Interview: Paul King on Bunny and The Bull

Paul King is best known as director of The Mighty Boosh, one of this decade's most hysterical comedy universes. Having just completed his first feature film, Bunny and the Bull, King has begun research for an adaptation of Paddington Bear, which he's also set to write and direct. "I've been taking pictures of Portobello Road today...I've been re-treading 'Paddington' and getting thrown out of the station for taking pictures. Yeah, it is quite exciting."

There is a peculiar charm to King's earnest enthusiasm, only compounded by his sedate lilt - its antiquity almost betrays an education. His early directorial aspirations were fostered at Cambridge, where he made many of his comedy connections. Time spent in Edinburgh was just as formative; he fondly recalls the city's cultural institutions, having directed Garth Marenghi on the Fringe. Now his work returns to Scotland, this time on the big screen. "I'm actually grinning at the thought of it running at the Cameo!"

Bunny and the Bull is King's first foray into screenwriting. "I started off doing a lot of comedy theatre in Edinburgh, so it was a bit of a sideways step. I don't know how much you plan a career, but I always fancied the movies. It's so ludicrously competitive...that even the chance to get to make something is quite odd, and there's so much luck involved. I wasn't gunning heavily for it, like those creepily determined people - the ones with famous dads. Then I met The Mighty Boosh and got to do their TV show."

"I thought, 'making a film's not such a crazy leap to make any more'. Writing TV comedy, you've got to write hours of the stuff and it's all got to be on the nail. You're really judging it by laughs per minute. That's not what I wanted to do. You don't go to the cinema and say, 'I didn't laugh as much as I'd like to', as if you were tuning into an episode of Frasier or Seinfeld. In film comedy, hopefully there's room for a bit more narrative, a bit more story, and some heart-felt stuff."

"There was this scheme for first-time directors that Warp were running. They're interested in new approaches, in films that don't look like everything else...it felt like an opportunity. You've got to be quite savvy and practical about these things, which I wasn't particularly. But I happened upon Warp and they were really supportive."

"The only time they gave me a hard time was when they thought it was getting too traditional, or that I was selling myself out. They're relentlessly looking for something different, or at least the people I was working with there are. Everyone was prepared to say, 'we want you to make your film'. I don't know how many people would have been as experimentally friendly as they were."

Like King's past work, Bunny and the Bull experiments in both form and content: an anti-bromance; a road-movie set amongst the psychological furniture of its hero's home; a comedy, or tragedy in reverse. Stephen (Edward Hogg) recalls his last holiday, piecing together what led to his current despondency and inability to leave the flat. Between gags and witty banter emerges a dysfunctional relationship with his companion, the eponymous Bunny (Simon Farnaby). "I was interested in that Brideshead Revisted thing: one of those adolescent types, somebody you think is really cool, even as you slowly realise they're not. Structurally, that came first."

Stephen transforms the memory of their trip into a wild hallucination. "Setting a film in someone's memories...the first idea I had was about boring postcards, because I love Martin Parr's books. I thought about how you look back on holidays and the photograph becomes a bigger memory in years to come than your [being there] at the time. I was interested in the idea that we need to anecdotalise the past - like when you split up with somebody and you learn to explain it all in just one sentence. Then you realize it's the most grotesque simplification of what actually happened." Stephen is the "guy who's not turned it into an anecdote yet", who can still "embellish it and embellish it until it's like a sketch."

A whole range of miniature worlds are created in Stephen's flat through ingenious set and effects design. King's aesthetic priorities will be immediately familiar to fans of 'The Boosh', though on a budget of £1m, they are as much a product of necessity as of artistic vision. "I was trying to make the backgrounds do a lot of the work for us. We didn't have the money to go all around Europe, and I wasn't interested in making a totally naturalistic thing...most films have an inherent naturalism, however they're photographed: rooms look like rooms, chairs like chairs. But I felt there was a way of exploring something visually as well as through narrative. I liked that thing from Raging Bull where the rings were all built different sizes depending on his state of mind. That was something I wanted to push a bit."

"It's quite hard to describe the look of the film in the script. Obviously a big part of the story is that it's all set in his head, and the sets are meant to reflect his mental state. But it's quite hard to go, 'this sort of looks like cardboard land, like late 1970s Paddington animation' - it's hard to visualize that. At a concept level, I'd be able to say, "let's go into a world of newspaper!", but what does that actually look like? The designer [Gary Williamson] brought a lot of those ideas to it. He'd done a lot of Dennis Potter stuff that I really liked - that's also set in such exaggerated worlds."

"Sometimes it's great doing things on a really small budget, trying to get every last drop of creation out of it. But sometimes we'd shoot days and second units through the night - and then, occasionally, it'd be nice to do an expensive explosion. I do like doing it hand-made, though. Deep down I love it."