everyone's really, kind of, funny." "Thank you." "There's lots of very, very good comic turns in it." "It's just that it's a really good night out." "And that maybe it'll encourage you to learn a card trick." "What are you talking about?" "That was a joke." "You don't really want to learn card tricks." "It's a story that makes sense, and you are engaged by the characters, having to laugh with and at them." "Lot of laughs, as well as drama." "And, cut!" "Blimey." "Well, I don't think that anyone has ever seen a final quite like that, and I do not, in any way, mean that in a positive sense." "Hello, my name is Andrew O'Connor." "I am the director of Magicians, and this is the commentary, we're very excited about this." "In the room, I have many, many people, possibly the most ever gathered together for one commentary on one British comedy film." "Forty-five thousand." "There literally are." "They won't all talk, though." "First of all, we have our two stars, David Mitchell and Robert Webb." "Hello." "Hello." "I am Robert." "I play Karl." "I am David." "I play Harry." "And we have the two writers of the movie, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong." "Hello, Sam Bain, here, one of the writers." "And Jesse Armstrong, also writing." "Not at the moment." "I am." "All this is grist to the mill." "And the producer of the film, Mr Ollie Madden." "Hello." "So, rather than us all just talking over each other and seeing who can be the funniest, we thought we'd sort of do little sections each." "Although we may still pop in and say stuff." "So, starting us off are Mitchell and Webb." "Hello, again." "Hello, there." "Now, these are genuine pictures of us..." "That's me." "That's me as Zorro." "...when we were little." "I did used to run around dressed up as Zorro." "That's me with the spectacles of a much larger man." "And that was..." "We looked in vain through our old photos for pictures of us with magic wands or, you know, Tommy Cooper fezzes, and there weren't any." "No." "That's real." "That was real." "Wasn't it?" "Yeah, we did that." "We did that, yeah." "The rest of it is lies and trickery." "Are you going to do that any more, now that you've discovered you can do that?" "No." "The opportunity doesn't come up very often." "And those are special photos that we had..." "That's not genuinely from our youth." "I've never had hair like that." "No." "I used to wish I had hair like that, but now I think better of it." "You had a bad back that day." "I did." "Well, getting in and out of that box is murder on the lower back if you're a sufferer." "But I am also an actor and, therefore, a bit of a wuss." "That trick with the box is called the Sub Trunk." "It's a famous magic trick and you spent a lot of time rehearsing that." "And it takes three seconds in the movie, and no one thinks it's real." "But we were sort of worried that..." "Obviously that Harry and Karl aren't brilliant magicians, but they are making a living." "And we thought the best way..." "I think we agreed this with you, Andrew, that the best way of making them look about as good as they would be would be for us to really try as hard as we can." "That's what we could do." "Yeah." "And then they won't look a bit bad." "Always doing our very best." "Yeah." "That was in a venue in Butlins." "That was a real theatre." "That was a real audience..." "That one's in Skegness." "People genuinely go there to have a nice time." "Good luck to them." "A real sticky floor, and real smells." "Yeah." "Cabbage." "Very strong smell of cabbage throughout Butlins." "I think we brought that with us, to be fair." "Did we?" "We had it pumped in." "Yeah." "In order to depress the actors." "Are you okay?" "Yeah, I'm okay..." "That box was made by a magician called Scott Penrose, and Scott Penrose is a member of the..." "He's actually on the Council of The Magic Circle." "He made that magic box for us, and he also plays Magibot in the movie." "And that means he has powers to destroy people with the blasts from his fingers." "Literally." "Yeah." "Was he one of the members of The Magic Circle who threw you out of The Magic Circle?" "Oh, dear." "He took you by one leg and one arm, while Gandalf took you by the other." "Don't ridicule the Circle, man." "This is hard enough as it is." "I made a TV show that got me thrown out of The Magic Circle." "What was it called?" "It was called Secrets of Magic Revealed." "What did they object to?" "Careers of Magicians Ruined, it was called." "Yeah, so I was thrown out of The Magic Circle for that." "But the Circle's sort of forgiven me, and they were very helpful in making this film." "And so much so, in fact, we don't refer to them." "We call them The Magic Table." "There is a fictional organisation which may or may not have any similarity to The Magic Circle." "The little badge is quite similar." "Yeah." "Where's Karl?" "I think when Sam and I were doing a bit of research on the film, you directed us to the International Brotherhood of Magicians." "That's the..." "The I.B.M., the I.B.M." "You went to a real magic convention, didn't you?" "Later on in the movie, you'll see it." "Where they were doing real magic." "They did real magic and, in fact, some of the magicians that you saw in spots are the characters in this movie," "I think it's fair to say." "Absolutely." "Now, we had to build that box specially, because a real sawing-a-lady-in-half box..." "Can't really get two people in them." "They're not big enough to have sex in." "They're not." "Yeah, even that box..." "It's not quite clear what exactly they were getting on to." "They were having a bit of a one-person nude, one person with clothes on, cuddle." "We've all enjoyed that." "In the story..." "The film way." "In the story it said it's supposed to be oral sex but I'm not sure you could have got down there." "No." "My wife made that very point." "Did she?" "Yes." "Filthy-minded wife." "My wife." "So, should we talk about the guillotine and how scary it was?" "It was pretty scary." "Genuinely a very scary object, and very, very noisy." "I think I've never had my head in it." "If you're fiddling around with those locks right next to people's ears, there, that gets pretty noisy." "And then, when it comes down, people's ears blow up." "I mean, it didn't." "Everything was very carefully looked after by Andrew and his team of wizards." "But people were genuinely scared." "We were scared." "It's a pretty intimidating object." ""Is it safe?" "Can we check?" "Is that blade safe?" ""That's not going to fall at any point, is it?"" "No, no, there's seven security mechanisms." "All actually there." "Here's a real trick you learned." "Yes, and I was very pleased when we did a screening of it that people genuinely winced." "And, I think, winced at it being a nasty moment, rather than winced at a trick done badly." "So, here it comes." "There you go." "It is kind of gruesome." "Looks good." "Oh, please." "Oh, and the moment you change back to a real knife." "Done very nicely, there." "Well done." "We shot this, really, in the real Wilkinson." "And people were shopping while we were making the movie." "And getting a little pissed off that we were in their way." "There's a little bit of that." "I was being fitted for my wedding suit upstairs in Lee's storeroom." "We should stress that you didn't buy this." "You didn't buy a suit." "No, it was a Wilco suit." "They do beautiful suits, don't they?" "Quite cheap crockery, but absolutely the most expensive suits available." "Greetings." "Now, at one moment," "I was going to be having a goatee beard throughout the entire film." "And I even let my..." "I even had a go at growing one myself, and it wasn't as bushy as that, but it was reasonable." "About the same length as Darren's got at the moment." "And then it was decided, because we were shooting out of order, we thought that we'd have to shave that off, and we'll stick a fake one on instead." "And then it was decided, I was very grateful for this decision actually, let's forget about the whole facial hair." "It was the very first day of filming, and we were shooting in these TV production offices, and I hadn't directed a film before and I was very, very, very scared." "You know, where do you put the camera?" "The lighting's taking forever." "And you come out, and you've got this beard on, and I think," ""It's not quite right, is it?"" "And the minute we put it on film once, you've got to work, so we had it trimmed..." "Eventually I thought, "You know what, let's just lose it."" "And that was a scary moment." "Sam, Jesse, who was there that day?" "That was me." "I remember that." "I think the problem is when someone who you know doesn't have a beard, comes on with a stuck-on beard, it's impossible to tell whether or not it looks real." "'Cause you know it isn't real, so it will always look fake to you." "But also I remember you couldn't talk." "No, you never freely..." "You never really can talk properly when it's just glued on in a good old British TV or film kind of way." "I think they have more special methods on films with bigger budgets, maybe." "I think it probably is growing them and then shooting it in story order." "It could be, quite literally, as complicated as that." "But I just thought that, you know, I mean, that you'd like to be on a big screen, see your facial reactions, quite a lot of your face is covered up," "or immobilized by the glue." "Exactly." "And that's what sort of put me off." "We just did it in Peep Show, didn't we?" "We had mixed feelings about that." "I think it sort of worked in the end." "Me, too." "But you cut down the amount I had to have it on." "It was very annoying." "You're much more funny in this." "Yeah." "We should have introduced Darren Boyd here," "and Jessica Stevenson we saw earlier." "We should've also introduced" "Sarah Hadland, who you saw having her head chopped off." "We didn't do any of that." "Sorry." "She was brilliant." "Okay." "Okay, come on." "Just keep moving." "I'm just really, really not sure this is a good idea." "Hello." "We're here for Caroline." "You could do a general introduction list of everyone in the film at this point." "I wanted to do a little movement like using the Force to close the lift door, but my director thought that was a little too much." "Little too much." "But I could've been wrong." "Probably was." "This is genuinely shot in a television production company." "It really is." "One that, coincidentally," "the director of this film owns." "Yes, yes." "I don't know how we managed to get that genuine location." "That's how tight the budget was." "In fact, basically the whole of the movie is basically shot..." "Costs, yeah..." "...in and around..." "The room in any television production company was bound to cost about 2 million pounds to hire for the afternoon, I think." "You know, Talkback would charge that." "You're actually Lord Mayor of Skegness, is that right?" "We spent a lot of time in Skegness." "And now, if you would turn to the window and look out of it, you will see the exact word which I have just implanted..." "This is Andrea." "Andrea..." "Andrea Risborough." "Coming up." "Now, that shot took quite a lot of work, didn't it?" "Yeah, we shot it in lots of different sizes." "And then we resized it in the edit to make it slightly closer." "We really did shoot that off the bridge." "Westminster Bridge." "Had to get permission from Tony Blair." "Is that right?" "We did." "For the "dickwad."" "Can you hang "dickwad" on a banner?" "Yeah, he insisted on monitoring the afternoon's filming." "Here's Andrea looking very, very beautiful." "The director of photography, James Welland," "I think makes you look great as well, obviously, Rob." "But she's particularly gorgeous in that shot, I think." "And here's a trick coming up from you." "Yes." "A little bit of sleight of hand." "This was that first scene where we were going to shoot this with the beard." "This is the very first day's filming." "Yeah, it would've looked shit, wouldn't it?" "Exactly." "Wow!" "Here's your trick." "Here we go." "Have my card." "I actually did that." "Only on the third or fourth take." "Fifth?" "Yeah, and I think I went..." "like that." "Can't quite hear "Ooh, well done."" "In my scared, first-day-of-directing sort of way." "This was the first day, wasn't it?" "Yeah, the very first day." "And this line, coming up now..." "Walk with me, Karl." "...that was put in later." "It wasn't really there." "The magic behind the magic." "So, here you go, magic behind the magic." "Now, this is a genuine magic shop, isn't it?" "Genuine magic shop." "Is it called..." "It's called Davenport's Magic Shop." "And it's underneath Charing Cross station." "It is." "Isn't it the oldest magic shop in London?" "I think almost definitely, yeah." "It used to be in Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum." "And, when I was a child magician, I bought my first-ever tricks there, and the man who sold them to me is in the movie." "You'll meet him in a little bit." "I think it's a shame that they had to move from Great Russell Street to underneath the main line station." "I imagine that day wasn't a happy day for that business." "Although it is quite great, the way it's..." "All the other shops, you sort of turn right when you come out of Charing Cross station and you're underground." "And it is sort of like something slightly magic, 'cause you turn left, and there's no other shops." "Nobody would walk that way except for somebody who's going to get some magic stuff." "I think it's kind of..." "A little bit of a, sort of, Diagon Alley about it." "It definitely is." "It really is." "Yeah." "We just saw Marek Larwood and Tim Plester, who play the magic geeks." "And, indeed, Mitchell, Webb and Bain and Armstrong, stalwarts," "Geoff McGivern, there." "Yeah, Geoffrey." "And that's Jessica Stevenson, who we didn't introduce when she was in Wilkinson's, but now we can." "Here she is, looking all tame." "The song in this scene changed a lot, didn't it?" "We had originally Bonnie Tyler." "Total Eclipse of the Heart." "Yes." ""Turning around," during the turn around bits and minding all the stuff." "It was a happy day, wasn't it, when we got clearance and also agreement from everybody that we should do Gay Bar." "'Cause I think, Sam and I, we spent quite a long time, and we all spent quite a long time listening to lots of little tracks, thinking what would be good." "People always ask me if Jessica made these movements up herself." "I always go, "No, she didn't."" "Yes, she did, though." "Did she?" "That's not true, is it?" "Well, she made up some of them." "The fallout-from-nuclear-war, she made herself." "I think some of the others are written." "I think you literally did make a cloud like an atomic bomb going off." "Yeah." "You needed a script." "Not to take anything away from her brilliance." "With her skin falling off, and the shock of her hair falling out." "The fallout." "The acid rain." "The acid rain." "Which is there in the performance." "That was not written." "I guess we should talk for a second about Jessica, about..." "It was quite a difficult part to cast, this." "The first thing I think about casting movies, is that people come in, we were all there, all of us." "Not Robert and David, but Sam and Jesse and Ollie, and people would come in and read the script, and sometimes it just wouldn't be funny." "They just wouldn't get the cadence or the rhythm of the script." "But then some of them just came and had a natural feel for it." "And Jessica, absolutely, from that very first audition..." "She's amazing, definitely." "She sort of claimed the part, didn't she?" "She's a dream actress for my film 'cause she kind of makes everything real and everything likable, and everything funny." "That's not funny, though." "That's definitely not funny." "We spent a lot of time on this scene about the editing choices." "Do we go close?" "Do we cut to David for reactions?" "And then in the end we just sort of decided," "Sam, you felt this very strongly, that we should just have a wide shot and let her just perform." "Well, there's kind of that car crash moment, isn't it, of David's reaction, which makes it, hopefully." "What was your favourite bit?" "The bit where you were on the floor." "What's your favourite bit, David and Robert, of the movie?" "Of the movie?" "Yeah." "Lord of the dance." "I'll let you know when it happens." "Maybe at the end, we can all decide what our favourite moment of the movie is." "That'll be exciting." "So, what you're saying is, basically, keep tuned." "Or fast-forward." "That's your choice." "You can fast-forward, hoping that you'll catch it towards the end." "Yeah, but what jewels are they going to miss on the way?" "None of us at this moment." "No." "No." "A nice selection of shirts we put you in, David." "Yes." "I was very comfortable in those shirts." "It's like wearing a magic shirt, actually." "I think it was Ollie that said I looked like a Nigerian taxi driver." "I think I may have made that comment." "So, that is the real Derren Brown." "We're watching a bit of Derren Brown." "Who let us use some footage from his TV show." "Courtesy of Objective Productions, Andrew's company, again." "Absolutely, yeah." "Thank you, Derren, for letting us use your clip of the show." "That's a real David Blaine poster in the background there." "Oh, I didn't notice that." "And there's a shot that we cut from this scene, in which David and Harry ask how..." "David wants to go to the competition and Karl looks up at a poster which Otto has designed for him, which is a spider diagram planning his career." "A call for Brazil, a call for Slovakia." "Franchiseability." "Franchiseability." "Erotica." "Erotica." "That's me looking at it, probably." "Oh, no, it's coming up." "So, how will people realise that he looks at the poster, and we don't cut to it." "There are loads of little scenes we cut from around this section of the film, that we filmed, and they should be on the DVD in the deleted scenes section." "But we all kind of felt that it needed a bit of speeding up at this point." "There were three, sort of, little auditions of assistant scenes, that I..." "Which were very funny." "They were sad to lose." "Yeah, we were." "And there's a really great scene where Karl and Otto are playing chess, and..." "It's just great." "I really love it." "I love the way it's shot." "I love the performances." "But we just felt that, at this point, we really wanted to get to the competition, 'cause you were going into a world that you hadn't been to before." "This is where the film sort of really took off and started there." "Plus, also, the audition scenes in the van, I think we felt were a bit clichéd." "There were other films, like Shallow Grave, we've seen that sort of thing before." "We felt it wasn't part of..." "Commitments." "...the succession of comedy types." "The Commitments has it." "This was the last day of filming." "It's like that now, is it?" "It was difficult to get all the equipment onto the plane, as we flew over to Jersey." "Very hard to film on a plane in this country." "That's right." "And that shot makes you believe, hopefully, that this is actually a ferry..." "It was in a normal building." "Well, not quite a normal building." "It was in a polytechnic canteen, wasn't it?" "Yeah, very near one of the oldest pubs in Britain, which is the old Trip to Jerusalem in Nottingham." "This is..." "Funny Steve Edge here, nailing this disgusting character very well." "Yeah, he's brilliant, because it's very hard to make this guy likeable at all, because he isn't, in any way." "I sort of felt like this..." "I know quite a lot of people like him, so I felt a little bit sorry for him." "I think he makes it..." "He is likeable the way Steve plays him." "We had lots of actors coming in who basically played him without the likeability of it." "It was just like, "Oh, my God."" "Not only the lack of likeability, Sam, we were horrified" "by some of the choices." "Yeah." "Now, if you look closely at David Mitchell's face during the end of this scene, you'll see that he's smirking ever so slightly." "He's about to laugh." "And now..." "I'm worried about it." "That's merely a..." "See, I was frowning there to slightly cover it." "Demi-corpse." "See it in the eyes." "Watch." "Pause it, and you'll see it." "I think I got away with it." "I think you get away with it." "It's very difficult." "Now, that's a little shot there of Jersey, where none of the actors went." "Never went." "I went for one day with the camera crew." "This hotel building is actually in Chertsey, near the M25." "These are real magicians and real tricks." "Real magicians, real tricks." "Really being done." "And I think, to the Jersey thing..." "That is me." "The Jersey thing, I think, came about because, I think, when we were first writing this script, we had in our mind, that there was tax breaks to be had for filming in Isle of Man." "I don't think even anyone told us that, but in a kind of servile way we thought it was good to shoot in the Isle of Man." "During the, you know, long..." "Spider-Man 3 is set in the Isle of Man." "It is." "And they didn't get a penny for it." "So, this guy's called Pat Page." "He's in his mid-70s." "He's one of the world's most famous magicians." "He's worked for Paul Daniels and Derren Brown and David Copperfield, and he is the guy who showed me my first real magic trick when I was 13." "The lovely Pat Page." "He's amazing." "And he really does do this." "He's brilliant." "He just does that." "And that was Peter Capaldi, head of the judges." "Nice work, Wolfgang." "Again, in the same way that Steve just came in and nailed Tony," "Peter just came in and..." "I imagined this character much more of a sort of a fat northerner." "That's how I sort of imagined him." "Yeah, likewise." "Peter was, sort of, both perfect and a little bit different." "Although our plan of sort of taking it in turns talking has gone out of the window a little bit, I'm going to hand over to Sam and Jesse." "Do you want have a little section?" "Anything you want to..." "Certainly." "Or, unless, you want to talk about directing." "I'd rather not do that." "No, of course I would." "Have a little chat first about the writing." "I mean, this film is an Andrew kind of film, I think." "In a very real sense, that's a truth and not just a piece of bullshit that directors put on films, because you originated the idea of the film, and you came to us for the treatment." "I did." "Which you'd written with three other guys." "Andy Nyman, Anthony Owen, and David Britland, who were all magicians, and have all absolutely lived through this world of magic competitions." "And when I was 18, I entered a magic competition a bit like this, not quite as good, called the Young Magician of the Year, and I won it." "And so, in lots of ways, it absolutely reflects parts of my life." "And certainly Tony is based on two or three people who I really know." "In some sense, he's me in my early days." "So, yeah, it is." "But talk about the writing." "So, I brought you this treatment, this storyline..." "Yeah, and we thought it was a great world to write a film in." "We obviously knew and liked you and wanted to work with you, and thought, "Yeah, let's do it."" "So we kind of re-jigged it quite considerably, brought in new characters." "I had the Isle of Man tax advantage idea." "That's what's you brought to the table." "He needed it to be somewhere where Harry had to fly" "to do it." "Absolutely." "I think the Isle of Man thing was in back of our mind." "We set it on the Isle of Man, turned it into a plot point, and then I think when we came to choose where we were going to set it, it suddenly looked a bit cheesy that we were doing it," "'cause the Isle of Man." "Some people knew about this one, the tax advantage that had since been abolished." "And we had to think, we have to find another bloody island off the UK, where we could conceivably have a magic competition." "A lot of people who interviewed us actually, have assumed that there's some tax advantage for shooting in Jersey." "And I've had to say that we didn't even get to go there." "And also we went to the beach, didn't we?" "For the head in the sand." "That's another requirement." "Yeah, right." "You know, there's literally nowhere else you have to fly to but the beach, other than Jersey, in the world." "We couldn't think of anything." "It's the nicest place..." "That we could afford." "We spent a whole morning with the atlas." "But it was an old atlas of Libya." "Lithuania." "Yeah." "Nearly, very nearly, set it all on the Baltic Coast." "The original treatment was a kind of mock documentary," "Christopher Guest style, and the original draught we wrote of the script was in that style with lots of bits of camera interviews and all shot like that." "And it was more of an ensemble piece with four magicians who didn't really know each other that well and had not much of a relationship back-story." "So then, when Ollie Madden came on board..." "Say, hello, Ollie." "Say, hello." "Hello." "I've done that, haven't I?" "Do it again." "Hello." "And you know, at that point, we already wanted..." "We knew we wanted Dave and Rob to be the leads." "So, talking to you, Ollie, we sort of decided that we dump the mock doc thing." "Ollie chomped on his cigar and said, "Make it a normal picture, guys."" "Kids, kids." "Until it was a creative co-decision." "We all decided that they've made a lot of those mock documentary movies around, including their fair..." "They are not always terribly successful." "And there'd been enough of them, and we probably weren't Christopher Guest." "So, let's try and do a normal movie, right?" "That was quite a big jump for us and quite a big change." "It took a lot of work in terms of readdressing the script, didn't it?" "We had to cut all those speeches where they spoke straight to camera." "And do you remember the draught where we just put, "He talks to a bloke."" ""And he's funny."" "And of course we had to sort of..." "The other big note, which was, in a way, bigger, which is trying to make it more about David and Robert's," "Karl and Harry's back-story and about their relationship." "'Cause it wasn't really about that, originally." "So that, kind of, was the..." "Trying to keep the material we loved, while putting new material in about their relationship, was sort of the biggest challenge." "And their rivalry." "And their rivalry." "Exactly." "Which kicks into gear here." "...be very good, and that will be very interesting for me." "Here you go." "Karl takes off the red jacket." "Yes, his former..." "That's really Jersey." "That was really Jersey." "And this is Skegness." "Mapplethorpe Beach." "So, Sam, tell me more about the writing process." "I sit in a room, and you sit in a corner crying and figuring your tax advantages." "One of you does the vowels, one of you does the consonants, am I right?" "Yeah, well, we sort of sit together in a room thinking of ideas." "And then we go off and write dialogues separately." "Because we need our flow, don't we?" "Need to get our flow on." "Yeah, need to check our e-malls." "And then we e-mall each other relentlessly, until we have 550 draughts and we're willing to kill ourselves." "And how did you find the process of writing a film, as compared to writing a sitcom, which is what you normally write?" "It's harder." "Why is it harder?" "It's longer." "It takes about three times as long as writing a sitcom." "Exactly three times as long." "Well, it's harder, 'cause for one thing, the characters have to change." "In the sitcom they resolutely don't." "That's the whole point." "For tax reasons." "For tax reasons." "So making it about characters changing while being funny is..." "You know, you've got drama bits, you got to address some of that." "And also the tone, you know." "I think the biggest challenge for this was, like, what's the tone going to be?" "Because in Peep Show we knew what that was and we could do it." "Sort of a full series, and that's fine." "But this was, is it a big, broad comedy?" "Is it a sort of dark, edgy comedy?" "Is it a mock doc or is it not?" "All that sort of thing was, kind of, the most difficult thing to get right, I think, for us." "What would you call it, now?" "Just sort of hard-edged rom-com." "Call it Hootenanny Good Time." "That's what I'm going to put on the poster, isn't it?" "A Hootenanny Good Time for All with Jools Holland." "Is Jools Holland going to be in it?" "We're still waiting for Jools." "Yeah, it's a rom-com with lots of unnecessary swearing to piss off the parents." "Yeah, there's a little bit of that, isn't there?" "I'd like to say that I can't drive, and yet, in the film, it looks like I can drive a quite large van." "Who was your driving double?" "I don't know." "It was our runner with a wig." "Oh, yes, it was." "Yeah." "We never actually see him behind the wheel." "He's just wearing your jacket." "That levitation kit is total bullshit." "We know how you do the levitation." "It's not with anything like that." "No." "You sort of wanted not to tell us how the tricks work for quite a long time." "Then, when we were actually filming it, you sort of couldn't..." "Because it's disappointing." "The thing is that any magic secret you find out..." "You say, "Oh, is that it?" "All right." "Okay."" "Your favourite quote is the guarding the empty safe." "Magicians are guarding an empty safe." "There's nothing there." "Nothing to find." "Makes me think, though, that your programme, Secrets of Magic Revealed, is probably really full of..." "No, we had to create amazing methods to give away." "That's the irony." "None of them were the real methods." "Absolutely." "How many series have you had commissioned, then?" "So you genuinely, you Jonathan Creeked it all up." "I just made it seem..." "I Jonathan Creeked it up." "That's what we did to make the methods more interesting." "That's just what we did, yeah." "Certainly, all of the tricks I learned..." "You just have..." "There's a thing coming up." "Look, look at that." "That ball is going between your fingers in a very skilful way." "Well, thank you very much." "How long did that take?" "Well, I was sort of fiddling with my balls in front of the telly" "for about three weeks..." "This is gold." "...for a couple of hours a day." "Should have put this in the film." "Repartee." "When she says, "Say it, Harry." "Say fuck me in the arse."" "My mom was sitting next to me during the preview and whispered, "Don't."" "She doesn't like..." "She likes you so much that she doesn't like you saying horrible words." "You can't even say shoot..." "If you are a first-time director, my main advice to you is don't set a scene in the back of a van." "'Cause it is very, very hard to shoot a scene in the back of a van." "Because there is no room to move the camera around." "Looks nice." "Yeah, looks nice." "I quite like the way that scene is basically all on one shot, isn't it?" "Yeah, there's a very good reason for that." "Yeah." "Couldn't move the camera, and didn't have a lot of time." "It's just amazing acting." "Oh, this is a nightmare." "Yeah, yeah, sure." "In the edit, Lucien Clayton, our brilliant editor put Velvet Underground over this first scene, and I've always thought of it like that." "And I thought I'd just mention that, 'cause I thought it." "I'm sorry." "We probably couldn't afford to keep it on, I imagine." "I don't know." "This is one of my favourite moments." "This line, that you don't even hear him say, "Puts poo in her handbag, seriously."" "I really love that." "It gets a laugh, and you don't even hear him say it." "One of my first rules of screenwriting is that I mention poo a lot." "Gets a laugh." "Yeah, mention the poo." "Should mention James Welland again here." "Just how lovely this looks when they sit in those rich velvet chairs." "How lovely they both look." "All this just does look totally like a hotel, which it absolutely was not." "Was it a RAF?" "Disused RAF..." "What was it?" "The officer's mess." "Yeah, we didn't even have to dress it that much." "We put in some furniture, but all the panelling and..." "Everything was basically as it was." "Including the carpet." "Rather gaudy, deep pile carpet." "When we were reqing for the movie, it was a really important question, what's the hotel like?" "That would really set the tone for how..." "You know, was it like Alan Partridge, very modern motel?" "Was it a very old-fashioned hotel?" "It really helps set the tone for us, I think, and the look for the movie." "Occasionally, there are ghosts of RAF fighter pilots." "Most of those don't show up." "Do they?" "I think only if you are watching in region two." "What region?" "I don't know." "What region are we in?" "We're in region two." "We're in region two." "Yeah." "Things have come to..." "Britain is in region two." "Unless this is a pirated copy, in which case it's any region." "So that is Scott..." "If you're watching a pirated copy, just think of the jeopardy to future film production that you're causing." "Fact." "So, that is Scott Penrose." "He was our magic consultant on the movie, who is in The Magic Circle." "Very important." "And plays Magibot." "And this is Jessica, genuinely..." "Not a real act though, is it?" "Well, to be fair, it's sort of a real act, only he hasn't got a silver face." "To be completely honest..." "So, it's worse than the..." "No, it's not, really." "He doesn't do the robotic movements, but he does produce doves." "And to make the dove flap its wings, you do something with your fingers." "Stick your finger up its arse." "Don't stick you finger..." "How can you assault the dove?" "Simply make it move by walk, and walking makes it flap its wings." "You do." "You stick your finger up its arse." "Well, that's what David is doing now." "That's what's happening in story terms." "That was a joke." "This was all ADR, wasn't it?" "Yeah, because the way the trick works, it makes a noise every time the levitation..." "There are little magic elves that do it that never stop chatting." "They just don't understand film." "ADR being Additional Dialogue Recording." "That was recorded after." "Yes, you have to literally, you have to try and match your performance." "It's very difficult to do, I think." "The only reason to have me around on the set was to explain what the acronyms meant." "VCR." "Video recording equipment." "But as we were saying, while we're talking about the writing process, as we're meant to be, but everyone is having a great time all over us, that Andrew's incredibly collaborative, and not..." "So, one of Sam or I went down to set, I think, every day of the shoot, which we are used to doing on TV shows." "But it's not always the way it works in film and it was very nice to be there every day." "Other writers look at me with jealousy and sort of go," ""Wow, you got to be on the set." You know, "You're amazing."" "So, it was very nice for us." "Also, Ollie was there every single day, as well." "I'm not sure how common that is, for your producer to be there." "It was a very collaborative process." "And every scene that we're in, we were actually there." "The odd scene you didn't turn up for..." "Only once I wasn't in." "Every time you see me on camera, that is me." "That's not quite true, Rob." "I just sent my photo." "There is a scene that you were in that you're not there, Robert." "What's that?" "There is." "There is a shot of you in the movie, and it's not you." "Not on the beach." "I look forward to that." "Have we had it yet?" "No." "Okay." "This is in the dealers' hall, which is..." "We went to a real dealers' hall in a convention and saw one and it's a weird atmosphere." "It was a bit like..." "For me, who used to collect comics, it was a bit like a comic convention." "Very male, quite smelly, with the occasional very scantily-dressed woman walking around, feeling slightly queasy at the..." "Just see how great Rasmus is." "Sorry to keep interrupting." "Rasmus Hardiker." "He's excellent in it." "And you sort of believe they're father and son from the same midlands..." "They look a bit the same, don't they?" "Yeah." "These are real magic dealers in the background." "All the dealers there came for..." "Just, I think they got a few hundred quid just to help us out." "They all set up their real magic stores and they all demonstrate real tricks that they really sell." "So that really helped us." "I love the look on Steve Edge's face there, after he's created a laugh with his joke." "So predatory." "Yeah." "So, this is Mapplethorpe Beach." "Was it cold this day?" "It was cold quite a few of the days." "I'm afraid we can tell that it's cold by my body language, which is not ideal." "It looks freezing." "I didn't know that." "I wasn't there that day." "I've never known it was cold that day." "Coming up again, one of my favourite moments in the movie." "When he kisses me, there's a look on Darren's face." "That." "Like he's a 12-year-old boy, who just got kissed for the first time, isn't it?" "He's so great, man." "We were sort of concerned about this." "For a while we thought about making Darren female." "And the Karl story would be he's gay, and in the film he comes to terms with it and goes off with a male Dani." "But he didn't." "I don't remember that." "So you didn't even bother changing Dani's name." "We called her Dani for tax reasons." "We couldn't change Dani." "We were a bit worried about the, you know, the sort of, the subtext of the, sort of, gay man, who ends up sort of lonely, and slightly..." "I don't know." "I think it was a little bit more interesting." "For a while we thought, is it a more interesting story to have..." "But we kind of didn't do that." "Because it seems funnier this way." "Again, we see..." "A lot of others came in for the part of Otto, and Darren just has this amazing ability, just to, the first time he reads it, bring it to life and hit the rhythms." "People have almost got this thing that comedy is easier than drama, but for me the truth is that as a comedy, actually, it's got to be real, and it's got to be funny," "you know, and that's a very hard thing to do." "Who's got the thing that comedy is easier?" "I hear it all the time from people." ""It's not like drama, " you know, drama is really serious, grown-up stuff." "Just..." "It's just, it's not true." "You've got to be funny as well." "This isn't a real toilet, is it?" "No." "The RAF place that we went to had loads of rooms that we just dressed up as..." "Well, this was actually a real toilet." "Except that we put those urinals on the wall." "And they had a carpet." "How many toilets, these days, have carpets in them?" "It wasn't a working loo any more, was it?" "You couldn't actually have a wee in there." "There's a whole sequence we shot in this room with Harry putting a note under the door of Linda, and then removing it with a fork, which was kind of funny, but we kind of thought, "Do we need it?"" "A little story cul de sac." "Didn't move the story along." "Yeah, it was a sort of, "Is he going to tell her of his own accord?"" "And then he chickens out, and pays a price." "But, yeah, I think it works just better that he wasn't..." "Absolutely, he wasn't going to tell her." "And then, Karl..." "Talking about the difference between sitcoms and film, one of the things about the film, I learned, is that the story just has to keep moving." "The story has to keep moving on." "You can't just stop, really." "I think, 'cause with a film, you sort of know you're going somewhere." "Whereas in a sitcom you just think," ""Well, I'm just here to sit and enjoy these jokes happening."" "In defence of sitcoms, I think you probably have to keep it going in a sitcom, too." "But it's just that, you know, for a commercial station, it's 23 minutes versus 90." "So, what's really challenging is the pacing, 'cause you can't just have a relentless pace in the film, in the way that you can get away with in a sitcom." "I'm actually sitting on a stool in a crate." "Are you?" "At that moment, yes." "I don't know, I wasn't there that day." "Yeah." "It was very, very comfy." "I was a bit worried about wasps, obviously, 'cause I wouldn't be able to defend myself." "Just with my tongue and..." "And when you had orange squash painted all over your head as a joke..." "That's right, yeah." "Was it uncomfortable in the sand?" "After a bit." "But I was very well looked after." "Watching this bit in the movie, I always slightly regret that we didn't have him wee on him." "I sort of feel like, "Oh, if he'd only weed", and then something else would happen." "Yeah, we talked about it a lot, didn't we?" "We even talked about could we put it on CGI." "Could we create some wee to go on his head, at one point." "That's James Bachman there." "Just saying, 'cause I know him really well." "We all know him well." "He is a very nice man." "He came down for the day and was in the middle of the big crew photo shoot on the beach, as if he's the director." "He was on my lap, I think." "Another Peep Show alumni." "Alumnus?" "Catherine Shepherd." "Alumnus." "She's really, really naughty." "She is very funny." "And in the background, in the far right there, is Alex Ferguson, our line producer." "He gives an excellent performance." "Good performance." "She looks over exactly at the right moment." "She's stealing this scene." "Yeah." "First take she wore..." "I made her take her sunglasses off." "She wore sunglasses in the first take." "Brilliant." "That's the kind of thing..." "You know, I can't put a price on that." "That would have destroyed this scene." "Destroyed the whole thing." "It's only going to be Alex listening at this point anyway." "Someone in the background with sunglasses or a Darth Vader helmet..." "It just seems like it's funny, having people in the background doing crazy stuff but it actually ruins it." "Filmed at RAF Ducksford on the final day of the shoot, which was a lovely sunny day and we were all very happy/sad, as we all said good-bye to each other." "Thought I hit a strike by the fear it's tied to." "It's a bit stronger than the last scene, isn't it?" "I think I knew what I was doing, by then, sort of." "Basically, just let the DP do it." "This scene is set in London, but was actually shot in Nottingham." "And I remember a little boy coming up to you, David, and saying, "Are you the one that signs the autographs?"" "Yes." ""Are you famous?"" "That was your job." ""Are you that one?"" "I've been trying to get hold of you." "Look, I just wanted to say..." "Shall I do a little section on what it was like being a first-time director?" "Yeah." "Yeah." "So, I've produced in television, and directed in the theatre." "Done a little bit of directing in telly, but this is really my first proper time deciding where to put the camera." "And it was fairly terrifying." "It's like going to war, as I describe it." "I'd say what really helped was having an amazing team" "I'd worked with before, in Sam and Jesse, and Ollie, who I got to know, who really helped." "And you have to pick your collaborators." "Your DP is incredibly important." "Your first assistant is very important in terms of helping you set up for the day." "The choices over the shots." "And we storyboarded the whole movie up front and didn't use a single one of those shots." "Is that right?" "Yeah." "Didn't use a single one of the shots." "Did it make you feel better?" "It gave me some choices, is what it gave." "You didn't use any of them?" "Didn't use a single one of the shots that were storyboarded." "What was this storyboard?" "Shots of people's knees..." "Literally, it was Remains of the Day." "All our headshots." "Yeah, and not a single..." "Was it because all the stuff in storyboard was sort of more adventurous, technically, or just..." "It wasn't that." "It was that, for me..." "We had like two weeks of rehearsal." "It was every day and that's..." "We'd come and you guys'd be there every day and we'd rehearse the scenes, and we'd block it through, and we'd all talk about..." "We'd change the script sometimes, we'd talk about the performances." "It was quite detailed, that work." "And then I'd go back and do some work based on that." "But once you get into a real location, that changes everything." "And you want the actors to have some real freedom in terms of moving around." "You don't want to be prescriptive with a comedy, was my feeling." "I guess, with a big action-adventure or sci-fi movie, there's a real argument for being very prescriptive." "But with comedy, I just felt people had to feel relaxed." "So we just felt that we were dictated by what was happening on the day." "We shot this in Chusick Town Hall, we should just say." "We find out how that trick is done in a second." "That's not really how it's done." "So, you see, the challenge was we shot it in 28 days on a tight budget, being able to make sure that you were getting the performances right, and also make it feel like a film and not like television." "Those were the main challenges that we faced." "And so I'd just..." "It's just having people around you that you trusted, and certainly having, you know," "Sam and Jesse and all of you there every single day." "And frequently it would go, "Is it funny like this?" ""Did you prefer that take?"" "And we'd talk about it when we were together." "We'd find a way to get through." "And for me the key thing obviously was about casting actors who I thought could really do it." "But you were under quite a lot of time pressure, right?" "This is a relatively low budget." "Is that correct, Ollie?" "Technically speaking?" "Yeah." "It's not a no-budget, it's not a micro budget, but it's low-budget." "And the thing that people don't realise about low-budget films is that it's not so much not having the crew, or not having the locations, it's about time." "And it just means that rather than covering a scene in seven different shots and having loads of choices in the edit, you just have to be much more decisive about what you need to make the film." "And with comedy, it's even harder because you want to let the camera run and just see what happens." "You just have to be very militant about making your days and moving on, otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell the story properly." "No, it's just about letting the camera run and letting the actors have a play, but what you really want for a comedy is loads of choices." "You want a wide shot, and a mid shot, and a close-up and a two shot, and the reverse with the actors both in." "And in the edit you really have got lots and lots of footage to play with." "And we didn't always have that." "There's only one or two times where I think," ""We should have some more shots."" "Most of the time, I think we have got the options." "I think that's really good." "I know there were tough days in the theatre, when you were really, really pushed." "But compared to doing Peep Show it was actually, we found it quite luxurious." "Really, 'cause we were, what, shooting four or five pages a day, as opposed to twelve." "So, when you..." "You were terrific saying, "Let's just have another take, just for you." ""And let's have a play around."" "You know, we never really get a chance to do that on television." "So, from our point of view it was strangely laid-back most of the time." "Not the stuff in the theatre." "That was pretty hectic." "Well, it's sort of slow-motion panic, isn't it?" "In that everything takes forever." "So there's quite a lot of time." "There's loads of fucking time." "But it's all going too slowly..." "There are certainly days where you sort of feel that..." "You know, certainly as an actor, you sort of feel that nothing has happened, and you feel you've got a lot to do that day and you haven't said any of your words with the camera going." "But I think, that is the case with television as well." "Well, the difference between film and TV, from my experience in making this was, it takes longer to turn the camera around." "Every time you move the lights, it's not 20 minutes, it's two hours." "But the one thing I figured that I could deliver in the film, on the budget and the schedule we had, was very good performances." "And I think we've really done that." "So it was very, very important to me that the actors felt, whether they really did or not, had the flexibility to play, and had some time to do it again, and just try again, and all spend time" "to get the performances exactly right." "Yeah." "So, even if we did feel stressed or panicked, it was important that you guys never knew." "That was the..." "You were a very good stress sponge in that way." "I don't think you ever emanated stress in the way that you claimed you were feeling it." "Certainly." "I think you absorbed a lot of it, although my problem is, I've always got my eye on the schedule." "I just say, you know, we got to do four pages today." "We've done one." "And it's 5.:00 in the afternoon." "If people aren't showing that they're panicking, that's going to make me panic more." "'Cause I think they've gone mad." "They can't really win with you." "Now, that's quite an impressive trick." "I have to say, I'm still impressed by the hoop around the body." "Oh, yeah, that's a good one." "And in fact, there's a little moment where you catch the hoop on the foot." "And I think you were doing that on purpose." "It was difficult and I loved that Harry was stressed and didn't quite do the trick properly." "That was his choice, wasn't it?" "Again, I think we should stress just how lovely this looks." "James Welland." "We took all day to shoot this scene." "It was our most indulgent scene." "But I think it just looks..." "Also we should mention Annie Hardinge, who did a great job with the costumes." "Jessica looks fantastic." "Sort of like a Thunderbirds style outfit there." "And Susie Munachen, who browned up David expertly." "We had, sort of, a lot of trouble getting that right." "Because it's got to look sort of plausible, but noticeable, that he has put all this fake tan on to justify the solarium story." "We actually shot an extra scene with that, didn't we?" "With them." "In the dressing-room with the vest, to try to make that clear." "But I think it is clear." "This is an interesting scene, because we originally shot this..." "The last shot of the scene, which is the only shot we did of him panicking and going, "Fuck."" "Generally, it was kind of, you know, the shots were very sort of..." "Sort of robotic, sort of, no emotion." "And we struggled a lot with the story 'cause there was a sense in which we didn't really know that Harry liked her for ages." "Was this an ad-lib on the day?" "Doing the, "Fuck."" "I think it was Andrew's idea." "Or did we just go, "Let's do one at the end" ""where you show how frustrated and pissed off you are."" "I think that..." "I mean, 'cause it is..." "Yeah, it was a bit of a worry at this point, that you're just maybe thinking he just isn't interested, and that's not the case." "We ended up writing and filming a whole new scene which we did as a pickup after the shoot, which will come later, which is the pros and cons scene in the bedroom to sort of indicate that he had some feelings." "Otherwise, you just don't know." "Because, you know, we can't bring in voiceovers like we did in Peep Show to say, "I like her", where he would say, "I like you," and she would have a word." "So it's kind of how do you write an emotionally repressed character without actually having him say anything." "No one's ever worked it out." "It's impossible, isn't it?" "That's why there aren't any." "I think the scene we did sort of fixes that." "Hopefully." "It did take a lot of thinking about." "But again, in that last scene, I just think it looks great and the performances are just amazing." "This was an interesting case in point in terms of your timing schedule." "So there's like an establishing opening shot and there is a two shot of Robert" "and Darren and then there's a two shot of Rosie and James." "And some singles." "Singles of you, singles of Darren." "But I didn't have time to pick up singles of the other two actors." "So in the end it wasn't quite the coverage." "But again, that's the amazing thing about editing a movie is, that you can change the whole essence of the scene and where the laughs come, by when you go for close-ups and when you stay out." "This scene was based on a real interview me and Jesse did years ago." "We were worried about how we were going to come across in this interview with The Times about our programme and we had a code word." "Courtney Conte, who was a producer we were working with at that time." "We were going to drop him if we were uncomfortable with what the other one was saying." "So we never did, but we thought it was very funny and used it in this scene." "He didn't have to use the code word." "No, I think we should have done but it was too late." "'Cause I'd already put my foot in it." "What did you say?" "I said we'd redefined the mainstream." "It was days like these, the disastrous." "ITV primetime." "I think you might've done, 'cause I think the mainstream's sort of been going downhill since then." "Now I think you've possibly redefined it as defunct." "It was also based on two incredibly depraved..." "Those two TV execs, we went once to meet the two most depressing TV execs we'd ever met." "A guy who looked like he thought he was going to be fired, not the next day but later that afternoon." "And his young, much more up, assistant." "It was a great pairing, this." "And I love how tired and depressed the man is and how he chose magic." "Earlier in his career he maybe worked on shows that he cared about and now he's just..." "I said to him, "You used to be at LWT making big Saturday night shows," ""and now you're on cable."" "Yeah, exactly." "Most dead people who have come alive again looking around in night vision shows." "We should say it's James Smith from The Thick of It and Rose Keegan, who's very funny." "Originally, that character was Chinese, and I have to say it is a slightly depressing fact that there are no non-white actors in this whole film." "Because we..." "It's great to try and, you know, write those characters, but it's difficult when someone comes in who's really good like Rose and you think, well, she is brilliant and she should do it." "It's just annoying because..." "The challenge with the movie was to try and get the total performances all to match up so people weren't doing different sorts of comedy acting." "And so our casting was very important from that point of view." "I'll have to say that, Ollie, you were very supportive in our casting because our big worry was kind of like, are we going to get given some, you know, clunky star name who can't do comedy and that never happened to us." "I think every single actor we got was our first choice." "Absolutely." "Ollie, do you want to have the floor for a little while, and talk about how you got involved in the movie and the process and how it's been?" "So, I had seen Peep Show." "I was working at a company called Intermedia that made this film, and I thought Peep Show was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen and I decided that it would be a good idea to sort of flagrantly copy the Shaun of the Dead I Spaced model" "and figure out if there was some way of working with the Peep Show people to make a movie." "And I harassed the writers, Sam and Jesse and Andrew, until they admitted to having written a script, or had a script called Magicians, which, as they said, was at that point a mock documentary" "and I read it in a single sitting, which is quite rare." "And I laughed out loud in my office on my own on at least 10 occasions, which is even rarer." "And then by that point there were a few other people who wanted to buy the script and make it." "But we were quite aggressive about it and managed to get into business and then..." "Ollie was very, very aggressive." "He would not take no for an answer." "Is that right?" "Yeah, and I love that in a producer." "He was just, I was going, "We'll do the next draught, I'll pay for it."" ""No, no." "We want to get involved." He was fantastically aggressive." "He is a very aggressive man." "He looks aggressive, he's just generally aggressive." "He's physically aggressive." "He is too aggressive." "It's the one word he'd use, isn't it?" "I wouldn't cross him." "No." "Early on in my career I worked for Harvey Weinstein, the founder of Miramax." "And he has a technique which is when he wants something in business he just doesn't stop until he gets it or doesn't get it." "And so I sort of took that approach with this." "Well, it worked." "Well done." "And then we started quite a long and thorough process of creatively developing the movie." "And also putting the money together for the movie, which sort of worked in tandem." "And the creative side was incredibly enjoyable and productive." "And putting the money together was fairly straightforward." "Although, with independent films, there are always multiple sources of financing." "And it's like a balancing act." "If any one of them falls apart, then the whole thing comes tumbling down." "And a week into shooting this film, we still hadn't closed the financing." "Which meant that things were still being paid for on credit cards, and..." "I had no idea of this." "Imagine, I was scared." "My first movie, can I do it?" "What do you do?" "We had close to a hundred people, all in one place, shooting, who hadn't been paid yet for their first week of work." "And someone was being difficult about a deal and it looked like the whole thing was going to fall apart." "And I was literally writing the speech that I was going to have to give to everyone, saying, "I'm really sorry, guys," ""but the show's over."" "Bloody hell." "That's the first time we have ever known anything about that." "I knew about that, because I was in the car with you when you got the phone call at 6.:00 in the morning, which I shouldn't really have been, but I just..." "I didn't tell anyone." "But I knew it was kind of edgy." "But what you have closed it down?" "Or would you have asked them to work for longer without any money?" "Or officially you would have had to say for insurance reasons..." "I think you would have to close it down because there would have been 20 or 30 people who would have been happy to carry on." "But there are a lot of people for whom this is just a job and they didn't really particularly care about what it is, or whether it happened." "They were just being employed and you can't expect people like that, reasonably, to work for no money." "Although, just to jump in, another difference I found about making a movie over television, is that in television people just finish one job, go right onto the next job, and they might make three or four series a year." "It's a career." "But I really felt, making this film, there was an extraordinary commitment from the crew." "That they would, you know, work incredibly hard, do longer hours, and just do whatever you wanted them to." "I never felt that really extraordinary commitment before." "It's amazing." "We should just say that we had some amusing negotiations that we had to get into to try and keep those lights in the background on." "And there was one particularly surly, and actually racist..." "In Skegness." "...owner of an arcade who was not very cooperative." "But then reason prevailed" "and we managed to..." "Money prevailed." "Can I just introduce Alex MacQueen, who is about to appear onscreen, who just did a brilliant turn as the Stooge." "Another Peep Show guy, but..." "And The Thick of It." "The Thick of It." "And he's quite brilliant." "This is probably my..." "Coming up is my favourite scene in the movie." "If I were to pick a favourite scene in the movie, it would be this scene." "If I had to pick one." "It is fantastic." "Brilliant performance and a brilliant piece of writing." "A fantastic monologue." "Yeah, and I just love your reactions to him." "When we go to the two shot and you see..." "You look like, "This guy's a complete nutter."" "I just..." "Yeah, he's great in it." "And, Ollie, did you refer to it as an independent movie?" "Is it, technically?" "Was it?" "It's a hybrid, in that it is independent because it's not wholly funded by a single studio." "But Universal are our distributors in the UK and a number of other territories and got involved pretty early." "Got involved and were incredibly supportive and enthusiastic about it." "A guy called Ben Roberts who'd seen Peep Show and loved it, and fell in love with the script as soon as he had read it, and they have been with us all along and were incredibly supportive and great." "And so, part of the thing about it..." "Do you have to say that for contractual reasons?" "Well, I happen to know it's mostly true." "Amazingly, it is true." "It often isn't, but that is true." "And, you know, one of the sad things about independent film is that so many great films are made but then never get distributed." "So literally about 50 people at a festival get to see them." "And what's wonderful about working with a proper distributor is that lots of people get to see your film." "So, yeah." "Still reeling from the news that a week in it..." "Don't tell David things like this." "What scenes were we doing?" "He's already imagining the conspiracy..." ""And that's a wrap for today." "Actually, come to mention it..."" ""Thanks for the whole..."" ""Sorry, bye."" ""We are making a short film now." "We have got easily enough material."" "Yeah." "For a sort of nonsensical short." "Still looking for sketches, Robert and David." "For what?" "Sketches for the three-minute chunks." "Yeah, well done for somehow holding all that stress in." "Ollie, we should also say that you were a real part of the creative process on the set." "That you were there with me and Sam and Jesse," "and we'd talk about..." "Everything about the script." "Yeah." "Every single scene." "No, we did lots of read-throughs and lots of long script meetings over lunch and that was incredibly enjoyable." "And just honing the script to the point where you felt confident about almost every line." "In fact, you probably felt like you never wanted to see any of it again, in my case." "And it was a really great atmosphere on set, as well, wasn't it?" "Where everyone..." "Working on comedies is so great because you just get to laugh all day." "So, you would just be sitting by the monitor and when someone gets something really right and everyone laughs, it's a great feeling." "Yes, it's nice to see when the crew laugh." "Although then you see the large joint they've just smoked and you realise that they laugh at everything, the pigeon walking around the terrace, and it's not quite so funny." "Robert talked earlier about how I'd often say," ""Okay, now I'll just do a take for you to have a little play." ""Just do whatever you want."" "And virtually every shot of you in that scene there is when you were just playing and messing around." "Oh, really?" "Yeah." "You're just having fun." "And this is the scene you talked about earlier." "Yeah, which we sort of found out after we had written it, that it was sort of similar to a scene in Friends, which is a bit annoying." "But I didn't know that when we wrote it." "They do a pros and cons list, don't they?" "Apparently." "Yes, it's a good series to rip off." "Yeah." "We didn't do it on purpose, we need to stress." "We are so unprofessional we don't even know what they put in there." "But am I right in saying that this was a reshoot?" "After we watched the film we thought, "Oh, is this..."" "Additional photography, we like to call it." "Additional photography." "And did part of the note come from Scott Kroopf?" "Yeah, our executive producer felt that there really needed to be a sort of climactic scene where they fought and argued and talked directly about their relationship, and Jessica confronted Harry about..." "Linda confronted Harry about his feelings for her and her feelings for him." "And they have this big row and it's very funny." "Well, we did a bit of rewriting on the day." "Jessica had a lot of ideas and mostly very, very good ones, and so we did a bit of rewriting at the end." "Her little speech, her list of pros and cons." "The haircut line." "Which I think, David, you were a bit worried about?" "Well, I was all right, because it's a joke that actually Johnny Vaughan had made first on a panel show." "You have to credit him now." "I will." "Well, this is a Friends I Vaughan hybrid." "Yeah." "It's a Friends thing first." "Hybrid thing." "Well, Jessica is a writer as well, so had a lot of good ideas." "Stevenson-Vaughan." "They're natural collaborators, Stevenson and Vaughan." "I'll be amazed if they're not working on a project together." "I'm sure they are." "Another favourite line of mine about what's wrong with Thai food." ""I just think it is a bit samey."" "Yeah." "Jesse wrote that." "Wasn't entirely the work of Johnny Vaughan." "But Johnny Vaughan was in almost every day." "You can see him behind most bits of furniture, lurking." "So, this is pretty hand-held, this scene." "And it feels..." "It is absolutely is hand-held and we wanted to try and get in there and make it feel that you were with those two people who are about to have sex." "I gave Andrea a terrible note on this." ""This scene, you know, he's about to penetrate you," ""and this happens." And she looks at me. "What?"" "I was going to go and get a little..." "It wasn't the greatest of notes to say to..." "You know, she's a bit vulnerable." "She doesn't have any clothes on." "And they're awkward sex scenes, because the crew who are in the room at this point were entirely male." "So there are about 20 big sweaty men in shorts." "Quite apart from you're not wearing much, it's also..." "It's hard to block two people in a bed." "That's sort of, I think..." "We tried some of the weirdest..." "I have to say, it was Ollie's big idea to put her on top of him." "Yeah, that was my contribution." "You whispered to me," ""She should straddle him." You whispered it." "It's a little awkward, though, 'cause we were rehearsing it, and I didn't want to just say, like I was some sort of porno producer..." ""Position 32."" "Suddenly the producer gets involved." "You were very interested in this scene." "This is the one scene you perked up about." "No, because your thing was that they are often quite boring to look at, sex scenes, right, the blocking et cetera." "Well, I felt that you actually needed to feel like they were about to have sex." "That it wasn't just a comedy scene with two people in bed." "Look, basically he likes me." "I mean, that's the thrust of it." "So I hope you can feel the heat." "Yeah, and you're wearing shorts at this point, but we've taken them off" "for the last shot." "Oh, yes, jogging bottoms at the moment." "Andrea was naked." "She insists on it." "She was, nearly all the time." "She is very good in this scene." "See, that looks beautiful." "Like an art film." "It's gone all French." "Yeah, what's going on?" "And this is coming up, the obligatory..." "Rob has in every contract that he must appear naked." "Yes, that's become the law of Britain." "I was nervous when showing you the latest draught of this without telling you how you take it off." "Well, I think it's just because when I..." "The scene..." "Obviously the payoff is when Otto opens the door, which I gather is consistently one of the biggest laughs in the film." "It would have seemed childish to refuse to do it, just because I slightly overdid it in confetti." "I guess we're going to have to give credit, aren't we?" "Lucien Clayton, who is editor, who rarely got the chance to be at lots of read-throughs, early read-throughs of the script, and gave us some ideas, including this scene." "This very funny scene was Lucien's idea." "And, as Rob said, it often gets a big laugh in screenings." "That's a great reaction from Darren." "Eyes go down." "He's just..." "Oh, yes!" "He is pretty great, here." "And those are his real tattoos." "Those are his real tattoos, and he dyed his hair for something else, but I rather liked it." "That's the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, where we spent some pretty..." "This was, I think, the toughest stuff to shoot, right?" "We had three or four days in the theatre." "Four days." "That's a real shot," "I believe there's a bit where he removes his fake penis." "He was just going to reveal his real one." "I always thought that was extremely funny." "And then he weighs the two up to compare them." "He lifts it up, you see his real penis." "One cut of this montage, we had one, that one that you just saw, then he lifts it up and we cut back to him, and he weighed them to compare which is the biggest." "Now this day, the people coming into the theatre as well, they had about 700 or 800 extras, but actually they were real people who wanted to come down and watch a day's filming." "And very properly queued up." "Initially." "Yeah, we employed a company comedian to keep them happy." "And we locked the doors from the inside, right?" "We were talking about how tough the days in the theatre were." "We had four days to film everything." "And after the first day, we were two days behind." "That's what I remember." "Yeah." "We'd just run and shoot." "Run, shoot." "The tough thing was that on most days, we'd do between 15 and 20 setups a day of the camera." "And in the theatre we were doing about 50 setups a day." "And at the end of the third day, the members of the crew were lying on their backs." "They just couldn't get up." ""Come on, just one more shot." "One more shot."" "I mean, James was really pushing them, but it was..." "It was incredibly tough." "And all the shots with the audience we all shot in about three hours." "Three hours we had an audience for, so every time you see a shot of the audience," "I had to go, "Okay, what's happening in the story now is..." ""Please give us a reaction." It was not easy." "It's a beautiful theatre." "Yeah, Theatre Royal in Nottingham." "And Darren was high on painkillers at this point." "You wouldn't notice 'cause he's fantastic." "But he had a massive, massive toothache." "He had a wisdom tooth that had basically exploded in his mouth." "And I, rather appallingly, thought that he was overreacting and being hypochondriac." "You screamed at him." "Just told him to get on with it." "But, yeah, as it turned out, he was in excruciating pain." "But we drugged him up and he managed to get through the scene." "And the reason it's in one shot is because we didn't want to have to make him do it more than once." "It was just, "Let's just do a two shot."" "Probably didn't have to." "It was good." "It was great." "Heady days, eh?" "Heady days." "This was actually shot downstairs at the theatre." "This really is in the theatre, yeah." "Not everything is, but this really was in the theatre." "That was a little like it all could fall apart, right?" "Before we had the theatre for four days, there was a production coming in and absolutely no give or take about that." "And Darren could have easily been in an operating theatre." "And there was a little bit of time when it was like, "Oh, dear."" "And we thought we would have to shoot him from one side, because when you have your wisdom teeth removed, often your cheek blows up like a hamster." "And in continuity, that was not going to work." "So we thought we could maybe write in something about him having..." "Or we'd shoot it, we'd find somewhere else that could be the theatre but wasn't really the theatre." "It was all those difficult things." "Is that the Jersey joke here that I'm doing?" "Yeah." "One of the biggest laughs in the movie, isn't it?" "People loved that joke when we tested it." "It's lovely, isn't it?" "How did you guys find acting?" "Was it different acting for a film?" "Did you think about any of that stuff?" "Was it the same?" "It was overwhelmingly the same, actually." "All the time, I was sort of thinking," ""Is the fact that I am finding this the same a mistake?" ""Should I, you know, should I be finding this different?"" "But, no." "It's exactly, you're trying to make the jokes come across without looking like a terrible ham." "You're sort of aware that your face is going to be, you know, much, much bigger than usual." "So, you don't want to do too much massive girding, but then I try not to on TV as well." "Right." "I love this costume that Harry is wearing in this scene." "Again, we were incredibly short of time, but James just managed to make it all look lovely." "Those lights hanging, the green light everywhere." "See you on stage." "If the end of the day was 8.:00, this was like 7.:58 that we got this last shot." "The guillotine going through." "So, this is a real trick." "Real flower trick." "Again, we had to practise and learn." "Can't say how it's done." "But the timing is very important." "It's Scott Penrose's greatest trick." "Didn't create it, but he certainly brought it in for us." "He had the van." "He had the van." "Well, he had the props." "He sourced it." "You can see a couple of empty seats in that last shot of the audience." "And that's because that shot was done towards the end of the day." "When the unpaid extras had thought, "Sod this."" "Yeah, I think they were slowly discovering that watching a day's filming isn't at all like watching a film." "It's watching 40 seconds of a film again and again." "Unless you've got a job, a movie set's a very boring place." "Although Jessica went out and entertained the crowd with a QA." "She had a little chat with them, didn't she?" "Until people started asking her about her sex life." ""Did you ever sleep with Simon Pegg?" That was the main question." "That's not right, is it?" "So, here's your mind-reading act." "And you should say, you really practised throwing the ball over your shoulder into the audience." "We were chatting about something else, the scene with me practising." "Yeah, that was a good two and a half hours in the hotel." "And you did it." "He did it." "Yeah, eventually, because I thought this could be something that takes a very long time to shoot." "So, I didn't want to be the guy who holds up the entire film." "Can't get a simple basketball in a hoop over my head." "Backwards." "Some of the big tricks are about to come up." "And a stunt coordinator came in and helped us work out the trick in the hitting of the head." "And we shot it in lots of different ways." "And I was really scared that we wouldn't be able to edit it and turn it into a moment that really worked." "'Cause you've got to really believe that he's knocked out." "I love the slow motion." "It's a big turning point." "That does look vicious." "It's a good thump." "Alex MacQueen, I think very gallantly, agreed to let us shoot that, about 15 takes of his head hitting the ground." "We did it a lot." "And then Lucien, our editor, edited it and pretty much from the very first preview we did, we didn't really change the cut of the trip." "We sort of got it right the first time." "I was really scared about it." "Adrian Hood there, a very good security guard." "The human mind, and..." "Good." "So, I will now search the spirit zone..." "Really, in writing narrative terms, the ending was the thing we spent the most time trying to get right." "Yeah, there was a lot of different endings to the film that we went through." "Yeah." "But for a long time, at the end, it was Linda who went to the guillotine and got her head cut off." "It wasn't Karl." "That went on for a long time, didn't it?" "And there was a whole sequence of Harry being the guy who came on stage in the middle of Karl's act to help him out." "And contacting Carol, his dead wife." "And they were..." "Yeah." "It says, "Now, Harry, when no one will help you, I will help you contact Carol."" "Sort of like the way it works, but the other way around." "Yeah." "It was your idea, I have to say, Andrew, to do the Karl volunteering to the guillotine as the climax, which I think we all felt was the ending." "Sort of brought it all back together again, didn't it?" "Otherwise it was sort of two endings." "Karl's ending then Harry's ending." "And you really want to see that guillotine in the end." "Oh, yeah." "You know?" "Yeah, we always had the guillotine going into everything." "Yeah, I think we did." "So, you can see if you look very closely, in fact, sometimes, the audience members change their places because we have to move them around so they've all vanished and disappeared next to our actors." "That happens quite a lot." "It's like magic." "Just like magic." "So, you're about to go mental here." "Yes, indeed." "And we did various levels of mentality." "First it was..." "Yeah, we had a good old play with that." "A few journalists have actually been surprised that we come down quite hard on mediums and people who exploit vulnerable people by pretending that they can talk to the dead." "The whole thing's bollocks." "Yeah, people have been quite..." "Yeah, these magicians are saying, "Well, a lot of people believe" ""in that kind of stuff and you know, surely, you should be a bit careful."" "No, it's nonsense." "These people who pretend they can talk to the dead are lying and they are exploiting people who believe that." "But the people who believe that are culpable to an extent, because they're that stupid." "So that's the shot that you're not in." "Oh, that was me." "That isn't you, that was done in post." "Oh, yeah." "Oh, good." "Thanks for not bringing me in that day." "I was not anxious to do that." "We should say, in quite a lot of the scenes where you see Peter Capaldi..." "It's not me." "No." "We see Peter Capaldi reacting to moments of both your act and then Harry's act later." "But all those shots were done, were picked up much later." "We did this in a reshoot, or additional photography." "Yeah, it was really after watching the very first cut of the film, we felt that there wasn't enough jokes in the finale and having Peter in the wings giving his funny performance really helps that, I think." "It was a great idea to do that." "Well, it was up to Lucien again, so we shot the semi-finals first." "And Lucien said, "The reactions of Peter Capaldi really help." ""You should do that when you get to the final."" ""We won't need those." "What are you talking about?" ""There's so much going on."" "Well, of course he was absolutely right, so we went back to pick them up." "Not that we would have had time to film them on those four days, anyway." "Again, it's a beautiful shot." "Look at that." "James did a great job on that." "Mandy Pandy." "The actual trick there is a real trick from the '40s." "You produce lots and lots of flags." "Yeah, I remember seeing an old poster from the musical saying so-and-so," ""He fills the stage with flags."" "And of course classic would be the Union Jack right at the end." "Then you'd get lots of applause and off you go." "And then they burn it." "So, what are you hitting your head on here?" "We put a little foam..." "Yeah, there is sponge foam, and if you even see, the pipe actually moves when I hit it, in a way that a real pipe like that would not." "It would be cast iron." "Beyond the power of human head to jitter." "Shall we talk about the change that we made to the actual script in this scene, about the things that we took out?" "Yeah, right." "It used to be more explicit." "We sort of..." "We always felt that it was a difficult thing in the heart of the movie, their relationship and what they thought about..." "Especially what Karl thought about Harry, and really this is the point at which Harry might in another film say," ""Oh, no." "I didn't really chop a head off, and look, I've got this little screw" ""which shows that it all went wrong." And we did a little bit of that, a little bit more of an emphatic kind of "I didn't murder her" stuff in the original script, right?" "Yeah, and then we thought, "It's a bit crap."" "In the edit, a lot of that stuff came out." "Well, the truth is, at the last-night party at the end of the shooting, and we showed some rough scenes, that Lucien had just sort of roughly bolted together." "And one of the scenes that we saw at the party was this scene." "I remember, Sam, you turned to me and you said," ""You know," and this was the old version where we really believed that David hadn't killed Linda." "Or Harry hadn't killed Linda." "And you said to me..." "I do cry an emphatic line about saying" ""It's just a terrible mistake."" "It was much, much longer." "And you turned to me, Sam, and you went," ""You know, it's a really great scene," ""but at the end of that you know that Harry didn't kill Linda," ""and therefore there's no jeopardy" ""when Karl puts his head in the guillotine." So, we worked very hard on that." "Yeah, difficult balance." "We also wanted to make it, to not have their relationship be resolved, and not have Harry just forgive Karl." "So that you do think he might just not do the safety catch and chop his head off at the end." "And we did re-shoots of the final guillotine scene to give it a bit more jeopardy and a few more jokes as well." "Not re-shoots, additional photography." "I just want to say, there wasn't that much additional photography." "It was two days, wasn't it?" "'Cause additional photography/reshoots has bad connotations, as if you haven't done it right the first time." "It does, although people like Woody Allen actually schedule a week of additional photography just as part of his process." "Because with comedy especially..." "It has no negative connotation for me." "I feel like..." "Great." "Go back." "Fill in." "Absolutely." "It was great that you had already budgeted for that." "It made a huge difference that we could go and do those scenes." "None of which we deleted immediately after having filmed them." "We shot a..." "And if you press your remote control, you can watch them all on the DVD." "Oh, yes." "There was a whole scene that we shot in..." "Where was it?" "It was in Kingston upon Thames town centre, of Harry doing tricks and not impressing the public supposedly from his wilderness years." "And it got cut immediately." "And there is this scene of Robert." "And there's a scene of Karl doing mind-reading for the children's party." "Oh, yeah." "And they're all going to be on the DVD." "And they're really funny scenes, but at the start of the film we just wanted to get on with the story, and get into it quicker, and not set up the characters which was the..." "So, that's the scene that was just picked up afterwards and we have just dressed part of that RAF place to look like the theatre and we put the camera on." "It's amazing." "And the Carmina Burana is so important in this scene." "And we listened to about 52 different versions to try and find one that was the right speed and the right tempo." "And that we could afford." "And that we could afford, because you have to pay every single member of the orchestra." "Brilliant." "So in fact there's only one person playing every instrument in the version that you are hearing." "It's just a very, very expensive synthesizer." "Yeah." "But the music we should mention." "Paul Englishby." "Yeah, Paul Englishby did a really great job on the score." "I think it's a real challenge in terms of..." "Obviously it's a very broad comedy, but also there's a heart, and a rom-com and emotion to it." "And Paul managed to pull those different strands together." "It was tough." "Well, I..." "He played it all on an instrument called the Orchestronium, didn't he?" "It's like a tuba, but it has all the different instruments." "But the truth is in reality he recorded the soundtrack at Abbey Road." "And that was really fantastic." "They actually record the score of the movie to the shots." "So, you see your movie and they're playing live at the same time." "It was really exciting." "Here we go." "It's all going to be all right." "They're back together again." "Our two heroes." "Now, there is the logical flaw in the setup of the magic." "The setup with this ending." "Which no one has ever commented on, other than you, Jesse." "Yeah." "Which is how did he know?" "Well, yeah, obviously," "they need a fake head for this trick to work." "That matches Karl's head." "Yeah." "In my head, what happens is..." "I think there is some other method." "Yeah, that it's not a fake head." "That his whole body drops." "It looks like it's just his head dropping." "And then he goes through the trapdoor in the stage and runs out to the back." "I hope this isn't the first time you're watching this movie, because if you haven't watched it, you know what we are doing." "If you've chosen to watch the commentary first..." "That's a big mistake in terms of plot." "Yeah." "This scene, as the beginning does, has weird echoes of The Prestige, which came out well after we had finished filming." "But luckily, we had seen the script early enough to steal from them." "Those safety mechanisms have absolutely nothing to do" "with the working of this trick." "No, they don't." "So, let's talk about the fake head." "The fake head cost a lot of time and money." "We had to match the exact calibration of hair loss." "Which is not easy." "As you see, Rob was losing a lot of hair during our shoot" "because of the stress involved." "We had to keep adjusting the fake head." "You should pause it." "If you can pause it, pause it now." "There you go." "That is good." "And go, "How real was that head?" I was obsessed with, on the big screen, would it look like Robert's real head?" "I think it completely does." "Who designed it?" "Well, Susie Munachen, our makeup designer, did a lot of work on the hair, and the colour and the weight had to be right so that it would fall right." "And the distribution of the blood on the blade." "I kept making Robert kneel next to the guillotine with the fake head, just taking photographs." "The glamour, the unending glamour." "I was terrified that you'd go, "It's just not his head, is it?"" "But now you use the head and send it to casting." "I do, yeah." "It goes to the writers I don't like." "Now, we tried a lot of different songs, didn't we, on that scene?" "Things like Champ." "And we ended up going with the Jimmy Smith track that we open the movie with." "To me, that worked." "Now we are into giving out the awards." "Do you want to talk about the "I don't actually love you" moment?" "I can't remember where it came from." "I do know where it..." "I think it came, like most things in the script, from the writers." "Obviously." "What, you didn't ad-lib it on the day?" "I mean at what point in the process of writing the script." "How early it was in?" "I can't remember, but I remember we definitely wanted..." "It's kind of, you know..." "We're writing, obviously, a feel-good ending where people get back together and it's all great and everything gets tied up." "But we also really wanted to undercut that, because it's a very potentially sugary, cheesy, kind of tame." "I remember talking about it a lot in rehearsal to decide how far we try and actually sell the initial "I love you."" "The Richard Curtis homage." "Exactly." "And I think, you know, I think we went the right way." "Let's just play it as if he is saying that, in the hope, basically, of briefly disappointing a lot of people and then going, "No, it's all right, we don't mean it." ""There is no such thing as love."" "Well, certainly Harry would never choose to declare it with..." "Exactly." "It looks like something totally out of character, and then it's great the way it turns out he's not really doing that." "And it's a damn brilliant few seconds where you think..." "The audience is thinking, "Oh, shit, they've completely sold out."" "The shame is that quite a lot of people tend to leave," "having no idea." "In disgust." "Got the run on it." "But it's one of my favourite moments in the movie." "I think it's great." "You can feel it, when you watch it with an audience, you really can feel that they're going, "What?" "What?" "Oh, it's all right."" "And they laugh and it makes it all okay again." "She does a great thing when she gets given the trophy." "She sort of looks at the audience and smiles." "It's a really cute thing Jessica is about to do that I always loved." "I love that. "Look, I got it."" "Again, this is five minutes to midnight on the last..." "What I remember most about this bit, is the first time we shot, 'cause we didn't rehearse the kiss, because it was too embarrassing and it would be fine on the day." "And then the first time we actually did it was on that shot with 700 strangers." "You know, I have not done many on-screen snogs." "And I sort of felt, "My God, this is embarrassing."" "But at least I didn't have any time to prepare." "Now, we shot this in a retirement home on the Skegness coast." "Well, it's a rather wonderful institution there." "It's for Nottingham miners." "Yes, retired miners." "Or it wasn't a retirement home, where they could go for..." "Convalescent." "Convalescent home." "It used to be where they went for holidays as well." "But I think because there are now fewer and fewer working miners, the retirement side has dominated over." "But didn't the production have to pay for all of the residents to go and see..." "Who was it, that cruise ship opera singer." "Excellent, she's excellent." "I've forgotten her name." "I can't remember her name." "She's not excellent, she's awful." "Anyway, her." "Andrew likes her." "They all went to see..." "They can't remember the name..." "Can't remember what her name is, so we can't be sued." "Think of someone awful, and that's who we mean." "Steve Edge went to give a little apology to that lovely brunette lady he winces at." "Did he?" "You know, I think he felt a bit bad." "All right, well, that's the end of the film, virtually." "But we should just, our favourite scenes." "For me it's the Stooge, where we first meets the Stooge." "And then where he says "I actually love you."" "That's what I pick." "Ollie?" "You picked two and they're the best bits." "You can't say what I said, you've got to think of something else." "Poo in a handbag, and then also when the Stooge says..." "The exact thing that he says, "Only bad Stooges would say..."" ""I can't believe it!" -"I can't believe it!"" ""I can't believe it!"" "Jesse?" "Everyone's chosen my favourite bit, so I'm just going to look like a copycat." "All I needed was somebody to get a trunk to Mexico." "That was exciting the first time you saw it, wasn't it?" "Very exciting." "Very exciting." "This is very proper." "I like it when it looks like Karl really is going to get pissed on." "That makes me laugh." "Yeah, I like the pissed-on bit, I think." "Though I also, I actually really like the guillotine trick." "You know, the whole Carmina Burana bit." "It actually gets me, because, you know, it's cheesy but it's also quite stirring." "Sure, that's what I wanted you to think." "We did a great job on it." "I like Wilkinson's, actually." "I like it when the knife goes into the arm." "'Cause it's..." "I like that." "All right, well, that's it." "Thank you for listening." "Hope you liked the movie." "Anything else you want to say before we go, gentlemen?" "I am sorry for slagging off the singer woman who we didn't name, 'cause I think I've upset Andrew." "All right." "Well, listen, I'm off to have dinner with her." "All right." "Bye, everybody." "Bye-bye." "Good-bye." "There you go, commentary for our movie." "Just have to make sure they don't record this bit." "All us sort of saying," ""I think we did pretty fucking well."" "We talk about our favourite bits in the commentary." "I liked it when I made you sort of have to start again." "That's what I liked about it." "I couldn't remember someone's name." "Oh, my God, my poor back." "Okay, Karl?" "I know you're playing in Blackpool tonight, and guess what?" "I'm in the sand, Karl." "I'm buried up to the neck in sand." "And the tide's coming in, that's right." "So are you going to come and dig me out?" "'Cause I'm not doing it myself." "Come on, Karl." "Come get me." "Really hope you get this message." "Hang on." "I haven't done a trick yet." "I'm not a beggar." "I'm a magician." "Take this back." "This is not a begging scenario." "You can't give me that until you've seen a trick." "Thank you." "...to the power of 92." "And so, if we subtract that original 43, we find that the number that you are now thinking of is 3.75." "Am I right?" "So, it's really good to meet you." "Thanks so much for coming down." "And, with all your experience," "I'm sure you'll be familiar with everything in the act." "There are certain things I will not do." "I will not be chained, manacled, incarcerated." "I will not be cut, endangered, or imperilled." "I will not be silent." "I will not be patronised." "And I will require equal billing." "And you were born in 1932?" "No." "I am 32." "You're 32?" "That's right." "I'm 32 years old." "Right." "Well, that was brilliant." "This is all brilliant." "There's just one thing I should..." "Not a big thing, I should probably mention before we talk about the travel arrangements." "I did chop my last assistant's head off with a guillotine." "Anyway..." "Fuck!" "Don't say anything now." "Just have a think, and see what you..." "Look, I don't think I can do this, okay?" "Oh, Jesus." "Not again." "And who is that?" "Who is texting you direct?" "I'm the agent." "I'm the gatekeeper." "It's Dani." "You know, the TV, coffee person." "That's funny." "Do you think that's funny?" "It doesn't mean anything." "Well, it relates to something I sent her." "No." "Well, it does." "Well, let's not argue, Karl." "Shall we?" "And just remember, your little problem, since Carol." "You don't want to be writing any cheques you can't cash with your cock." "I mean, people need magic." "I mean, where's the magic in modern life?" "Where's the mystery in a nail bar?" "Or a key cutting place?" "I suppose that is a bit mysterious, how they actually cut the keys." "But you know what I mean." "Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, totally." "So, that's why I've decided." "I've had a big think about it, and I've decided to go to Jersey to enter the Shield with Harry." "What?" "You've..." "What the fuck?" "You've been thinking about it?" "What kind of partnership do we have if you go around thinking things privately in your own head?" "Well, I told you as soon as I decided." "As soon as you..." "What?" "So, you decided five seconds ago?" "Not exactly five seconds ago." ""Not exactly five seconds ago."" "There you go." "Now it's all coming out, isn't it?" "So, when did you decide?" "Was it on the bus?" "Was it in Costa Coffee?" "Well, I suppose I finally made up my mind about half an hour ago." "Half an hour!" "And you've kept this little bombshell to yourself for 30 whole minutes, have you, Karl?" "You're quite the Secret Squirrel, aren't you?" "Come on." "What do you want, Dad?" "What do I want?" "I don't necessarily want something, Dwight." "I just came down to say, "Hi."" "Also, there is something I do quite want." "You know that flower vanish?" "Could I have one?" "You know, like, for free." "On the house." "That's a 90-quid illusion, Dad, and you can only use it once." "Jesus." "How many have you sold?" "None." "But, you know, I'm biding my time." "Everyone that sees it freaks." "Right." "Right." "Yeah, well, I don't carry that kind of wad around with me." "So, can I have one?" "No." "Give me one, or you're grounded." "No." "Oh, come on, son." "Look, if I win, think how many you'll sell." "Everyone in magic is going to be chanting the name, Dwight White." "And not in the way those kids did at primary." "Yeah?" "In a nice, lucrative way." "Yeah?" "Simon Small-cock." "Wanting to know why I'm not at the shop." "You didn't ask for time off?" "No." "No, I thought if I asked him, he might say, "No."" "Oh, right." "Good point." "Anyway, screw him." "I'm never going back there." "Linda, I..." "Listen, there's every chance that we'll have a promising professional future." "But you should know, magic's not what it used to be." "The gold rush is over." "Daniels mined it all in the '80s." "Relax, Harry." "Okay?" "It's not all about you." "All right?" "If it doesn't work out, I'll just find something else." "No, I'd probably do my book, or snorkel for cash in Malaysia." "I mean, this is just a ride." "Yeah?" "I'm riding you." "Oh, okay." "Great." "Well, I'm glad we cleared that up." "Hi, guys." "My name is Ben." "And to celebrate the release of Mitchell and Webb's new movie, Magicians," "I'm going to show you a little bit of card magic." "So here I have a regular deck of cards." "No two cards are the same." "There are no gaffs, there are no hidden trapdoors, secrets, smoke machines, anything like that." "What I'm going to do..." "I'm just going take a card from the middle." "I'll take this one, put it onto the top so we can all see it." "It is the nine of diamonds." "Now I'm going to make this a very special nine of diamonds by writing the name of the film on it, which is, of course, Magicians." "So you know that any magic that's done with this card, is this card." "There is no other card like it in the world, and you're very privileged to see this card." "So I'm going to put this into the middle like that." "So it's not on the top, unless I click my fingers, in which case, it is on the top." "I'll show you again." "Of course, I don't actually do any magic." "I just click my fingers and it just kind of happens." "I don't know how." "Anyway, so it's not on the top." "In fact, it's not second from the top, either." "Or third from the top." "I'll click my fingers." "And it jumps back to the top." "I'll just show you one more time." "I'll put it into the middle, okay?" "That's the Magicians card." "I'll put it further into the middle, give it a shuffle as well." "And by magic..." "Oh, I didn't do the click, sorry." "I'll try something else." "If I just give it a little magical wave, it changes to the nine of diamonds, which is, of course, our special Magicians card." "Now I'm actually really going to lose this into the middle of the deck and we're going to select another card." "So if I just put this in the middle..." "Okay?" "So that's the Magicians card." "Into the middle." "I'm just going to take the next card from the top, which is the ten of diamonds." "I'm going to sign the back of the ten of diamonds with the name of two magicians that we all know and love, which are, of course, Penn  Teller." "I mean, Mitchell and Webb, sorry." "And so we've got our card, the ten of diamonds, with "Mitchell and Webb" written on it." "Now I'm actually going to put this..." "I'm just going to take it to the middle." "Now what I've done there..." "I'm just going to roll my thumb through and I'm going to stop at the original card which is the nine of diamonds." "Right there." "Now I'll tell you how I know it is the nine of diamonds." "It's because I'm a wizard." "Okay, if you don't believe me, I'll just show you." "We just go through and we have a look for the Mitchell and Webb card, which is there." "It's actually right next to, of course, a card, because it's in the deck." "But what's really significant is the card is the nine of diamonds." "I'll show you again." "That's the Mitchell and Webb card, the ten of diamonds." "It's next to the nine of diamonds, the Magicians card." "Now I'm sure you're yelling at your TV screens, going," ""Wow, that's amazing, Ben!" "Show us more!" ":" "And of course every magic trick needs a killer ending." "So what I'm going to do, I'm just going to show you my killer ending." "I'll just give the Mitchell and Webb card a little rub." "And the Mitchell and Webb signature vanishes." "So you've got this ten of diamonds, which is completely blank." "And the next card, the nine of diamonds, has got both signatures on it." "That was magic." "I hope you enjoyed it." "Enjoy the movie." "Hello, I'm David Mitchell, and this is my video diary thing for the filming of Magicians." "And we're actually about halfway through the shoot already, and Rob's just given me the camera, so that's why I'm starting now." "We're in Nottingham Theatre Royal, where we filmed all the sort of finale stuff." "And this is a dressing room there that I am in." "If I just sort of show you, that's how cool it is." "And, in fact, I can even show you Nottingham proper." "I dare say the camera will get screwed up, but that's Nottingham." "Okay." "And, you know, we've been staying in Nottingham for a few days now." "I've done most of the tricks I've got to do already." "And I've worn the most dramatic and uncomfortable costume of the shoot, which I'll show you as well." "It's there." "See, it says, "Grim Reaper."" "I realised, by swinging the camera around, I'll probably induce vomiting in anyone who's unwise enough to watch this." "Anyway, so, here I am." "This is my lifestyle." "Don't you envy it?" "Oh, and I'm reading this." "It's called The Man Who Smiled, by Henning Mankell." "I'd recommend it." "It's good." "And this is Ollie, the producer, and Jesse, one of the writers." "Say hello." "Hello." "I like that you introduced yourselves." "Yeah." "And perhaps you could just say what today's challenges and threats to the project..." "It's..." "What's today?" "It's like a middle..." "Thursday." "We're waiting." "The government fell." "Darren Boyd happened to have sex." "Those are the main two." "Yeah." "See, this is a reality that I'm too busy to have to do this." "But, you know, that's the thing about the media now." "You have to screw around with DVD extras and the Internet and all this bollocks." "If you're watching this, you're wasting your time." "Watch the film and then watch another film." "Anyway, I'm going through the motions." "So, you know..." "Now, if it's all right with you, I'm going to actually go make the film." "Anyway, bye from the producer and from the writer." "Goodbye." "Well, here I am, sitting on the floor of my hotel room, which I find is the best way of getting the right height level for the lens." "I'm still in Nottingham." "This is my room in the hotel." "And I don't know why I think that would be of interest, but I've got a camera and I'm therefore empowered." "I've had a couple of pints." "It's 10:25 on the 7th of September, and I've got to learn my lines for tomorrow." "And maybe answer a few e-mails on my laptop." "And, yeah, tomorrow..." "Early start tomorrow to do some more filming." "And it really is as simple and as boring as that." "My shampoo thing's run out for fuck's sake." "Who's going to fill that up?" "I don't know." "Anyway, good night." "This has been my first day of video diarying." "Diaryising." "Diarising?" "And we've got a lot of stuff, but none of it of much moment, for which I apologise." "Night-night." "Hello, it's..." "Oh, this is a prop watch, so it doesn't say what day it is." "But it is a Sunday, and we're in Nottingham again." "It's about 11:30 and I haven't done anything yet today, so they sent me back to my room to wait for an hour until it's lunch." "This is my..." "I'm in costume." "I've actually walked through the hotel and no one said, "Ha!" "Fake!"" "So that's a tribute to the costume department." "And I thought because I had a bit of downtime," "I should do an item." "I've found a better way of setting the camera," "I know you'll notice, so I can actually sit on the bed." "I put it on top of the telly." "Later today, we're shooting a scene on a ferry." "Except, it's not on a ferry, it's just in a room." "So I imagine they'll have the camera doing a sort of rocking motion throughout." "Or maybe it's more subtle than that." "I don't know." "But maybe I'll show a bit of the non-ferry in order to relay the magic behind filming." "Anyway, that's all from me for now." "Hello." "It's me." "I'm Robert Webb." "I play Karl in the film Magicians." "So this is my video diary." "So, hi." "So..." "I've made a little list of things I should talk about down here, so every now and again I'll go..." "And then that'll be me finding out what to do next." "You probably won't want to use that bit." "I mean, it's gold." "I mean, clearly you know from the start it's been all gold." "But you might not want that bit." "I don't know." "So, yeah, it's a film about magicians." "David and I had to learn a few magic tricks." "And David's been given a whole lot of really easy stuff, which he's managed to do." "I was given loads of really hard stuff, which, just unfairly, because I've been treated unfairly, which I wasn't able to master." "And, in fact, in some circumstances, in some instances, I mean, I just gave up." "So they gave me..." "I'm supposed to do a coin roll, which is like you take a 50 p, you place it on..." "You have to bend the knuckle." "That's a tip." "That's the first tip." "And then I spent four weeks practising this." "And the idea is to get the coin to roll gracefully across your knuckles, pass it under, and then transfer it." "It goes round in a little circle." "After four weeks, this is how well I can do it." "You see?" "And it dropped on the floor." "And it always drops on the floor." "That's what happens." "So they said, "Don't do that because you can't do it."" "And, instead, I do a little card fan." "I produce a card from behind someone's..." "Oh, maybe I can do it." "Shall I try and do that?" "Produce a card from behind someone's ear." "I'll try and produce a card from behind your ear." "Although, you know..." "Here's a normal playing card." "For all you know, I've got another one Blu Tacked over there." "And let's just, you know..." "Just bear with me." "Oh!" "You seem to have something over here." "Oh, look, I've produced a card." "That was shit, wasn't it?" "Wasn't that shit?" "Didn't that look shit?" "Don't use that bit." "And what did I say?" "I do a nice fan of cards." "I'm not going to do that because, you know," "I just want you to see the version that's in the film, if that, because I can't do it very well very often." "What am I?" "A fucking magician?" "But I did..." "I did..." "There was a bit where..." "One thing I was quite pleased with, there was a bit where Karl has to become very adept at throwing a miniature basketball over his right shoulder, so that he can get the spirits sphere to land in the right place in the audience." "And then there's a scene where I'm practising that and I have to get it in a basketball hoop." "And in order to accomplish this feat..." "I mean, it's not a magic trick." "It's a feat." "It's a feat." "But in order to try and get this in a manner that didn't use up £5,000 worth of film stock, go into the 28th take, me missing, on a day off, I came in and practised doing that for a couple of hours." "And that's what I did." "I mean, it's not exactly like Keanu Reeves spending three months to learn karate or kung fu or sword-fighting." "But it is a bit like that." "It's a bit like that." "I mean, it's not like that." "It's not like learning kung fu." "It's a bit like it." "It's a bit like that." "So I did that and I got it on, like, the fourth take." "So I was very, you know, I was very pleased with myself." "I remain quite pleased about that." "I think about that when a lot of things are wrong in my life." "I think about that moment." "Other magic stuff?" "That's most of the magic stuff I've had to do." "At one point, I was going to, like, produce a champagne cork from inside my hand." "I better not tell you how they do that." "It's pretty fucking obvious." "It's certainly obvious when you see me do it." "But they decided not to use that, either, because it got in the way of the action, not because I wasn't doing it very well." "I'm just consulting my list." "It says, "Naked stuff." Yes." "Well, this being a British comedy film, obviously, at some point, I'm required to take off all of my clothes." "That seems to be the law at the moment." "But luckily, Karl, unlike the character I play in Confetti..." "In Confetti, an inferior British comedy of 2006..." "I mean, I don't know that, but, you know, Magicians isn't..." "I haven't seen the finished version of Magicians." "We haven't even finished making the unfinished version." "But, you know, the odds are it's going to be funnier because the difference being a funny script deliberately written to be funny, i.e., there is one." "So, in Confetti, I was playing a naturist, whereas, luckily, with Karl, when he gets locked out of his hotel room, naked, he reacts like normal people by covering his ghoulies." "So that, at least, was a relief for me, if not for the cinema-going audience." "In fact, they will be very relieved as well." "So that was sort of interesting." "It made a change to be able to cover one's ghoulies." "It was a welcome break." "Other slightly embarrassing things I've had to do..." "It wasn't embarrassing particularly." "I did a sort of love scene with Andrea Risborough, who plays Dani, in a very funny and talented way." "We spent a day snogging in a bed." "Really, no headlines there, apart from she farted." "She farted." "And she calls herself a professional." "I didn't fart." "I would not." "Stage stuff with all..." "Other moments of total humiliation." "Observant friends, fans and enemies alike will have noticed I'm slightly balding." "I'm balding." "In fact, I'm going completely bald." "I'm going to be a bald fucker." "And this becomes crucial in that Karl, my character, towards the end of the film, puts his head in a guillotine and gets his head chopped off." "Now I can exclusively reveal..." "This is a spoiler." "Don't listen to this if you haven't seen the film." "I can reveal it looks like Karl gets his head chopped off." "But actually, he doesn't get his head chopped off." "And I didn't get my head chopped off." "But in order to achieve that, they need a dummy head." "So, basically, there was a process where they got the dummy head to be as bald as me." "And they had to make sure that the pattern of the baldness of the dummy matched my baldness." "And so there were some brilliant moments where I basically had to get on my hands and knees next to the bald dummy head in the guillotine so they could compare which one was the most bald and whether it was the right amount of bald." "And brilliantly, during the final camera test, it turned out I had slightly more hair than the dummy." "So the dummy was wrong because it was even balder than me." "So another great buttress added to the great cathedral of my self-esteem there." "That was a good day." "Hello." "Another day, another hotel room." "And now it's not Nottingham any more, we're in Skegness." "Yes!" "We're in Skegness." "We've been filming on the beach in Skegness." "One of the scenes we did was the scene where Karl gets buried up to his head in sand, up to his neck in sand, which, I think was probably quite a good scene." "I don't know." "Haven't seen it." "What they did, basically, it wasn't enormously comfy, they dug a hole in the sand, they put a big wooden crate in the hole, they put a stool at the bottom of the crate." "I sit on the stool, they put a couple of live rats in the box, they put the lid on, they cover the lid up with sand, and then I sort of do the scene with David." "I was trying to stamp on the rats before they bite me." "And it seemed to go quite well." "It wasn't very comfy, you know." "The sun was kind of beating down, wind blowing sand in your face, the rats trying to bite you on the ankles." "But, you know, of those three things, there's nothing really you can do about it." "I mean, you know, sometimes as an actor, you just going to be a bit uncomfy." "I suppose they could've put a brolly to kind of keep the sun off my head a bit, but there was nothing you could do about the wind." "Obviously, you got to have the rats in the box." "So, generally, it was good." "It feels like a funny scene, where I'm buried up to my neck in sand." "It has a sort of whiff of chat-show clip about it." "I can imagine them using that as a clip because it just looks good." "Apparently, at one point, I was in the box fending off the rats and a trailer..." "No, not a trailer, a trawler." "A boat went by, sort of, on the horizon behind my head." "And everyone said that looked funny." "I've got to take their word for it." "I don't know." "Every now and again, the producer or director will come up and they go," ""I've seen the rushes from a couple of days ago." ""It all looks great." You got to trust these people." "You got to trust these people." "I don't know." "I don't know if it looks good." "We could be making an absolute turd." "But I do trust these people, basically." "I basically trust these people." "It was their idea about the rats." "But I think that added to..." "It must've added to the scene." "Otherwise, why would they do that?" "Why would they do that?" "They don't want me to be needlessly uncomfortable, do they?" "So, yeah." "Other things we did in Skegness..." "We did some filming in Butlins." "Butlins Holiday Camp." "I mean, I'm from Lincolnshire." "I'm from around here." "And, you know, if you ever hear me going on about my working-class credentials, and I hope you don't very often, bear in mind, we didn't have much money." "We did have holidays in Skegness." "But, fuck me, we drew the line at Butlins." "Even when I was nine," "Skegness was basically the best place in the world." "And Cannon and Ball..." "I didn't expect to see anything funnier than Cannon and Ball." "And I may have changed my mind about both of those things." "But Skegness is still..." "I'm very fond of Skegness." "But Butlins..." "Butlins, though." "Butlins." "We did the stunt drop routine and it's two days later." "And after having done a bit of a leap up onto a box six or seven times two days ago," "I can still barely walk from stiffness." "And that's some kind of indication to me" "I should do something about my well-being." "Maybe I should take up something like swimming or rat stamping on a more competitive level." "I can't think of anything else that's happened lately." "Skegness is not really how I remember it." "I mean, I am kind of a metre taller than I was the last time I was here, so everything seems a metre less tall." "And on that note..." "So it's day two, and we're filming a scene where Harry, David Mitchell, goes to a magic shop asking for a job." "And the magic-shop owner won't give him a job because he killed his wife's head in a guillotine accident." ""Killed his wife's head"?" "Killed his wife by chopping her head off years ago in a magic accident." "So this is a magic shop called Davenports, and it used to be in Great Russell Street in London near the British Museum." "And 30 years ago, I bought my first magic tricks from this shop." "Have I mentioned that I was the Young Magician of the Year at 18?" "And let me show you this." "Come over here." "You're going to hate this, but come over here." "There's a poster here called "Cine-Magic."" "And that man there, that man, Noel Britten..." "Can you get a little close-up of Noel Britten?" "So, Noel Britten, who is a hilarious, very, very funny comedy magician, one of my heroes, he was the runner-up in the Young Magician of the Year." "And next to him, if you go next to him on that poster, next to him..." "The year I won it, Noel was second." "That man, that's Scott Penrose." "Scott is our magic consultant on our movie." "Along here, Richard McDougall." "Richard's a brilliant, brilliant magician and inventor, and Richard worked on the second series of Derren Brown, and brilliant he was in it as well." "So do you want to explain where we are and what we're doing here today?" "Yeah, we're on Skegness beach." "We're not." "It's not true what you just said." "We're not on Skegness beach." "Okay, I'm just waking up." "We're on Mablethorpe beach." "Mablethorpe is about 17 miles away from Skegness." "It's a very pretty beach." "Tell them what scene we're doing here." "You should get it wrong again?" "This is the scene where the panthers come and attack." "It's not true." "All this is wrong." "We're shooting this..." "Sorry about this, it's early, and drugs." "We're shooting the scene where Otto digs Karl out of his hole on the beach where he's been doing a David Blaine-esque endurance stunt." "You want to see the hole?" "Come, we'll show you the hole." "We've got two holes, in fact." "We have got two holes." "It's very impressive." "Come and look at this." "Got a real hole and a fake hole." "You're seeing behind the scenes." "This is our version of George Lucas effects, basically, here." "This is our high-tech effects." "So, this is the real hole." "Look." "And look, there's a writer in the hole." "Hey!" "So that's the hole that he comes out of." "I'll help you." "Thank you very much." "Thanks." "He's a bigger man than me." "I should've gone in." "Look, here's Gareth." "He's like out first..." "So that's the real hole." "And then over there is the..." "Do you want me, don't you, Gareth?" "Just for my props here, sir." "Yeah." "Cameras?" "Sam, do you want to show..." "I've got to do work for the movie here, official director work." "So why doesn't Sam show you that hole, show you how that works while I look after the other thing?" "That's the real hole." "This hole is the fake hole." "Obviously, you can't just put an actor in a hole." "We'd all like to, but it's not legal, so you have to build a box." "And, as you can see, if you look inside, there's a little plastic stool there where he can sit." "He could live in there." "He could live in there off his brains, which is the idea." "So, yeah, we're using this for two scenes, for Karl in the hole and, also, Otto in the hole later." "So it's a multipurpose actor hole." "Where the actors can get sent if they've been naughty." "In this situation, they're just acting, so it's fine."