SUBMARINE directed by Richard Ayoade, screenplay by Ayoade based on the novel by Joe Dunthorne, with Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige, Noah Taylor, Sally Hawkins and Paddy Considine. An Alliance Films release. 94 minutes. Opens Friday (June 10). See listing
It’s the middle of the Toronto Film Festival, and Richard Ayoade has just become the belle of the ball.
The distinctively coiffed Londoner – best known in North America as the fussbudget techie Moss on the English sitcom The IT Crowd – is watching, somewhat bemusedly, as distributors wage a bidding war for his debut feature, Submarine. Buoyed by strong reviews, the odd little coming-of-age drama set in the Welsh town of Swansea in the mid-80s will ultimately sell to the Weinstein Company for a reported $1 million.
But we’re not talking about that. Thoughtful and soft-spoken even in the frenzied festival atmosphere, Ayoade would rather be discussing Badlands and Taxi Driver – films he refers to repeatedly when talking about his strategy for making Submarine.
“They both have a central character who’s somewhat deluded,” he explains, “and has an idea of his own legacy that you hear juxtaposed with the reality of things. They were very influential [for me], even though the subject matter of those films is far more mythic and violent and portentous.”
Shifting the action of Submarine from the present-day setting of Joe Dunthorne’s novel to the 1980s let Ayoade dislocate the characters in a different way.
“The idea was to put it into a somewhat generalized past,” he says. “To avoid mobile phones and laptops and Twitter and particularly modern things. Partly because I think stories about adolescents tend to be set in a time when the writer was that age” – meaning himself, in this case. “It would seem slightly ridiculous for a character like this to be entirely contemporary, for some reason. He seems to have values which are more traditional than the glib, modern values of his peers. A lot of characters in films of this type feel slightly out of place. Even Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver seems to have an idea of an older, more Puritanical past.”
Submarine carries itself with a little less self-importance than Ayoade’s models, being focused entirely on the efforts of a precocious teenager to get laid and keep his parents from splitting up, not necessarily in that order. These tasks would be much easier if young Oliver (Craig Roberts) actually understood how the world works.
“He somehow thinks that by being able to identify things, he’s mastered them,” Ayoade says. “He very much hasn’t.”
That’s a notion that puts Submarine in line with a few other films about the end of adolescence. TIFF audiences were throwing around comparisons to Hal Ashby’s Harold & Maude and Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. I suggest another comparison: The 400 Blows, directed by François Truffaut.
“I love his films, and Jean-Pierre Léaud just may be my favourite actor,” Ayoade says. “I suppose it’s one of those films that, if you do anything [about] this age group, it’s slightly inescapable, like The Graduate. You do any film about the Mafia, you cannot get out of the way of The Godfather. What’s the point of trying to get out of the way of it?”
Interview Clips
Richard Ayoade on shooting Submarine:
Ayoade on the myth of artistic versatility:
Ayoade on casting his young star, Craig Roberts:
normw@nowtoronto.com
