Garth Jennings was 11, maybe 12, when he saw “First Blood,” Sylvester Stallone’s original Rambo flick.
“Already it was quite exciting,” says the British filmmaker, calling from Atlanta where he is traveling with his indie delight, “Son of Rambow,” playing exclusively at the Chez Artiste.
“I was seeing something I shouldn’t see. But also I just thought it was incredible. So did my friends. We lived around the edge of a forest in which we played every day, and here’s this guy that was unlike any heroes we’d ever heard of.”
Like Will Proudfoot and Lee Carter, the young protagonists in “Son of Rambow,” Jennings was inspired to make his first action movie. Shot with his dad’s videocamera, it was called “Arrow: Part One,” and yes, it was very much in the vein of “Rambo.”
“It was ludicrous,” Jenning admits. “It was also a glorious time of not considering consequences and just being incredibly ambitious, making terrible mistakes.”
Jennings, 35, and creative partner and producer Nick Goldsmith are well known as Hammer & Tong, makers of many an inventive music video: the sauntering milk carton in Blur’s “Coffee & TV”; the boogeying silver robots in Beck’s “Hell Yes.”
The duo’s first adventure in filmmaking was 2005’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” based on Douglas Adams’ cult novel.
Jennings had already recounted to Goldsmith his childhood do-it-yourself filmmaking as a possible storyline. Eight years ago, in fact. But he hadn’t found the true hook.
Enter wee Proudfoot, who, along with his sister and widowed mum, belong to a religious community called the Brethren.
“I lived next door to a Brethren family for around 25 years. My parents still do,” says Jennings. “They were very intriguing and very pleasant. There was no ill feelings whatsoever. But they did regard anyone outside their community as pretty much a distraction from serving God.” They didn’t watch movies or television, didn’t listen to recorded music.
“I realized when I was writing that if I moved my story next door, I’d have the movie I was trying to make. Because it was really hard to capture early on in the script what movies meant to us without a character going, ‘Wow, I really thought that was incredible.’ ”
So while it may be nothing more than rich coincidence, there is something sweetly blasphemous about a movie in which a boy’s first encounter with the movies is titled “First Blood.” And that this communion of a fresh soul with a big-screen sacrament leads to a conversion.
Quite compassionately, Jennings reveals the pained geekiness behind the teen’s smokescreen (we think Gaulois might be his cigarette of choice).
None other than Rambo himself has weighed in.
“Sylvester Stallone has seen our little film and been incredibly complimentary,” said Jennings. “The only trouble is I then went to see ‘Rambo.’ Directed and co-written by Stallone, the latest excursion into Southeast Asia assaulted theaters earlier this year.
“It was really upsetting. It’s so relentlessly brutal.” It’s hard — or chilling — to imagine what this Rambo misadventure might inspire in kids like Will or Lee, or for that matter, Jennings’ three young sons.
“I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve become less and less tolerant of that sort of thing.”
It was John Rambo’s “resourcefulness” that so captured Jennings’ imagination years ago.
“All he had was a stick and a knife and he had 200 men after him. He was really resourceful and he only killed one guy in the whole movie and that was with a rock that he threw at a helicopter and the guy fell out. And that was his own fault.”
The unbridled recounting of a favorite movie often reveals the child that a man or woman was when first they saw the film.
Jennings located that kid and transfused it to Will and Lee.
It’s what makes them believable. It’s what makes them winning.
