by Gill Pringle at the 18th annual Zurich Film Festival
Well, the animals bit, for sure.
“Capuchin have the highest intelligence of monkeys, sharing very similar intelligence levels with chimps and gorillas. Certain primates are naturally brighter, similar to us humans, where some are brighter than others. There are stupid humans and there are intelligent humans – and there are the same things in the primate world,” asserts Hamm when we chat at the 18th annual Zurich Film Festival.
The human cast weren’t bad either, Hamm assembling a strong ensemble featuring Charlie Rowe, Marcia Gay Harden, Diane Ladd and Australia’s Josephine Langford.
However, there was a period of adjustment on Gigi & Nate’s North Carolina set as the actors grew to understand their own place in the shoot’s pecking order.
“The trickiest thing was watching the other actors realise that the monkey was the actual star of the movie, and that she was number one on the call sheet,” Hamm says of the film’s captivating Capuchin, Allie, who stars as the eponymous Gigi to Charlie Rowe’s Nate.
“Animals only work for four or five hours a day, and they get driven around by huge Teamster men, who carry them around in crates and look after them lovingly.
“So, the monkey comes in at the very last moment, and it’s kind of like Greta Garbo walking onto the set, because everything’s lit and she is literally ready for her close-up.
“And then, in between takes, she’d lie around, maybe on the bed or on the set and just be dreaming or posing for pictures. And I’m telling you, she truly understood acting by the end of the movie. She understood, ‘OK, I get peanut butter if I move this glass from there to there, and if I look at him in the eyes, I get a thing of peanut butter too. No problem. I’ll do that in two seconds’,” recalls Hamm, whose other films include The Journey, Driven and Killing Bono.
The director learned very early on that his leading lady wouldn’t work if she was full: “If there’s too much peanut butter, they get bored and stop working. So, there’s a level of rewards that you give each time, that teaches them how to act. And there’s a moment in the movie where she actually takes the whole jar of peanut butter into the cage and is merrily eating the whole jar.
“And we had to reset so Marcia went to get the peanut butter from her, and the monkey looked at her, like ‘I’m not giving you the peanut butter’, and Marcia grabbed the peanut butter, and the monkey held the peanut butter and then the monkey kind of swiped at Marcia as she took it. And they had this standoff moment, and it was all on film, none of that was rehearsed. It was pure ‘This is my peanut butter, right? I’m the star of this movie’, while Marcia is like, ‘It’s our peanut butter and I’m the star of this movie,” he laughs.
Truth is, it’s Charlie Rowe’s Nate who is the monkey’s co-star, portraying a young man who is stricken by meningitis and rendered paraplegic.
Real-life US scientists at the Helping Hands organisation had successfully experimented with Capuchin as service animals for Vietnam vets although today their programme is more or less closed after meeting with opposition from animal activists.
At the height of the programme, there were almost 70 Capuchin assisting people with disabilities, according to Hamm. “I think what most disabled people want more than anything else is a sense of independence, even though maybe they’re not independent – and they also want the emotional relationship, even though that’s difficult sometimes,” he adds.
Casting the right actor to play Nate was crucial. “No question. One of the first things we asked Charlie was: are you comfortable with animals?” he says of the charismatic Rocketman actor who missed out to Tom Holland for the role of Spider-Man.
“You couldn’t have done this movie unless you’re actually flat out OK with a small furry animal sticking a toothbrush down your throat, and picking at your hair,” says Hamm.
“We never allowed Charlie to get out of the chair on set, so the monkey only knew Charlie as disabled. And you must never hold or cuddle a monkey, because they feel threatened, and then they bite you. But when you’re disabled, you can’t do that anyway. So, Charlie was a kind of resting place on set, because he was in a wheelchair, so the monkey could sit with him. Over the months of work, there was a real love that the monkey had for Charlie, and vice versa. And that really shows in the film,” he says.
If some audiences might dismiss Gigi & Nate as sentimental – its narrative somewhat similar to Australia’s own Penguin Bloom – then Hamm insists his story is actually quite subversive.
“To me, the film is about anti-polarization,” he says. “It’s about a world in which you can’t say anything anymore without coming down on one side or the other of the political argument. Nothing. It’s impossible to be politically neutral. It’s impossible to have a normal, comfortable, functional, intelligent debate about issues without turning it into some kind of tit for tat. And this is not just in America. This is in Europe and across the world. And it’s fueled by social media, encouraged by idiots, and so what you get is a world in which there is only black and white and there is no gray, when actually the gray is the interesting area where we make progress.
“The intolerance that’s shown in the movie to the monkey represents a force that is polarizing and not necessarily progressive.
“I’m a progressive, ideological believer, and I sometimes believe that my own side is more repressive than the other side. In other words, the liberal intolerance is significant, just like right wing intolerance is significant, and both are deplorable,” he says.
Polarization is a running theme through several of his movies, he argues, pointing to The Journey about the 2006 Northern Ireland peace talks between Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuiness and Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley.
“I like to take real stories and reimagine them in a different way, like The Journey was a great event to look at how two completely polarized political figures represented the extremes of those two different places. But they were the only two people who could come together and solve that problem in the end because they were the only two people who could bring their relevant tribes with them,” says the Belfast-born director.
“And with Driven, I was fascinated by the characters around John DeLorean who was a kind of empty shell. Despite the cars, I wasn’t massively interested in him because he was a narcissistic idiot on many levels, and was a kind of prototype Trump who was, in many ways a Born Again Liar,” he says of his 2018 thriller starring Lee Pace and Jason Sudeikis. “DeLorean literally couldn’t tell the truth if it smacked him on the head with a plank, so I was fascinated by that aspect but also by the pretty disgusting people that surrounded him and fed off him.
“Those criminals bled him dry six ways to Sunday, so that’s where the Jason Sudeikis character came from. Jason and I were fascinated by that guy. He was an absolute crook.”
