l-r: Luke Treadaway, Tony Grisoni, Harry Treadaway
Dublin Film Festival (pic: Pat Redmond)

Brothers of the Head is a new film shot on location around Notts and Skeggy: filmed in documentary style by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, it tells the fictional story of conjoined rock star twins Tom and Barry Howe and the rise and fall of their mid-seventies pre-punk band The Bang Bang. LeftLion spoke to screenwriter Tony Grisoni, whose previous work includes Michael Winterbottom's In This World and Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tideland. He met Fulton and Pepe whilst working on a third Gilliam film: the ill-fated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Tell us a bit about Brothers of The Head. Why did  you want to make this film?
It comes from this strange novella by Brian Aldiss, who’s known as a science-fiction writer but this is very different from his other stories. I asked him where it came from and he told me he was on holiday with his family in Norfolk and he had a terrible argument with his wife. Everyone else was sitting in the back of the car and he was on his own driving and he suddenly remembered this dream he’d had. He claims that he dreamt everything that happens in the story and just wrote it out. To me that’s a really beautiful place for a story to come from, from a man’s dreams. It’s almost medieval. I went to see Brian about this story twenty years ago and said “I really want to do this, I want to make it into a film somehow.” I had very little experience, I was a runner or something, but amazingly he gave me an option on the story and he was very enthusiastic, very supportive. He didn’t know me from Adam, but he just took a punt.

The other thing is that the story is told by the characters surrounding the two twins. As each person tells the story they kind of lay claim to the twins at the same time, which is something that people do to freaks and to the dead. It’s about the things that you can’t know about someone, the things that you can’t quite explain, things on the edge, the other.

So this was twenty years ago, the project then ended up on the back burner?
Any idea you have for a film is never dead until you make it, it’s like a body in the swamp. A friend of mine talks about The Shelf: The Shelf is warm and in a dark place, so it cooks. It’s never cold.

Like bread rising.
Or like fungus… It was always at the back of my mind. I used to go up to the place in Norfolk where the story begins to escape London and I’d always remember the novella when I was there. Then I met Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe when they were making Lost In La Mancha and they wanted to make a film of their own rather than one about someone else not making a film. We got talking and threw ideas around and I suddenly remembered this novella. They read the material, they responded really well to it and they wanted to leap in there.

Was there any temptation to update the story?
I did play around with updating it at one point, but musically it was a really interesting time to set something, where the band could be proto-punk. Just before punk broke in the UK, our boys are playing music which prefigures it, that was a very exciting idea. Also it helped the gothic quality of the tale somehow to be set in 1975.

When we got into making the film what blew me away was the music by Clive Langer, who’s a genius. Harry and Luke Treadaway, who play the twins, learned to play guitar, learned to play with the band and the music in the film is for real, there’s no playback in the gig scenes, it’s all live. What’s more, the gigs are all full of Nottingham extras and that’s one reason it works so well. I’ve never seen extras like that, they threw themselves at the band!

So you’re quite involved throughout the production of a film then? You don’t just finish the script and hand it over to the director.
I try and work on films where I don’t do that, because that seems to me like a job half done. For me, writing a screenplay, you’re not finished until the final cut. I’m not someone who just shuts themselves away to write, I want to be part of the party, I want to be there and I want to be writing and re-writing. That’s what makes me excited about films. That’s why working with, say, Michael Winterbottom on In This World was such a wonderful experience: that was total involvement but I think I did less writing on that than anything else.

What was that process like?
Michael wanted to make a film about refugee’s journeys, he wanted to shoot everything sequentially and he wanted to use non-professional actors. I didn’t know how to write for non-professionals, it sort of robbed me of everything I thought I knew about screenwriting. That’s what really interested me about the whole project. I started to meet people and collect stories from people who had been smuggled into London, from Sangatte refugee camp near Calais - all you need is a moustache and a hood and you can get straight in. Michael and I tested the route overland through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey to Istanbul and collected more stories. We filtered down all these tales and gave them to our two main characters, then concocted this story which was like a road movie with the events that would happen at each border crossing outlined. Michael cast people to play characters in the film which would be close to what they did in reality: If you wanted a people smuggler character, you went to a travel agent, and it was all semi-improvised.

You’ve worked with a lot of interesting directors, do you seek them out or do they come to you?
I keep on having to seek them out, they never come to me. I have to go and find them and bang at their doors, mail dodgy things, threaten their cats with forks. Anything I need to do to get the gig. No shame.
There’s a quote on your bio that says, “screenwriting is about making film, collaboration and passion.” Did you learn that the easy or the hard way?
To be honest, when I compare what I do for a living with what my dad did, there is no comparison. Making films has to be about passion, about joy, otherwise you’re in the wrong business.

So who’s been your most passionate collaborator?
No, I mustn’t compare them. It’s like comparing girlfriends; you’re not allowed to. I will say this though, anytime that Terry Gilliam or Michael Winterbottom want me to go tilting at windmills, I’m there for them.

Is there anything else you’d like to say to LeftLion readers?
Yes, go and see this film! Go to a cinema, see it where it’s meant to be seen. It’ll be great if this does well on DVD, but because of the intense quality of those gig scenes I think you need to be in that darkened place and blasted by a really good sound system.

And with an audience?
Yeah – with a bunch of people you’ve never met before. It’s a great way to make friends.


Brothers in the Head is showing at Broadway until Thursday 19 October.