Two very talented men have been responsible for several of the best music videos ever made and, not only do they get to hang with great bands, but they have a wicked nickname - Hammer and Tongs. In the real world, Hammer and Tongs are director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith and the two have collaborated on landmark clips for R.E.M. ("Imitation of Life"), Pulp ("Help the Aged"), Blur ("Coffee & TV"), and the latest from 'It Band' of the moment Vampire Weekend ("A-Punk"). But they do more than make music videos. And we're not just talking about their awesome commercials. Jennings and Goldsmith were the two men behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an interesting film that never took off and stalled as a franchise before it really even began and they've returned to break the curse of the sophomore slump. They sat down with us in Chicago to talk about the Hitchhiker's experience and how it affected their true passion project, Son of Rambow, a movie that has already made the festival rounds and will soon be playing at a theater near you.

THE DEADBOLT: So, why Son of RAMBO and not "Son of Cobra" or "Son of Tango & Cash" or "Son of Indiana Jones"?

GARTH JENNINGS: Because this whole idea came from having a discussion with Nick about possibly writing a movie based on my own experiences, which was seeing First Blood when I was very young. My friends and I thought it was so amazing that we were inspired to make it my first home movie, which was based on that. It was slightly different but it was Rambo-esque.

NICK GOLDSMITH: There was something so accessible about First Blood. Like Conan, Indiana Jones...there was more stuff. With Rambo, it was great because you just took your tie off and wrapped it around your head and you were him.

JENNINGS: That first movie - he's only got a stick and a knife. And he only kills one guy and that was with a rock he threw at a helicopter and the guy fell out and he deserved it, quite frankly. The rest of the movies became the movies we think of when we think of Rambo - the whole bullets and tons of exploding arrows and things like that. The first one just has something that's very different from that regular action movie, kick-ass thing. And it still holds up where a lot of that period [do not].

THE DEADBOLT: Do those old home movies still exist?

JENNINGS: Oh yeah. In fact, we put one of them up on the website. We put them up on SonofRambow.com. We're doing a little home movie competition. The winning home movie will be a DVD extra on our film.

THE DEADBOLT: So, children will be hurting themselves worldwide.

GOLDSMITH: That's the plan.

JENNINGS: The thing was to put up one of my home movies as kind of an inspiration.

GOLDSMITH: Show how bad they can be.

JENNINGS: You don't have to be ANY better than this and you don't need to be.

THE DEADBOLT: Did you ever hurt yourself making those home movies?

JENNINGS: We all hurt ourselves as kids when we're playing make-believe. Rope swings and things - someone always got hurt. BMX just provoked even more - going over ramps and getting the handlebars. We've all done that. Not so much in the films although we still did really dodgy things. Things that we look back on now and slightly gasp at the fact that a lot of things you did were really near-death experiences. You just don't consider it at the time. Not "near-death". That's a bit dramatic. But things where you think I probably would have broken both my legs if I jumped off there.

THE DEADBOLT: Things you wouldn't think of doing now.

JENNINGS: Exactly. Because you think about the consequences. But there's a sort of glory and freedom in that innocence and that was really, beyond all the fun of seeing kids make a movie about Rambo, it was actually trying to capture that moment in our lives that was the real draw for us to both sit down, work it out, and turn it into a movie.

THE DEADBOLT: Nick, did you have a First Blood as a kid?

GOLDSMITH: I didn't have a First Blood. I remember seeing First Blood. I didn't go out and make films. I went out and tried to be Sylvester Stallone in the woods or my mom and dad's garden. I fell out of a tree and broke my arm doing that.

JENNINGS: You didn't set it yourself like Stallone.

GOLDSMITH: No, I didn't set it myself. No, I cried really badly. I remember being driven to the hospital by my mum and she had a Volkswagen Beetle at the time and it was really rattly and my arm was bouncing up and down and I was screaming the whole way. I remember that incredibly well. But, so, no, I didn't make films until much later on. Although, come to think of it, all of my early stuff did involve injuries. Back in college, I broke my ankle and made a film about my broken ankle. Then when I fell off my bike, I made a film about being careful on your bike.

JENNINGS: He got hit by a truck and recreated the whole thing. He even used computer animation and was doing a simulation of the crash. It's called "Be Careful on Your Bike". It was brilliant. It's famous in our social circles as being one of the craziest movies anyone's ever made. Forget Ed Wood. When we did our degree show that year, Nick had been given the pride of place, the pole position, which was the foyer of the art school. And he got the front of a coach from a scrap yard and built a bike slammed underneath it with a crunched tire and then had the film playing.

GOLDSMITH: It was terrible.

JENNINGS: It was amazing. What the tutors must have thought of that? Jesus Christ.

THE DEADBOLT: First Blood was a clear influence. What were other influences on Son of Rambow? The production notes cite Harold and Maude.

JENNINGS: Yeah, definitely that era of films that were actually very big-hearted and, we felt, universally loved, but they were extraordinary friendships. They weren't conventional. Harold and Maude is a classic example of something that's very off-the-wall and yet completely wonderful. They're complete movie experiences. It's funny. It's different. There's nothing we borrowed directly from that but it was just something that was encouraging and something that was lovely. We did see an awful lot of similarities in Midnight Cowboy, which is another favorite of ours. Obviously not tonally, but in terms of a very innocent Joe Buck and a very despicable Ratso, who kind of rips him off to begin with and then they form this friendship. It's a sort-of love story. That dynamic - we couldn't help measure how successfully our relationship was playing against that. To the point, where the one thing that we did consciously take is that we allowed that film to influence how we shot the common room scene. In Midnight Cowboy, Joe Buck is invited to this hedonistic, psychedelic party. He's the "belle of the ball." He's swept up by these incredibly exotic things and people, where Ratso ends up on the stairs. That was how we were trying to play that teenage scene.

GOLDSMITH: We made a pitch book to try and sell this film with all of our thoughts and references in it and, recalling back, things we had in there were like Midnight Cowboy, Stand by Me, E.T., My Life as a Dog, Amelie - these are all feelings, not direct references. It's like emotional feelings that one has when they see the film. In Amelie, I remember coming out of the cinema and just wanting to go off and go do something. And that was definitely a feeling that we were after with Son of Rambow. They all had little elements of what we were trying to achieve.

Inspiration and Mayhem with Hammer and Tongs Page 2