A movie about kids based on Sylvester Stallone's "First Blood"? It sounded like a sure parody in the making to the original John Rambo, who was not amused at the prospect.
"When I first heard . . . I assumed it was going to be a very broad and stylized joke-a-minute comedy at Rambo's expense," Sylvester Stallone said by e-mail. But he took a look at "Son of Rambow," the playfully rambunctious tale of two boys in 1980s small-town England, and liked what he saw.
"The fact that it was so heartwarming is the result of brilliant filmmaking by its creators," Stallone said.
It's the kind of triumph filmmakers dream of. Having finished "Rambow" just a week before its showing at the Sundance Film Festival last year, writer-director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith saw it become the biggest sale of the festival. Then came the long wait for licensing approvals -- though their confidence in their little film never wavered.
"If we were asking to use the clips to show the film in a negative light, we may have had some problems," Goldsmith said, "but [our] film is clearly a celebration of that film. I don't think we ever went in thinking they were going to say no, and from Day One it was all very amicable."
Drawing inspiration from Jennings' childhood, "Son of Rambow" finds the religious, sheltered Will and the tough, lonely Lee bonding over a pirated videotape of the original Rambo film, inspiring them to make a movie of their own on an era-appropriate VHS camcorder. The homespun enthusiasm of the boys' imaginative adventures seems to seep out into the larger film, infusing "Rambow" with a mischievously infectious energy.
The delay the legal tangle over authorizing footage caused in the film's proper release unexpectedly allowed Jennings and Goldsmith to continue traveling with it to a series of film festivals. Another triumph, of sorts, for the filmmakers.
"You're watching the film with an audience, and it wasn't being judged on whether it was doing anything at the box office, it was purely whether we made a film that worked. I can't tell you how satisfying that was," Jennings said.
The two have been collaborators under the moniker Hammer & Tongs for more than 17 years, since meeting in art school, and made their name directing playfully whimsical commercials and music videos for the likes of Pulp, Blur and Radiohead. They made their feature debut with the inventive, underrated adaptation of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
