Tag: I Love My Mum

Our dirty questions to Alberto Sciamma

Posted on by victorfraga

The British-Spanish co-production I Love My Mum is about to premiere at the 38th Cambridge Film Festival, which starts this Thursday. The film narrates the story of a bickering British mother and son accidentally shipped off to Morocco on a ship container and having to find their way back home past Spaiin and France. Our reviewer Redmond Bacon described the film as “a picturesque comedy that doubles up as a grand tour of Western Europe”. Click here for our review of the film.

We took the opportunity to talk to the 57-year-old director from Barcelona, who is now on his sixth feature film, with a career spanning more than two decades. So we asked him about political undertones, nationalism, how it feels to be “from the outside” in Europe, and much more! All the images on this article are from the behind-the-scenes of I Love My Mum.

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Redmond Bacon – What was the core inspiration behind the film?

Alberto Sciamma – My own experience, I guess. I always feel like a fish out of water wherever I am. I have always been considered ‘from the outside’ both in Spain, where I was born, and in the UK, where I have lived for many years. That sense of being lost and trying to find a way back ‘home’ wherever that is… I guess that’s me.

RB – Olga and Ron’s journey is similar to that a refugee might take to the UK. Did you want to make any political comment here?

AS – I didn’t want to make a political comment, rather a social one. It’s always there as a background to Ron and Olga, but I wanted them to be blind to it, just as we tend to be. It’s there, we recognise it in occasions, and then go have breakfast…

I wanted to comment on the general attitude. Take the immigrant boat scene for example, in which Ron and Olga want to help rowing. They create chaos by trying to help. They are chucked out of the boat while screaming “sorry, sorry!’. For me, that sums up it all up.

RB – Is it correct to say that the film is also about Brits struggling to communicate in Europe?

AS – Instead of communicating, Ron and Olga just tend to ignore everything. Until a number of accidents moves them forth. They act instinctively, never questioning the world around them. But they never ever act out of badness, they don’t purposely ignore the world, they are just who they are, so there is no judgment.

I see Ron and Olga and both heroic and utterly flawed. Just like everyone else. Well, or at least me. They happen to be British, but they could as well be Spanish just like me…

RB – As the release date is the day after Brexit officially starts, is there another political message here too?

AS – The release date has not been fixed. But of course the discourse about Brexit underlines many situations in the film. The core of that discourse is not exclusive to Brexit, I believe that what is happening in Italy, Catalonia, France etc is at its roots the same bollocks; it’s a nationalist and populist discourse.

The movie looks at that from above and uses it in an absurd and occasionally surreal way, as a comedic pizza base.

RB – Did you look at any other road movies for inspiration?

AS – I’ve always loved Plane, Trains and Automobiles (John Hughes, 1987). But the inspiration wasn’t any other movie in particular, rather all the movies and experiences I’ve had: the good and the bad.

RB – The film has Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009) actress Kierston Wareing. Did you pick Wareing due to her performance in that film?

AS – Kierston is a force of nature, a fantastic instinctive actress. I loved her in It’s a Free World (Ken Loach, 2007). Seeing that movie nailed it for me.

RB – The acting is very naturalistic here, really allowing Wareing and Tom French to shine. How much improvisation did you allow?

AS – They got into their character very deeply, so that made working with them very easy. Tommy French is a natural, very talented and fast learner. He gets it. They were able to shape the script with the improvised style I was after.

The script was followed, and it was shaped by them.

Shooting the movie was nuts, in many occasions we were all improvising and adapting to the locations and never-ending changing situations we encountered. Morocco was particularly nuts, so the actors were responding to the craziness around them, Same with me Paolucci (our DOP) and the rest of the crew.

RB – You have mostly done horror and thrillers before. Why the change to comedy?

AS – I guess all my movies, specially the first one The Killer Tongue (1996) were or had comedy elements, or at least rather absurd stuff. I feel comfortable with comedy. I had previously written a few comedies, and I was desperate to direct one of them. I Love My Mum is that movie. My next movie is also a comedy and also a heist movie, entitled Five Idiots.

In fact, Ron and Olga were born as characters in the script of Five Idiots. I enjoyed so much writing them that I extracted them from that script and dropped them into a blank page… then started writing I Love My Mum. At the start of writing I only knew one thing about their story; they were gonna have an utterly stupid discussion that would put them in a rocket and send them to the moon. After that, the script grew its own body.

I Love My Mum

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a film that wastes no time getting started. Within the space of just 10 minutes, our central characters, mother Olga (Kierston Wareing) and son Ron (Tommy French) have an argument over stolen cheese, go for a shop at a petrol station and accidentally crash into an open shipping container bound for Morocco. Initially thinking they are in the afterlife, they find themselves stranded in a foreign land with no papers, no easy way to get back, and only each other for company.

It’s an action-first, character-second beginning that leaves us breathlessly catching up with the endlessly bickering odd-couple as they navigate their way back, humorously tackling everything from the refugee crisis to Britain’s relationship with Europe to the difficulties of truly connecting with your family.

Zipping nicely along from one wacky scenario to another, and coming in at a neat 86 minutes, this is a picaresque comedy that doubles up as a grand tour of Western Europe. While extremely broad in both its characterisation and comic chops, it’s grounded by the strong performances of Wareing and French, who locate the very real emotion of familial conflict to anchor this road movie on.

Why don’t they just fly straight back? Well it turns out that Ron isn’t actually a British citizen, and that his dad, long-thought dead, is actually a Frenchman – when Ron asks why they visited their “dad’s grave” every year, Olga replies that it was “good for your mental health”. In typical British fashion, the embassy cannot do much to help, leading the two of them to attempt the long way round. The early scenes, depicting paperless Brits stranded in a strange land, are the best in the movie, flipping refugee clichés on their head.

Not only does Ron end up getting a job as a taxi driver who doesn’t speak the native language, but they even attempt to cross over to Spain in a small and overcrowded dinghy. Done with too much heavy-handedness these types of scenes could be rather crass, but they gather their humour here by focusing entirely on the dim-witted Brits without resorting to North African stereotypes. Humanising the depictions that have been used to reduce them to statistics in the media, the king of thing is to make British people see themselves in the shoes of refugees or economic migrants.

Ammunition is reserved, however, for our European neighbours, Spain and France, who are seen respectively as sneaky drug traffickers and natural born philanderers. The essential misunderstanding between our heroes and their Spanish and French counterparts has overtones of Brexit negotiations, in which none of the countries can seemingly surmise what the other wants. While these later scenes meander at times, and rely on just a little too much flat sexual humour, they do get at the heart of why Britain and the rest of Europe seemingly can never properly get on.

Complemented by handsome photography of the Mediterranean Coastline and the Pyrenees, the rugged beauty of both Spain and France shows us what we are missing, making I Love My Mum’s 30 March 2019 release date (the day after the UK’s scheduled exit from the EU – that is, if it does ever come to fruition) rather apt indeed.

It premiered at the 38th Cambridge Film Festival in 2018, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas Friday, May 31st.