FILM

Coming-of-age yarns are ten a penny in American cinema. Hip young director Richard Ayoade aims to redress the balance with his timeless and distinctly British take on the genre, an adaption of Joe Dunthorne's cult novel ‘Submarine’.

Thus far, Norwegian-Nigerian Cambridge graduate Richard Ayoade has been best known for his award-winning TV and pop promo work. In 2004, he co-created and directed Channel 4’s spoof horror comedy series ‘Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace’, in which he also appeared. He's performed in ‘The Mighty Boosh’ (as well as script editing) and the Emmy Award-winning ‘IT Crowd’. After signing up with Warp Films, he made music videos for the likes of The Arctic Monkeys, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Super Furry Animals and Kasabian. Talk to him for more than five minutes, however, and you find that Ayoade is incredibly knowledgeable about film, dropping references to everyone from Mike Nichols to Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Satyajit Ray. You can't help wondering whether he acquired this love of movies from his parents.

"Not especially, although my dad fixed TVs, so we had lots of TVs," he laughs. "I had one in my room. I could fix videos, too! So I watched a lot of videos and probably it was the French New Wave films that I first got into. I was probably 15 or 16. I was relatively late to begin in terms of understanding the narrative of films."

He certainly caught up quickly, as his feature debut 'Submarine' has been winning plaudits across the board. Landing the job of adapting Joe Dunthorne's acclaimed novel was, he insists, just luck, since he happened to be working for Warp Films just as they optioned the book. "I had always liked the genre - if you can call it that - of coming-of-age films, or just even films and TV about adolescence, although it seems mainly to be American. There are a few great European ones in the 1960s, but adolescence seems to be more an American concern than an English one."

Certainly, the unreliable teenage narrator and protagonist of 'Submarine', Oliver Tate, is less immediately likeable than his American counterparts. "I like that the character is somewhat cruel and mean-spirited and seemed, at least to me, different from other characters in this area," Ayoade says. "The other thing in my haphazard idea of this genre is that because the writers are generally talking about themselves they are quite kind to the protagonist, and generally the rest of the world is that cliché drama: the world is populated with mean bullies, and their character would be the misunderstood genius geek who slowly won over the girl. But in 'Submarine' I like that he joined in, although in a very weak way, and that Joe wasn’t indulgent of this character."

He acknowledges that there's also a major difficulty in adapting this particular book. "Much of the humour in the novel lies in the tension between what you think has happened and how Oliver is describing it. The question was how to do that effectively in the film. The idea was to keep Oliver’s unreliability as a narrator but to juxtapose that with an actual reality – not just one that Oliver describes."

One of the more intriguing aspects of the film is that it's difficult to work out when it's supposed to be set. Most of the usual indicators, such as pop music and teen fashions, are absent. This, says Ayoade, was entirely deliberate. "I didn’t want the film to be specifically located in time. I suppose it’s slightly because the idea that coming of age stories tend to be set when the author remembers that time - like for Joe it’s the early 1990s. But there is something about having mobiles and computers that didn’t feel necessary, and the story just didn’t feel the need to occupy one time. I don’t particularly know what fifteen year olds are like now. If I had set it in a definite time frame, here and now, it would need to be about what is happening here and now. And really, it very much isn’t."

Next up for Ayoade is, as the saying goes, something completely different: an adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novella, 'The Double'. "Yes, it's a doppelganger story and it is about a lonely clerk who meets his exact double, and how this double then takes over his life. To me the idea of someone appearing exactly like you and it not bothering anyone else is funny…"

'SUBMARINE' OPENED ON FRI 18 MAR. FOR REVIEW, CLICK HERE.
 

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