Happy Together
A bromance like none other, the story of an inventor and his robot has stolen our hearts. Rafaela Sales Ross meets one of the men we have to thank for it, Brian and Charles director Jim Archer.
With his feature debut, director Jim Archer managed to gracefully do what few others can: to build a deeply heartfelt exploration of loneliness that is also genuinely funny. Brian and Charles, based on Archer’s 2017 short film of the same name written by and starring David Earl and Chris Hayward, tells the story of Brian (Earl), an ostracised inventor in the Welsh countryside who, one day, decides to make a robot out of an old washing machine and a beaten mannequin head greatly resembling Jim Broadbent. The result? Charles Petrescu (Hayward), perhaps the loveliest humanoid to ever grace British cinema.
MASSIVE sat down with Archer to discuss the process of turning the short film into a full feature, the hurdles of working with a seven-foot-robot, the blending of comedy and drama and, most importantly, cabbage guns.
Film4 approached you and the creative team to develop this into a feature a few years ago, but how did the period of isolation brought in by the pandemic affect your take on this film about loneliness?
It's hugely more relevant now, but I don't think we've changed the script at all. Only maybe on a technical level after the pandemic, but, it was all already all there. The short we made in 2017 was about isolation. So we made a film and it just happened to slide into the world we now live in.
The original short film feels much gloomier, despite its hopeful ending. In the feature, did you go in wanting more comedy?
We wanted the feature to have a bit more joy to it. There was a version of the script that had those darker moments in it, we even shot some of those things. There was a moment where Charles sort of dies for ten minutes, he gets clogged with water and can’t function. We had this right in the middle of the film and then, in the edit, we thought it didn’t make any sense. So even though we liked that darkness, it also took away from everything else that was about to happen, and it makes everything feel not as intense, so we took that out. We were aiming for this sort of live-action Pixar movie, a Wallace and Gromit type of thing.
Is there anything else that you left on the cutting room floor that you wish you had kept?
We cut quite a few things, actually. There was another big scene, where we first meet Eddie, and it was my favourite scene to shoot. It was the only time we brought in rain machines, we had thunder and lightning going… It was Brian driving by himself, pre-Charles, and he is just driving on the road until he sees Eddie standing there, and there’s this exchange between them where they’re friends but not really, but Brian is trying to be jovial with him.
Then you meet the whole family and they have this confrontation, which I loved. I loved that scene, but we put it in the film and it just slowed everything down. It was such a darling to kill but it had to go, because we needed to see Charles sooner.
Was there anything in the film that came out of the period you spent in creative isolation with David and Chris?
I’m personally never that strict with a script, and David and Chris are very open to improvising. The script was so well written, so we usually went from the pages and it would evolve and change from there until it became something completely different. The scene where Charles is asking to sit in the front was not scripted like that, we were purely trying to solve a problem. We couldn’t put Charles in the back for that particular scene because then when Brian goes to meet Hazel, the window doesn’t wind down and we needed the window to wind down to shoot it, so Charles had to be in the front.
Because we shot the scene with Hazel first, we then had to figure out why Brian was taking Charles to town in the front when he’s so adamant no one should see him. So we were like, “Let’s improvise this entire scene where Charles is being a stompy kid trying to sit in the front” and Chris, in the robot suit, just improvised. I think that’s the scene where everyone on set laughed the most because it was just different every time and it took so long!
What was the most whimsical logistical challenge that you had with the seven-foot quasi-robot?
It was actually getting him ready! It took way longer than it did when we shot the short because now he had a structure to him and proper costuming as well, so that was always a big logistical problem. It was on the very first day of shooting that we realised what we were in for…
We were shooting in the valley by the lake and Charles came on set and the valley wind just went through him! It channelled through! We saw this big cardboard box with a man in it just being battered and trying to stay upright, looked at each other and thought, “Okay, this could be a tricky shoot.” But then I think a lot of it just plays into it. Charles’ unsteadiness and the fact Chris can’t see a thing from inside the costume, which then means David needs to lead him by the hand, just kind of plays into the sweetness of their relationship.
Another interesting logistical challenge lies in all of Brian’s many quirky inventions, such as the super-shover. Did any of it work?
The super-shover did work, yes! Not all inventions worked but that one did, and then it didn’t on the day! So we had to do some stuff in post-production to make it work. It wasn’t as dramatic when sticking out of Brian’s chest, it was a bit flatter, but it worked. And the cabbage gun also worked, but we didn’t end up using it on set because it was quite dangerous and we realised we didn’t need to work in that way. We also had to light it and do some work with it and it was all a bit of a faff. We had an amazing props crew who made stuff work and then we had a few VFX tweaks in the end.
Did you take the cabbage gun home?
No, I don't know who's got that one. That's a really good point because we've been looking at stuff that we want to take home. David has taken the entire cuckoo clock into his house. I wanted the egg belt, but I have no idea where it might be.
Did you take anything else apart from the egg belt?
I always take the clapboard. That’s always the thing I like to have because we had our own printed clapboard, but I haven’t actually got the egg belt. We got all of Charles's heads, which is sort of gruesome, like decapitated heads. But the universe still has it all somewhere, so I will probably steal a thing or two one day.
Did you hear of any interpretations of the film that really stayed with you?
I haven’t read that much about this film so far, but there was one particular person who really related to it because they had a parent with dementia and the way in which Charles drifts in and out of clarity, dipping into saying something nonsensical then suddenly becoming very engaged, really stuck with them. And that stuck with me. There’s a lot of my dog in there, a lot of David’s kid in there.
At a certain point in the film, there is a lovely montage to the sound of ‘Happy Together’ by The Turtles. How did you go about picking music for the film?
With ‘Happy Together’, I first added it as a joke and my reaction was much like, “Well, if this works, good, but it is too on the nose”. But then I just grew to love it, and I loved the way it just fit to what we were doing with the montage, with the pillow fight, feathers going everywhere, the slow motion, a complete staple of what a happy montage looks like. I thought we’d have something like an electronic song, we tried those tracks and we thought it was boring. We just wanted to celebrate it more, so we dialled up everything in the edits and made it even more joyful, which I think is good. Some people may find it too on the nose and deliberately saccharine but, it’s a bit of a parody in a way.
You end the film with the jolliest of notes: a rap sung by Charles himself. How did that idea come about?
That was all Daniel Pemberton, our composer. He made the song for the ending and it extended two minutes into the credits. He didn’t want to extend it anymore, so he said, “Why don’t we make a rap song and have Charles rap it?”, and we immediately loved that idea. So credit goes to Daniel and Chris, who wrote the lyrics. It was a lot of fun to do.
And, lastly, if you were to build your own best friend as a robot, what would be a must-have feature?
I think just someone tolerant. Someone who could put up with me.
Brian and Charles is out in UK cinemas.
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