From Garth Marenghi to Garden Force: Sam Campbell and Joe Pelling discuss the creative approach to Make That Movie

It’s Nice That: First off, can you tell us about your background working together, and how partnering on Make That Movie came about? What led to you wanting to make this type of show?

Joe Pelling: I met Sam after seeing his Edinburgh show in 2017. I think our mutual friend Charlie Perkins introduced us when she was working as head of comedy at Blink Industries. We made a short Comedy Blap together in 2019 called Get Real Dude, and then Sam worked with us on the TV adaptation of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared for Channel 4. Sam has a very original voice and doesn’t massively overthink stuff, so we always found it pretty enjoyable working with him on that show and he seemed to get the tone we were going for. I think the idea for Make That Movie came from Sam’s love of terrible amateur filmmaking and a lot of the chaos that goes down on set. Documentaries like Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau about Richard Stanley’s nightmare making a film with Marlon Brando were a big influence.

I think we wanted to make a comedy show that also had a strong visual flavour, like Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, Documentary Now! or The Mighty Boosh. This idea meant we could weave that stuff in naturally as part of the overall concept.

Sam Campbell: My cousin showed me the original Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared short on Youtube back in the day. My memory is hazy but I remember looking up the creators and saw they were in an art collective. I pictured them all living in a commune and waking up at the crack of dawn to build puppets and film maggots.

Sorry to nitpick but I actually met Joe in 2018 not 2017. He really does lie through his teeth! I found him very funny to talk to and indeed look at (pencil neck) so when the offer came through to make a Blap with him and evil production company Blink it felt like a no-brainer.

Will Kay, who was working on an animated sequence for Dora the Explorer movie at the time and ended up producing Make That Movie, was tasked with making the dream helmet because he has an affinity with wires and cords and the like.

The road to Make That Movie would make even the most seasoned traveller extremely car sick. I believe the germ of the idea is from our initial meetings in 2019. This comment is from an excel spreadsheet of stray concepts:

“We find obscure ebooks, interview the authors and adapt a scene from their work. – Wouldn’t this be cool?”

INT: What other shows or genres were you looking to for inspiration, or to parody?

JP: With the sci-fi stuff in episode one, we looked at a lot of bad naughties films where everyone had extra complicated facial accessories and leather. Films like Swordfish and In Time were definitely on the moodboard. Then with the teen love story and the bog man we wanted it to feel more bright and 80/90s, like the film Heathers. Our costume designer Ailsa Windsor did an amazing job at pulling the right references for these sections.

SC: I wasn’t on the hunt for visual references during the writing so much. For a while I was trying to study episodes of Arrested Development to see how they manage to juggle so many storylines, which looking back was the errand of a certain fool.

I would say a bigger inspiration was watching movies like Boondock Saints and The Butterfly Effect at sleepovers as a child.

A decade ago I was living in Sydney and met a fellow called Craig Anderson with a huge VHS collection and he would dig out flicks like Warriors of Virtue – a high fantasy made by some Chinese brothers who were doctors by trade and a Norwegian movie called Body Troopers about a boy who shrinks down and goes inside his grandfather's body to chase out his kidney stones.

INT: The opening sequence is really fun – what were your references and inspiration here, and how did this come to life through the details?

JP: We chatted a lot about the team and their overall look. The idea I suppose is that they see themselves as an elite squadron of filmmakers, so a lot of detail went into their purple outfits and the colour scheme or their HQ. There is an era of light makeover TV shows like Changing Rooms, and Garden Force where the titles have a lot of soft fades, over-the-top graphics and strange music we were trying to emulate. I ended up making the music for the titles and trying to give it a naff world-music feel, after Sam shared some Australian TV shows he liked like Ocean Girl.

Challenge Anneka was also a big influence in terms of the show’s overall tone and premise, plus she wears a cool jumpsuit. I’m not sure if they do this kind of thing anymore on TV shows but I think it would be nice if all the dragons on Dragons Den had dragon themed costumes instead of quite expensive business suits.

SC: Originally the title sequence was more directly aping a sort of A-Team or Mission Impossible vibe which you’d see DIY and gardening shows in Australia doing in the early 2000’s and always felt pretty OTT given the subject matter. Ultimately it felt a bit played out and we tried to go with a more light-hearted vibe. Joe composed the music using his laptop. It is amazing what laptops are capable of with the right keyboard touchings.

I really do wish every title sequence had different clips and gags for every episode but that is a luxury of time and money that our clock and wallet did not permit.

INT: There’s lots of different types and styles of animation in the show. Why did you take this approach? What did you want animation to add to the story and the comedy?

JP: We both like animation, Sam also studied animation before doing stand-up and we probably wasted a lot of the writing time we had drawing horrible little characters. I guess we wanted the show to have a bit of that mixed-media feel, where there is a lot crammed into 22 mins.

With the Yooglet episode the idea was that this stupid-looking woodland folk creature was a national treasure with a long history like Paddington or Winnie the Pooh. So we tried to show him in a variety of styles on book covers that stretched back to the 1940s and then more garish modern versions. We also looked at a lot of old books that famously have not aged well, like the Tin Tin stuff.

There is also the 2D-animated section in the last episode that was essentially a parody of outlandish 1970/80s films like René Laloux’s Gandahar and maybe a bit of The Land Before Time. I love all that stuff.

SC: We had to find a balance with the show functioning as a sitcom while still trying to include the occasional motion graphic spurts you’d likely see more in a magazine-style show. The Yooglet show was a horrible horrible nightmare for the longest time because it needed a load of these packages built, but it seems to be the one people have responded to the most, based on the text messages I’ve received.

I do feel like we have a lot left to explore. If we were allowed to do more episodes, the crew attempting a bombastic Henry Sellick stop motion film would be fun.

Also I had the great privilege of performing the motion capture for the 3D character Super Breast in the second episode.

INT: What visual aspects of the show would you want to push further in a second series?

JP: Most of the time we were just trying to make sure the story and characters were funny, and the heightened visual stuff was actually something we could afford to do in the time we had.

There was an MTV-style sequence where we shot on digital, MiniDV and 16mm at the same time. For the mythical bog scene we built the entire thing inside of a school gym and filled it with dry ice and a water tank to make it feel a bit more fake and stylised. We also installed a functioning car turntable in a hotel carpark, because none of the greedy millionaires who have them in their driveways would let us film on them. There were quite a few moments like this where we got to push the boat out and it’s always a bit stressful, while being very satisfying if you can pull it off. Although I did think our producer Will Kay was going to murder me with his brain. Hopefully we will do a series two, where the characters have to make a stop-motion strata-cut animation while they are skydiving.

SC: It is always exciting to try nutty set pieces and in the outline phase we were guilty of chasing those, then sheepishly returning to focusing on story crap and how your characters help or hinder each other, which is the one true key. I have a handful of ideas if the commisi-genie’s grant us the wish of series two. An episode about triplets who have noticed that there are a tonne of movies with twins but their kind rarely sees representation. I haven’t seen this new movie about Anthony Bourdain yet but I would like to make a gritty drama set in a revolving restaurant. Anyway, thanks for interviewing us!