by Helen Barlow
Ninian Doff, 38, had been directing short films, music videos and commercials before finally realising his teenage dream of making his first film, Get Duked! Initially titled ‘Boyz in the Wood’, the film took out the audience prize in the Midnight section of SXSW in 2019 before Amazon acquired it, and the film was ultimately renamed.
“With the passing of director John Singleton and the awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement, using the title ‘Boyz in the Wood’ didn’t feel respectful to John’s legacy or the Black community, especially as Boyz n the Hood was such a meaningful Black cultural moment in cinema,” Doff says in a statement. “Get Duked! was always our working title, and we felt it was better to return to that.”
Doff had made music videos for the likes of Run the Jewels, Miike Snow (Genghis Khan), The Chemical Brothers and many others. In Get Duked!, he includes music from rappers Danny Brown, Vince Staples, Run The Jewels and original music from Scottish producer S-Type.
The film follows three Glaswegian lads, Dean, Duncan and DJ Beatroot as they embark on real life orienteering/scouts program, the Duke of Edinburgh Award in the Scottish Highlands. They plan on smoking weed and are put out when the straight-laced Ian joins their team. After they venture off the beaten track into remote farming land, they experience true danger as the mysterious Duke (Eddie Izzard) does not approve of their behaviour and tries to hunt them down. They also experience the effects of hallucinogenic rabbit poo.
While the film might be seen as a coming of age story of sorts, Doff, who experienced the Duke of Edinburgh Award himself, was keen to explore the generational divide in a very funny manner.
We spoke on the phone this week.
Living in London, do you miss your Scottish heritage?
Yes, it’s funny. I’m a bit of a crazy mix in that I was born and bred in Scotland, but my mum’s Dutch, my Dad’s English and we spent some time in Dublin. I’ve been down in London for a while, working on a lot of stuff. When it came to make my feature, it was interesting how passionate I was to get back to Scotland and be in the Scottish accent with young Scottish people. That caught me by surprise. It’s amazing the way Scottish people talk and the rhythm of the humour is so great.
You wanted to capture that energy?
I felt like it had been quite a while since there was a Scottish film with that kind of energy and anarchy that young people could relate to and jump at. When I was in my very early teens, Trainspotting came out and it was life-changing for a kid in Edinburgh who loves movies to see Scotland be really cruel and irreverent and not be like bagpipes and views of the Highlands; to have another voice. I really just wanted to make a youthful and slightly irreverent Scottish movie rather than a Tourist Board version.
You drew on your Scottish side and on your American influences as well.
Absolutely. That’s what it ties back into, about growing up as a teenager in Edinburgh, which is ludicrously beautiful, with a castle in the middle of it; medieval buildings. I was and still am obsessed with skateboarding and I was listening to all the American hip hop when I was walking and skating around this medieval city that is like something out of Harry Potter. I would also go up into the Highlands, which is likewise very beautiful, and I would be listening to American hip hop. There’s an unspoken rule in British cinema, where you’d have the reverent violin or bagpipes over the Highlands. I jokingly called my film an anti-bagpipe movie. I wanted it to be way more true to me now, especially to how music works in a global world in the most unlikely places, listening to disconnected music and making new connections. So for me, after going out in Edinburgh listening to ‘90s hip hop, I wanted to put my favourite artists like Vince Staples and Run The Jewels onto the Scottish Highlands, which in some ways makes no sense, but in other ways makes all the sense in the world. It freshens and updates it and it was exciting to put it together.
You make a nod to Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, especially since Alice Lowe is among the cast.
I’m such a fan of hers as an actor and director. We had this part and I joke that it technically shouldn’t work on paper for a character to appear in act three for the first time and only talk about bread and then disappear again. It’s a testament to her how funny and how wonderful she is. It’s hard for someone to come in for a day when everyone knows each other, but Alice came in and blasted this single take/monologue about bread! It was electric; she nailed it.
And Eddie Izzard in a supporting role.
Finding the bored teenagers was a huge casting call, then in the other roles there is a balance with more established actors. It’s amazing how well cast this film is. Eddie brings it all. He’s got the political angle and the Monty Python side to him and he jokes about class so much in his stand-up shows. I was an enormous fan, he’s one of my all time comedy heroes, and when I thought of him as Duke, I couldn’t think of anyone else. It terrified me. We got him on the phone – he’s extremely busy and when he’s not busy, he’s running marathons. But when I saw him turn up on set in this crazy mask like a mask of Zorro from outer space which we constructed together the night before and he’s wielding a gun and shouting crazy stuff at teenagers, it was beautiful stuff.
The film implies how adults can be clueless while teenagers are smarter than they’re given credit for, no matter what class they’re from.
Exactly! A big part of it when I was writing initially, was as a response to the news over the last few years. I was feeling frustrated and upset for the short term, entitled state of mind that the leaders across the world were having – really making it all for themselves in the next couple of years and screwing the world politically and environmentally for the next generation. So, one of my first ideas was a revenge movie for the next generation on the current establishment who are not really caring what they are leaving behind in their wake. I wanted to make a political film that was completely entertaining that didn’t feel like you were watching serious or hard work. You want to engage or energise an audience like teenagers, to make an insane, hilarious film they can watch with all their friends, but also give it this subversive edge and slight sense of awakening.
Since you made the film COVID-19 is really fucking them up.
I don’t think anyone expected that piece of the puzzle. In the UK, it read like a plot from a movie: a computer algorithm graded everyone as the result of coronavirus and the algorithm insisted that in working class schools no child could get an A star and one child had to fail regardless of their actual talent. So, it was crazy in that the government algorithm would punish intelligent working class kids. So, everyone protested: “Fuck the algorithm”, which I thought was the coolest science fiction chant I heard from teenagers. And it worked and the government backtracked and threw it out the window. Now everyone’s getting the grades they deserve, and it was because of those protests working and energising and politicising. Underneath the insane jokes about hallucinogenic rabbit shit, that’s actually the heart of the film.
Are there really hallucinogens in rabbit shit?
Well, ha ha! A lot of people watch it and go, “Is that true?” I sort of love the idea of people going up to the Highlands of Scotland and just having a little nibble! I don’t want to confirm or deny, but the science in the film is pretty solid. The science in the film is that the rabbits eat magic mushrooms, which ferment in the gut and it makes the droppings hallucinogenic. I mean, it makes sense to me, so I just say go for it! That’s my Tourist Board slogan: come to the Highlands of Scotland and nibble on rabbit shit and see what happens!
We have a lot of magic mushrooms in Australia.
Yeah well, investigate your rabbits!
When you were doing the Duke of Edinburgh Award yourself, were you the dorky kid or one of the other boys?
Good question. It’s always something that someone else points out to you and you feel that you’ve bared your soul more than you wanted to. Essentially, a friend of mine pointed out that all four of those kids are me and are different facets of my personality. There’s an element of me who wants to work hard like Ian, there’s an element of me that wants to push against authority which is Dean, there’s my other side in the rambling idiot Duncan and like I said, I was the kid skateboarding around the medieval city of Edinburgh, so I am DJ Beatroot as well. I was putting myself out for the whole world to see without realising it.
First films are often autobiographical in a sense.
Yes, more than I realised.
Did you find filmmaking more personal that you’d imagined?
Yeah, I think so. The emotional investment in the work is incomparable to anything you’ve worked on before, because you work on it for so long and it consumes your life.
Are you married? I ask because I always have been fascinated that Ben Wheatley and Peter Jackson are nice, regular guys who have wives/partners who produce their crazy films.
Yeah I’m married. My wife’s an illustrator, not a producer and I guess that’s a smart idea because the work never stops. We have very young children, which was one of the inspirations for writing this, thinking about how I’m so angry about the fucking state of the world they will inherit. Between Trump and Brexit it’s like, fuck this! So, I wrote a revenge story for the next generation.
Get Duked! is available on Prime Video from August 28, 2020
