Four Lions premiere at Sydney Film Festival

Time Out presented the Australian premiere of Four Lions at the Sydney Film Festival on Sat 12 Jun at the State Theatre.

Chris Morris, director, and Kayvan Novak, one of the stars, attended drinks at Swissotel with Time Out (pictures on our Facebook) before swaggering down the red carpet to introduce the film. After the film Morris and Novak answered questions about the film. Other VIPs at the event included The Chaser.

Interview

Chris Morris read a story three years ago about five jihadis planning to ram a US warship. They packed their launch with explosives. They stepped in. It sank. He found himself laughing. Morris, whose credits include UK TV satires Brass Eye and The Day Today, has made a film that achieves two extraordinary things. It sheds light on the kind of religion that would make anyone form a cell in the first place. And it mines a rich seam of comedy in the dynamic of the gang, looking at modern jihadism through the prism of farce.

Where did this idea come from?
I went to the high court and watched the Bluewater terrorist trial [five men were convicted of conspiring to bomb a shopping centre in Kent in 2007] and got to hear a lot of MI5 surveillance tapes of the suspects, and you start to realise these people are klutzing around in a very average way. It was like the Keystone Kops. There's a recording I heard where one guy says, "Hey bro, what's the date today?" And the other guy says it's the 23rd. "So is tomorrow the 24th?" You wondered if they were stoned but the police said no.

There's a bit where they're arguing about who's cooler, Bin Laden or Johnny Depp. You hear ridiculous things like, "My wife's really pissed off with you 'cos she made you these sandwiches and you didn't eat them and then you ate a load of chocolate spread. Hey, wouldn't it be brilliant if we pulled an airliner out of the sky? Yeah bro, that'd be fantastic! What's on telly tonight? When's Jeremy Clarkson on, he's brilliant?"

So jihadists are on one level just ordinary blokes?
Well, they're a bunch of blokes but they're not just a bunch of blokes. You have to understand something that seems, paradoxically, not to fit into a universal experience until you look at it this way. I mean - call me sick - but I remember going to a test match once and thinking: I could take this one out! ... It is quite fun, walking around London. You start working up bomb plots. We came up with ten great ones. Sadly, if we'd been brown and the room had been bugged, we wouldn't be sitting here talking to you now.

There must have been potential investors who said they couldn't get involved as it was too controversial?
Well, we wouldn't hear from them. The more dangerous kind of idiot is the one who'll put the money on the table in front of you and then, at the last minute, say, "Oh by the way, you can only have the money if they all survive."

What's your response to people who think you can't make comedy out of something whose subject is, essentially, mass murder?
Perhaps the biggest laugh in Raiders of the Lost Ark is a man pulls out his sword and gets shot. He dies but we all laugh. I remember watching The General, a Buster Keaton film, the climax of which is a massacre in a canyon, basically soldiers falling off a cliff and then blundering around in mud while they're shot to pieces by cannons and rifles. And Buster's doing some sort of routine around it. You can include these things.

Four Lions will be released on 19 Aug 2010.

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