Hoot Press: In A League Of Their Own

The scenery on the way into the small Co. Wicklow village of Avoca is breathtakingly beautiful. But, like many another Irish townland in the region (your correspondent, having grown up in a neighbouring county, speaks from experience), there’s also a strange sense of desolation to be found in the acres of rolling farmland, isolated fields and Twin Peaks-like forestry. As Denis Johnson unforgettably articulated in the opening lines of Already Dead, “Van Ness sensed that these isolated towns were places a person could disappear into. They felt like naps you might never wake up from.”
Perfect territory, in other words, for masters of goth surruralism The League Of Gentlemen to realise their long-cherished ambition of a feature length movie. Later, the League’s Steve Pemberton will tell Hot Press that the bleak terrain of the Garden County was ideal for their purposes because, “the rural areas in Ireland have that undertone of foreboding that we always had in the show, and that we wanted for the movie as well; there are a lot of moors and so forth. The places we’re shooting in are just ever so slightly…cut off (brief, slightly evil, cackle). It’s nice to be corrupting that Ballykissangel picture-postcard ideal.”
When hotpress arrives on location to meet the League, Pemberton and his fellow acting colleagues in the troupe (Reece Shearsmith and Mark Gatiss) are shooting a scene outside a church on the edge of the village. The sole non-thesp member of the quartet, producer and writer Jeremy Dyson, lingers nearby in heavy overcoat and hunting cap, occasionally consulting with the group’s long-term director, Steve Bendelack.
In 12 months time, the sequence in question will no doubt be dazzling punters in cinemas across Britain, but for now, Bendelack has a couple of more set-ups he wants to squeeze in before rain disrupts proceedings, and with lunch and a press interview also to contend with, time is at a premium. It’s a scenario familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in film-making - the collision between creative ambition and logistical reality is perhaps more violent in this medium than any other.
Eventually, time is called on the morning shoot and we repair for lunch to the nearby grounds of the Avoca Lodge, which is functioning as base-camp for the production during its tenure in the village. The make-up and wardrobe departments are housed in a trailer nearby, and a double-decker bus serves a makeshift canteen for cast and crew. David Warner, the Omen, Cross Of Iron and Straw Dogs star who plays a 16th-century aristocrat in the film, sits on the step outside his trailer, wearing a dressing-gown and smoking a pipe, looking thoroughly bemused by the organised chaos unfolding within the Lodge’s grounds.
Thankfully, the stars’ cabins are an oasis of calm within the bustling atmosphere of the production base, and it’s in one of these that we enjoy an audience with Mark Gatiss. Clad in his Hilary Briss (the sinister Royston Vasey butcher noted for his surreptitious dealing of lethally addictive “special stuff”) costume and make-up, Gatiss invites us inside, clears some clutter off his couch and settles into his chair. Erudite, funny and really quite outrageously charming, he qualifies as one of the most immensely likeable interviewees this journalist has ever had the pleasure of meeting.
“Thankfully, things have been going wonderfully well so far,” he begins. “It’s been very tight, as we knew it would be; it’s a six week shoot and there’s an awful lot to do. But it’s helped that we’ve retained a lot of the people who worked on the show with us. There’s a kind of shorthand there that makes things move a bit more quickly, and when you’re working on a feature, very often time is the most valuable element of all.”
Earlier this year, Jeremy Dyson described the movie to this writer as “The League Of Gentlemen meets The Matrix - a proper high concept movie.” Is that description still a fair encapsulation of what the film will be like?
“Well, I hope it doesn’t mean that this one will be good and then the two sequels will be shit,” laughs Mark. “Stephen Fry, who’s a friend of mine, read the script and then described it as ‘Six characters in search of the North meets The Neverending Story’, which we should probably put on the poster. Actually, what we want to put on the poster is the quote from Don’t Look Now, which is ‘The act of love photographed as never before’ (laughs uproariously). We probably won’t get away with it, sadly.”
Ah yes, Don’t Look Now. Nic Roeg’s classic psychosexual mindfuck has enjoyed something of a critical renaissance in recent years, as have an array of other horror classics, including Theatre Of Blood and The Wicker Man - coincidentally, movies also endorsed by the League. Are they sick of talking about the influence those films have exerted on their work at this stage?
“Yeah, definitely,” groans Mark. “It’s funny, with those films you’re mentioning – and obviously we don’t want to make any claims – it kind of feels like nobody was talking about them the way they do now, before we started citing them. And now they’re all we get asked about (laughs). We get requests to go and talk about them pretty much every other week, particularly Don’t Look Now, and yeah, it feels we’ve discussed them more than enough at this stage. Although one new piece of information bought to my attention recently is that Donald Sutherland wears a wig in the film, which I couldn’t believe. That’s one of those bits of movie trivia you’re kind of in two minds about discovering (laughs).”
Since the League got their big break with their TV commission in 1998, Gatiss certainly hasn’t been slow about helping out other comedians, most recently serving as script editor on Matt Lucas and David Walliams’ Little Britain, and acting in Julia Davis’ Nighty Night. Was he surprised at the enormous success enjoyed by both shows?
“Nighty Night has been huge, although it was quite a troubled production,” reflects Mark. “It was a very interesting time we had working on it last year, one of the funniest times I ever had, actually. It was very hard work, a lot of it was very last minute, and we weren’t at all sure how it was going to go down. But I don’t know, people seem to be so much more receptive to these wild, left-field ideas these days, it’s hard to know where the mainstream ends and the underground begins any more.”
Does he feel the League are at least partly responsible for blurring the lines?
“We paved the way!” he bellows in mock-outrage. “But seriously, I think things change around you, the mainstream changes, and I do think that Little Britain wouldn’t be able to go on BBC1 if we hadn’t done what we’d done on BBC2. It would probably have been too much of a leap to have something so in-your-face. And it’s not so much that people become blasé about risky material or become inured to shock, it’s more to do with the fact that tastes change, and you’ve got a younger generation now who are more open to the envelope being pushed when it comes to swearing or imagery, or to humour that’s based on darker themes.”
And there we must leave them. They made one of the best British comedy shows of all time, the film is progressing nicely, and - to top it all - they’re as personable and humourous a group of blokes as you could hope to meet.
A league of extraordinary gentlemen, indeed.

Photography Dave Cullen