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like reading a David Lynch script before we all used
‘David Lynch’ as an adjective. It reminded me a
bit of El Hobo, Dust Devil by Richard Stanley and
also the Coen Brothers; it has that almost cartoon,
story-board aspect to it. It is very strange in its weird
kind of juxtapositions – I’ve been calling it a visual
non-sequitur.”
This sort of comment is all the more remarkable
seeing it’s concerned with a British film. If Four
Weddings, Sense And Sensibility and Trainspotting
have all recently played on their quintessential forms
of Britishness as their main selling point, The Killer
Tongue takes great glee in being a complete hybrid of
trash Americana and spaghetti westerns. As Michael
Cowan of Brighton’s Spice Factory who co-wrote,
produced and organised the financing for the film
comments: “Spice Factory really doesn’t give a fuck
about Channel 4 or any of those people because they
really aren’t interested in the type of movies that we
want to make. The world’s becoming a much smaller
place. People want to be entertained, not go and watch
My Beautiful Launderette which has only 50 screens,
all made in the UK, costs £1 million and takes 5 years
to produce because everyone’s trying to make money
out of Channel 4. Our philosophy’s really different
because it’s grown up from the video age. I think a lot
of kids from that era who have grown up knowing a
lot about all sorts of different films and music want to
BUY Alberto Sciamma films online from and
see that same diversity in the cinema.”
This is reflected by the other key figure in The Killer
Tongue’s genesis, the 34-year-old Spanish writer-director,
Alberto Sciamma. Like David Fincher’s rite of passage
before his directing debut on Alien 3, The Killer
Tongue is Sciamma’s first feature film after directing
a host of critically acclaimed music videos. That experience
shows in the fact that shooting for the film
wrapped up after eight weeks in Almeria and Madrid,
holding to its $6 million budget.
Acquiring the money for such a relatively modest
film budget is still a difficult process, as Cowan attests:
“It took us nearly 18 months to get it financed. Alberto
Sciamma had suffered total rejection when he was touting
the original script for The Killer Tongue. But after
we got involved and Jason [Piette, the other co-director
of Spice Factory] did some extensive rewriting, we
were ready to go. We used a front guy as a producer
called Christopher Figg who produced the Hellraiser
movies ‘cos otherwise people would have said, ‘Unknown
director, unknown producers, who the fuck are
they?’. We used him as the front and then put all the
deals together to make it work. During that process we
got a lot of rejections from a lot of people, Polygram et
al, who couldn’t see it, couldn’t understand it, couldn’t
get it. But we did it.”
The Killer Tongue has eventually emerged as a coproduction
between Spice Factory and Spain’s Lola
429
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