Chris Morris
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til661



Joined: 11 Feb 2007

PostPosted: Tue May 15, 2007 10:32 pm    Post subject: Chris Morris Reply with quote

Well hot damn and heavens to Betsy, some thunderously great comedy for you this update, and in all cases it's sheer brilliance is matched by it's extreme rarity. Good old The Internet for helping bring about a state of affairs where people can (and want to) share such goodness. It's hard not to take the technology for granted most of the time but, shit, the fact that anyone can now go on YouTube and see a stack of Syd Barrett footage that was previously a complete pain in the hole to get hold of is a real joy. And y'know, stuff like this, for example, is what the internet was made for...bollocks to all that 'piss-weak dancing kittens and George Bush being made to sing along to Vambo' style stuff (pssst...someone tell Iannucci, eh, before we have another nasty out-break of Time Trumpet. Actually, Brooker got it spot on about internet comedy being the worst thing in the world as soon as it goes near a telly...he's still doing another six episodes though, ho!)

Before we get to that, here's some actual concrete info about the new Chris Morris project, which has hitherto been described as 'that suicide bombers thing', because there's been hardly any information coming this way about it - waynecarr@gmail.com about that or anything else please, folks. Or PM me through the board for a much more rapid response, if you can - ah, and registration emails are still randomly bouncing, so email if you never got one and I'll manually activate you. So, as I mentioned before, there seemed to be some uncertainty over whether it was a TV show or a film...it's both as it turns out, a film for TV, with Morris writing and directing again. It's apparently about a bunch of Pakistani kids, and follows them as they work and play, while exploring their relation to the culture that surrounds them, their beliefs, and their sense of heritage. The brief description makes it sound really interesting, although the casting breakdown notably doesn't feature the word "comedy" in it at all. Was interesting wondering about what the tone would be when so little was known about it, the sighting of Morris at a debate on the ethics of Al Qaeda, and the apparent theme of the London Bombers being (to quote IanW) "like pissed off, pompous, narcissistic adolescents, blowing themselves up in something like a more extreme version of self-harming" had me envisioning a sort of Islamic Young Ones with smaller bombs, heh.

I think this apparent change in direction could really be what Morris needs to break this lengthy period of sporadic activity and water-treading. And he definitely has a gift for narrative, when I was checking through the latest 1993 GLR show again for encoding blips, I was impressed by the pictures painted by the Chollis Ketteridge letter, and by the stories told in those Our Tune-style frozen piss letters in general...course, they're more commonly associated with the R1 Music Shows that came the following year - and as an aside, it's a fact that the majority of all the greatly loved segments and features premiered on GLR. Case in point being this letter, in fact, which was later repeated on R1 almost verbatim...incidentally, I had no luck tracking down David Essex's cover of "A Horse With No Name" when I was patching the show to reassemble it and cover tape flips, so please get in touch if you can help there. Discretion assured.

Well anyway, back to the casting breakdown, here's how the characters themselves are described - and I must proffer massive thanks to the kind fellows who passed this on but wished to remain anonymous, very much appreciated. It's interesting that the intelligence of the characters is mentioned first-off with all these descriptions, dunno how common that is. Also, Hass sounds like a really interesting character, and note that the description of him being "funny" is the only time comedy is referenced at all. Because of that, I feel Waj may turn out to be a fan favourite. Amused by the description of Crow Uncle's as a "small seething boffin." I'm really intrigued by this project. I wonder also whether Morris was actually meeting with Will Adamsdale to discuss this film, rather than the second series of Barley. Having said that, I did ask Jock Spoogewince at the time, and he was adamant it was about Barley.

Right, onto the downloads. The penultimate 1993 GLR show for you firstly, and this is a particularly great episode from what is undeniably one of the strongest bodies of work Chris Morris has ever produced. Absolute gold from beginning to end, absolutely inspired comedy, bursting at the seams with head-turning invention...just listen to those 'what's on' bits, for gawds sake. And the calls...such a natural Cook-like flair for improvisation. Bear in mind when you listen to these mp3s that this run went out at 10am on Saturday mornings (and I must thank benthalo for his invaluable help with little nuggets of info like that and much more when preparing these GLR files). This show features the glorious Virgin 1215 RantI've frothed about before...heavily indebted to Victor Lewis-Smith but a hilariously caustic and pissed off piece of radio. A real gem




This going to be so good, hopefully back to the levels of Brass Eye and The Day Today Smile
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PostPosted: Tue May 15, 2007 10:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

could be good, but as with anything you never know...
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til661



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PostPosted: Tue May 15, 2007 10:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's going to be better than Nathan Barley II anyway Smile
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PostPosted: Tue May 15, 2007 10:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

are they making a new series of that? Christ! I did like the general idea, but to stretch it out over a whole series was too much
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til661



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PostPosted: Tue May 15, 2007 11:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sadly they appear to be, it's not a bad show generally but you just expect so much more from Brooker and Morris, especially together

Quote:

Will Nathan Barley 2 be totally Mexico?

A website recruiting extras suggests a second series of the Shoreditch-lampooning sitcom is on the way. Time for a round down the Nailgun Arms.



http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/tv/2007/03/nathan_barley_2_time_to_go_tot.html
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 2:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote



They're really on the ball eh? I doubt there's anyone who enjoyed the show who's not already got it downloaded - and probably at least 5 years ago. Still, it's good to see that it's being released.
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luke



Joined: 11 Feb 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 26, 2010 2:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Comedian Chris Morris faces new controversy over film about suicide bombers wearing fancy dress to target London Marathon

A new comedy by Brass Eye creator Chris Morris about bumbling Islamic terrorists in Sheffield is set to trigger controversy after it received its first public screening over the weekend.

Four Lions is loosely based on the Leeds jihadist cell that killed 52 London commuters on July 7 2005.

But the suicide bombers in Morris's film are far from hardline fundamentalists; instead, they are portrayed as hopeless amateurs who stumble into extremism.

Like the 7/7 cell, the film's four would-be jihadists plan a series of suicide attacks in the capital, during the London Marathon.

The result is a comedy that is likely to upset many cinemagoers when it is released later this year.

As if to substantiate the controversial nature of releasing such a film in 2010, Home Secretary Alan Johnson raised the UK terror alert from 'substantial' to 'severe' on Saturday - the same day that Four Lions premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

Morris doesn't just target Islamic extremists though, as the film is also heavily critical of the police, in particular their surveillance techniques.

One sequence mocks the series of procedural foul-ups that resulted in the tragic shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground.

So controversial is the subject matter that both Channel 4 and the BBC refused to commission the comedy last year, deeming the material unsuitable for prime-time audiences.

It is believed Channel 4 still has first refusal on any subsequent TV broadcast.

Four Lions has received a mixed critical reaction following its Sundance premiere.

Critic Kaleem Aftab, writing in The Independent, praised Morris: 'He exposes a myth of terrorist bombers being trained assassins but instead exposes them as being confused young men.'

But The Observer's Nick Fraser was less comfortable with making light of homegrown terrorism.

'I wasn't sure how to handle a jihadi who discusses going to heaven with his nine-year-old son,' he wrote.

'And I had a problem with the culminating scenes when the boys, dressed in obese bird costumes against a backdrop of the London Marathon, finally blow themselves up in a series of explosions that look and sound real.'

The film is Morris's first major venture since Nathan Barley, a satirical comedy about 'cool' Londoners.

He is best known for his cult TV show Brass Eye.

In 2001, he was slammed over a 'Paedophile Special' episode, which generated 2,000 complaints and resulted in politicians including then-Home Secretary David Blunkett and former Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell condemning Morris.

Musician Phil Collins sought legal advice after he was fooled into appearing in the divisive episode, which focused on paedophilia and the hysterical treatment of the issue by the media.

Collins was one of a number of celebrities who took part, endorsing two fabricated anti-paedophilia campaigns.

In one scene, the former Genesis star was featured wearing a t-shirt with the words Nonce Sense across the front while he warns youngsters what kind of people to be suspicious of.

Another of those stung into appearing was comedian Richard Blackwood, who warned viewers of the dangers posed by the internet. He told children paedophiles can make toxic vapours rise from their computer keyboards.

In an earlier 1997 edition of Brass Eye, Morris created a fictional Eastern European drug called Cake.

He tricked David Amess, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Basildon, into filming an elaborate video warning against the dangers of the drug before Mr Arness posed a question about the 'issue' in Parliament.

This time Morris is thought to have carried out research to ensure the content of Four Lions is acceptable to the Muslim community.

Producer Mark Herbert, from Warp Films, said: 'Chris's research has been meticulous. It is fatwa-proof.'

Speaking last September, a Channel 4 spokesman said: 'It was agreed at a very early stage that the project would work best as a film and from this point was developed through Film4.'



from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245887/Four-Lions-Controversial-Chris-Morris-jihadist-comedy-bumbling-suicide-bombers-premieres.html
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 1:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote


Chris Morris in the lion's den
The creator of Brass Eye is back and this time his subject is Islamic fundamentalism. Expect trouble.
By Sebastian Doggart
10 Feb 2010
telegraph.co.uk

The most controversial film of 2010 is almost certain to be Four Lions. This is the first feature film by Chris Morris, who was voted "most hated man in Britain" in 2001 for his Brass Eye TV spoof of the media’s obsession with paedophilia. He is also widely hailed as a comic genius and one of Britain’s finest satirists.

Four Lions is the fruit of three years’ research into Islamic extremism. In a rare interview given at the Sundance festival, where the film was first screened, Morris told me about that research. “I spoke to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims. I wanted to understand the wide context of Muslims in Britain, which is complex and very balkanized. Every place you visit has a different tone, and each Pakistani village has settled in a different town. Within that generally benign setting, you find tiny pockets of fierce radicalism.”

Morris was determined to do his homework after a public spat with Martin Amis in 2007 over Amis’s attack on Islam: “I lost my temper with the idea of making bold pronouncements on such thin research. It was pretty unbecoming and not very accurate.” Morris’s research yielded a massive arsenal of real-life stories. “The unfathomable world of extremism seemed to contain elements of farce. People go to training camps in the wrong clothes, forget how to make bombs, fight with each other and then fight again over who just won the fight. They volunteer for the mujahedeen and get told to go home and 'do the knitting'. They talk about who’s cooler – Bin Laden or Johnny Depp.

“Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce. On Millennium Eve, five jihadis planned to ram a US warship. In the dead of night, they dropped their boat into the water. They stacked it with explosives, and it sank. At that point I thought, 'What was the look on their faces?’ This was a Keystone Cops moment. “The more I looked, the more reality played against type. Then the penny dropped. A cell of terrorists is a bunch of blokes. A small group of fired-up lads planning cosmic war from a bedsit – not a bad pressure cooker for jokes.”

With his two co-writers, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, whose other credits include Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno, Morris started to explore real-life terrorist interactions. “Small group dynamics have been identified by intelligence agencies as the way to understand how a terrorist cell works. If you look at them from the inside, you find petty behaviour. Terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohamed spends two hours looking for a costume that won’t make him look fat on camera. In the Hamburg cell plotting 9/11, members of the cell would tease Mohammed Atta because he was so uptight. They would make fun of him for p---ing too loudly, and Atta would blame it on the 'bloody Jewish doors’. Sometimes reality was almost too ridiculous.”

Specific characters emerged from his research: “I met one white guy who used to be in the BNP and went around beating up Pakistani lads. He then decided he was going to get more subtle, and mess with their minds. So he bought a Koran so he could beat them at their own arguments. But he accidentally converted himself, and that guy ended up being a poster boy for a Muslim radical organisation. I came back to Sam and Jesse and said: where can we go with this?”

The result is the character of Barry, played by Nigel Lindsay, who worked on Brass Eye. Barry is one of the "four lions", whom Morris describes as “a bunch of jihadis who set off on an ill-advised course and then watch the wheels come off their wagon, one by one.”

Barry competes for leadership of the cell with Omar (Riz Ahmed, star of The Road to Guantanamo), whose disillusionment with the treatment of Muslims by the kafir (unbelievers) has led him to become a soldier of the mujahadin – or, in his own words, “a Paki Rambo.” The two lads quarrel like seven year-olds fighting over a Playstation console: when Omar gets to go off to training camp in the desert, Barry tries to stop him by swallowing the key of the car taking them to the airport.

Morris shoots the film like an observational documentary, with two hand-held cameras that make us feel, as in The Office or The Thick of It, that we are watching everyday life, in this case in Tinsley, south Yorkshire.

Morris directs the action confidently, managing complex tonal shifts seamlessly, and eliciting superb performances from all five of the principal actors, Riz Ahmed, Arsher Ali, Nigel Lindsay, Kayvan Novak and Adeel Akhtar. “We’d run long takes,” Morris says. “The actors got so tightly wound with the rhythms in their characters, that you could play around with it a lot. I would call action before people were ready, and if something occurred to me whilst something was going on, I would chuck something in – 'Say this’, 'Punch him’. Everyone thought I was a royal pain in the arse.”

I saw it twice at Sundance, and both times found it laugh-out-loud funny from start to finish. It’s the wittiest satire of religious extremism since Life of Brian. It’s not a film for everyone, though. There were some baffled American viewers, one of whom inquired what the fertiliser-like biscuit being held up as evidence by an interrogator was (Weetabix). Another asked me what was involved in the jihadi initiation ritual of “wizzing in your own gob”. The LA Times critic Kenneth Turan told me, “It’ll have to be subtitled, just like they did with Ratcatcher [about striking dustmen in 1970s Glasgow].” I hope Morris has some fun mistranslating it into American.

The people behind the film are convinced there is little risk of the movie provoking anger from extremist Islamist factions. Mark Herbert, the producer, says: “Chris’s research has been meticulous.” Morris himself points out that the film never mocks Islam. “People would only think that if they haven’t seen the film. Terrorism does matter. We’re trying to make you laugh – to entertain – to surprise – to move even. You don’t have to mock Islamic beliefs to make a joke out of someone who wants to run the world under sharia law but can’t apply it in his own home because his wife won’t let him.”

This is a historic movie: the first feature-length comedy ever to make jihad its main theme. It is a tribute to Morris that he has taken on the hottest potato of our time – and in the process, he has created an important milestone in British cinema.

His next steps? “My plan is to have a lie down and see what bites me on the arse.” Let’s hope that bite doesn’t come from any lunatic lions.

Four Lions will be released in May.

------------------

I can't wait - even that clip had me laughing loudly...
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luke



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PostPosted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 2:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

yeah i'm really looking forward to this Smile
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Sera_6969



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PostPosted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 2:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Chris Morris is back??? Let me break out the champagne i've been saving since 1991 for Liverpools first Premier title!!!!
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funkyfunkpants



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PostPosted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 9:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just saw this trailer, can't wait to see the film.
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luke



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PostPosted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 10:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

brilliant Laughing
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PostPosted: Sat May 01, 2010 6:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote


Chris Morris: 'Bin Laden doesn't really do jokes'
Can suicide bombers be funny? Chris Morris thinks so. As he releases his first feature film, he gives a rare interview to Xan Brooks
Xan Brooks
The Guardian,
1 May 2010

Two men sit shoulder-to-shoulder against a bright white wall. They are young and cheerful, at ease in each other's company. They clown around, try a hat on for size and direct dopey grins at the camera. The prevailing mood is one of jollity, and yet what we are witnessing are the rushes from a martyrdom video, shot at Osama bin Laden's farmhouse in January 2000. The man on the right is Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the 11 September hijackers. His buddy on the left is Ziad Jarrah, who piloted the United 93 flight that came down in a Pennsylvania cornfield, killing everyone on board.

Fast-forward a decade. Chris Morris and I are sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a London production office, staring at the screen of a scuffed white laptop. "It doesn't conform to type, does it?" Morris says. "These aren't cold, reptilian killers. They're dicking about with a hat; they're pissing themselves laughing. What's interesting is to look at this footage and think, 'But they still did it.' They acted like this, and then they still went and did it. And if you keep going with that line of thought, you might get somewhere and come out the other side." He shrugs. "Or maybe you just get lost and go completely mad."

Morris has spent the past five years researching, scripting, shooting and editing a comedy about suicide bombers. He has gone with it, got through it and come out the other side, and if he's gone mad in the process, it is sometimes hard to tell. In the course of a chaotic three-day spell, I run into the director on several occasions and he's different every time; by turns bouncy and ebullient, caustic and contemptuous, professional and forthright. At each turn in the conversation, I think I catch glimmers of the myriad media ghouls he once channelled on the likes of Brass Eye and The Day Today. Then again, maybe not. Morris suggests that his days of deconstructing the antics of the fourth estate are now behind him. He has grown up, moved on. Right now, he has other fish to fry.

Four Lions is a bumbling picaresque about a quartet of would-be jihadis who hatch a plot to bomb the London Marathon. It introduces us to jittery Omar (played by Riz Ahmed), dozy Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), foursquare Waj (Kayvan Novak) and belligerent Barry (Nigel Lindsay), while an inept rapper named Hassan (Arsher Ali) jogs on the sidelines, awaiting his big chance. The film's early scenes set up the jihadis as a bunch of Dad's Army-style buffoons – hapless, misguided, even faintly lovable. Then, about midway through, one of them runs through a field, stumbles over a wall and blows himself up (Asian Man's Head Falls Out Of Tree, proclaims the headline in the next day's paper). After that, we twig that this gentle, domestic excursion is actually tilting towards oblivion. And this, surely, is the point of Four Lions. It is a film on a knife edge, one that pits the inherent humour of its situation against the inherent horror of its subject matter.

"Big thinking in small places," agrees its director. "It's a fairly standard comic position." In person, Morris is lithe and limber, with a corkscrew bouffant and a birthmark on his cheek that the tabloids have chosen to read as the mark of Cain, physical proof of an evil nature. If so, it seems to agree with him. Morris is now in his late 40s, though he seems preternaturally boyish – more youthful, somehow, than the Paxman-esque news anchor he first road-tested on the BBC back in 1994.

He explains that he was first drawn to the idea of suicide bombers after completing work on his infamous Brass Eye paedophile special from 2001. The research, he says, predated the London bombings of 7 July 2005. "It was an attempt to figure it out, to ask, 'What's going on with this?' This [the "War on Terror"] is something that's commanding so much of our lives, shaping so much of our culture, turning this massive political wheel. I was wondering what this new game was all about. But then 7/7 hit that with a fairly large impact, in that we were suddenly seeing all these guys with a Hovis accent. Suddenly you're not dealing with an amorphous Arab world so much as with British people who have been here quite a long time and who make curry and are a part of the landscape. So you've got a double excavation going on."

And what conclusions did he draw? It strikes me that modern jihad (or at least the version that we see in Four Lions) says as much about the west as it does about the east. It's an unholy hybrid, isn't it? Fundamentalist zeal by way of Fame Academy.

"Well, it could be," Morris says, though he is not wholly convinced. "There are a lot of theories, all partly right. You could argue that this is a version of celebrity culture gone wrong. There's certainly a Live Aid element to it." He smiles. "I'm not saying that Diana was the perfect suicide bomber. But there are some parallels, I think."

I first spoke to Morris about seven years ago, when he granted a brief phone interview to promote his Bafta-winning short film My Wrongs 8245-8249 & 117. At the time, I presumptuously suggested that the ongoing War on Terror seemed tailor-made for a Brass Eye special. Except he was having none of it. There was no mileage in the idea, he sniffed. He didn't know what could be done with it.

Today, he qualifies that position. OK, he was interested, even back then. It's just that the Brass Eye approach had begun to bore him. "You can only maintain your interest if you're travelling more in ignorance than knowledge. I did formalise some ideas, but the jokes were all concerned with media coverage and perception, rather than the issue itself. And when you've already had a crack at media language, you can only do it a few times before you know how it works."

He thinks it through. "It's an age thing as well. You see young people, or kids, and they're fascinated by the way people talk. And that's great. But eventually you get to the point where you think, 'You know what? I don't care how you talk, I'm just listening to what you're saying.' "

All of which makes Brass Eye sound like an inspired piece of juvenilia. "Well, maybe," he says. "And, of course, there's a place for looking at the language. How can you wage a war on terror? How can you declare war on an abstract noun? But the danger is that then you're ignoring the most interesting thing about it. This is such a life-or-death issue that just looking at the language would be a cop-out. You want to find out what's behind the rhetoric. You need to look at the engine."

So Morris pushed his satire in a fresh direction and plunged himself into years of detailed research. He sifted through court transcripts, interviewed experts (and idiots) in the field, and came away with a stash of anecdotes that sound at least halfway as hilarious as anything that appears in the finished film. He tells me about the BNP hard man who "accidentally converted himself" after reading the Qur'an; about the fundamentalist who demanded that the world be run under a caliphate, yet freely admitted that he was unable to apply Sharia law in his own home because his wife wouldn't let him. Some of his subjects, he adds, were really rather funny. "The thing about a sense of humour is that it's not bestowed on the good. It's just randomly dished out. People say that Abu Hamza is very good at jokes. Admittedly, Bin Laden doesn't really do jokes. Maybe that's because his writers are no good, or his sense of humour is too dry for western tastes." He sighs. "Certainly he's no worse than Gordon Brown."

The homework has paid handsome dividends. Four Lions is a good film, both audacious and insightful. But it is also – and there's no easy way to gloss this – a potentially hazardous one. I ask if Morris is concerned about possible reprisals, and he umms and ahhs. Yes, he was nervous about previewing it at the Sundance film festival, and then again in Bradford, but so far the response has been positive. If anything, he is more concerned with upsetting those who were caught up in 7/7, except that he has spoken to someone who was on one of the tube trains and they claimed to be OK with the idea, "so long as it's funny". Besides, he adds, there is no way of making a film that's 100% fatwa-proof. During his early days as a radio DJ, he once bungled a request, played Tony Bennett instead of Frank Sinatra, and went on to receive lurid death threats from a listener in King's Lynn. Who can tell what people will react to?

To his detractors, Morris remains a malign and shadowy hoaxer; a hit-and-run media terrorist whose dislike of the limelight is taken as cowardice. Away from the cameras, he lives quietly with his wife, literary agent Jo Unwin, and their two young sons. He rarely attends public events and almost never gives interviews which, inevitably, only fuels the mystique. When embarking on Four Lions, he corralled the services of two co-writers, Peep Show creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain. For them, part of the appeal was the chance to meet Morris in the flesh. "We wanted to check he really existed," Bain tells me. "He has this reputation as the dark lord of comedy, this godlike presence. It was a surprise to find that he's actually human."

Morris has insisted that he never deliberately courts controversy; that there's no purpose in tackling a subject if your sole aim is to shock. That said, it seems clear that his compass is naturally pointed towards the thorny and the taboo. I keep coming back to that paedophile special, in which a series of duped celebrities lined up to talk "Nonce Sense" and earnestly explain that you can tell when your child had been abused because they "smell like hammers". Of course, what Morris was lampooning was the media's collective hysteria about paedophilia, as opposed to paedophilia itself. But no matter. The show sparked a perfect storm of tabloid outrage. The Daily Mail dubbed Morris "the most loathed man on TV", while 2,000 viewers (or possibly non-viewers) rang up to lodge a complaint with Channel 4.

And what was Morris's reaction to all of this? Was there, perhaps, a part of him that relished the attention? "I didn't relish it," he says quietly. "What happened was that I'd gone on holiday. I'd gone on holiday by mistake, in relation to the transmission time. Channel 4 had bumped [Brass Eye] by three weeks because there was a girl who had gone missing on a school trip in France, so it coincided with my holiday and I flew right back into the storm." Another shrug. "It sounds dismissive, but it was actually pretty boring. It wasn't particularly novel."

It wasn't novel, being the subject of a witch-hunt? "But it wasn't a witch-hunt. It all seemed to happen in a fictional world. I mean, if I'd gone on the tube and been menaced by a lot of angry people, then it wouldn't have been boring and it wouldn't have been pleasant. But stuff that's going on in the papers when you've just done a show about stuff that's going on in the papers is just" – he grins – "stuff that's going on in the papers."

Interview over, Morris reboots his laptop, guides me past various folders ("Asian Girls Names") and shows off some exclusive Four Lions off-cuts. En route, he name-checks the films he used as touchstones. He thought of The Ladykillers, The Guns Of Navarone and a thriller by Gillo Pontecorvo called Operation Ogro, about a true-life band of Basque separatists ("Like this, but without the jokes"). Now look, here's some behind-the-scenes footage, interspersed with multiple takes of key sequences. His work is now over, but he seems loth to let it go. "Did you know that Terrence Malick is still working on The Thin Red Line? Ten years after it was released in the cinema." How typical of Morris, to set his stall beside another famous recluse, another man who prefers to toil in the shadows and let his work speak for itself.

On screen, Omar is squabbling with Barry. This, Morris explains, is an exchange that failed to make the final cut because it was seen as being too obvious, too explicit; too much thought and not enough joke. "Sometimes you got to do the wrong thing in order to do the right thing!" Omar is screaming. "Sometimes the wrong thing's more right than the right thing!"

I leave with the suspicion that I've just witnessed the moment that best sums up the comedic intent behind Four Lions. Perhaps it says something about the man who made it, too.

• Four Lions is released on Friday.
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funkyfunkpants



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PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2010 6:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Torrents are out there now, I watched it yesterday and loved it.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 29, 2010 3:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote


Chris Morris Talks Minor League Terrorists, Gallows Humor, and ‘Four Lions’
Cole Abaius
October 7, 2010

How is Osama Bin Laden like Prince? If you’ve been wondering the answer to this burning question, Chris Morris might just have the answer for you. The writer/director just had his first film, Four Lions, picked up for distribution by Tim League’s new Alamo Drafthouse releasing arm.

The comedy focuses on four wanna be terrorists who can’t do anything correctly. The humor takes something completely inhuman in our society and reminds us that there’s a comedic folly to some of the people out there trying to blow us up. It’s a smart film that treats the threat of violence with the severity it deserves while still delivering an absurd amount of Three Stooges-like, bumbling comedic moments that come with being human.

You can check out my review of the film here, but be sure to watch the interview to find out what Joaquin Phoenix has to do with Al Qaeda, what happens when a woman wearing a niqab laughs, and how to stop terrorism once and for all with movies and twitter.
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