Following the STARBURST favourites The Greasy Strangler and An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (and his superb, criminally underseen [adult swim] series Tropical Cop Tales), cult director Jim Hosking is back with his unique depiction of a meeting of two musical legends. Set in a remote Scottish cottage and eating only frozen breaded vegetarian ready meals made by ‘the wife’, Paul (Sky Elobar) and Stevie (Gil Gex) bond over naked beach exploits and hot chocolate. Not to mention sheep. This all makes for another wonderful, bizarre movie from one of the UK’s most unsung treasures. We caught up with Jim to pick his brains about Ebony and Ivory…
STARBURST: Were Sky and Gil your first choice for the characters in Ebony and Ivory?
Jim Hosking: I did write it specifically for the two of them, yeah. I think probably a big reason for wanting to make it was that I find Gil just so funny. And I had been wanting to make a film with Gil. Not that I can particularly remember the genesis of the idea or why I wanted to make this film! I think the idea just came to me unexpectedly and for no particular reason, because I’m the least strategic and creative person on the planet. I wasn’t tempted to make a credible, authentic biopic in any way, obviously. I think I may even have thought of Sky and Gil and thought, ‘What can I do with the two of them?’ The idea of them being Paul and Stevie, but being sort of very wonky versions and being a bit old, seemed very funny.
They are perfect in the roles…
Yeah, Sky has this quite cultivated, deadpan, Californian persona. So the idea of him trying to do a Liverpudlian accent made me laugh.
It’s brilliant. The opening shot on the beach is fantastic. How did that come about?
Well, I had the idea that Stevie would arrive in a rowing boat and Paul was waiting for him on the beach. But I was working with my friend Mårten Tedin, the DOP, who also shot The Greasy Strangler. He’s shot quite a lot of stuff for me. In Greasy, we had this shot where Ronnie and Brayden were waiting for the character Oinker to walk along the street towards them. And we were panning between the two of them, and Oinker. And it’s just funny, panning like something urgent is going to happen, yet nothing visually dramatic is happening. Mårten had this very funny idea. I can’t take the credit – I suppose part of directing is that when someone has an idea that you’re able to recognise whether it’s worth keeping or not – but he had this idea that when we panned away from Paul, he would step towards the camera. So we were giving him these different marks so that each time we panned back, he was nearing the camera.
Was it a conscious decision to give Sky a bigger penis this time?
This is going to sound strange whichever way I say it, but I thought about the penises in every way that you could imagine, you know, like within a sort of a six-hour stretch of thinking about them, because I was. My producers had told me that the director Sean Baker had written something about my second film, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn, and I messaged a bit on Twitter and he was very nice. I watched his film Red Rocket, and there was a scene where Simon Rex was running along the street and was naked, and I didn’t realise he had a prosthetic penis. And then I was prepping Ebony and Ivory, and I didn’t want to make the penises look like the penises in Greasy. The only reason that they have fake penises anyway was because I thought that they’d feel too self-conscious, and it would feel a bit sad, and I didn’t want it to feel like I was laughing at the actors in the film. I wanted them to be able to be naked in the film, and it not to be a joke about their bodies, I suppose. And I wanted them to feel comfortable. So then I asked Sean Baker for the name of the person who provided the prosthetic for Red Rocket. And he said, there’s this guy, Matthew Mungle in the States, who does the best prosthetic penises. So I contacted this guy, and he said, Yes, I can provide two prosthetic penises for you. He sent me this very big PDF with every kind of penis you could imagine in his… well, penis box.
In his toolbox [laughs]?
Exactly! Because there’s one white penis and one black penis, I didn’t want it to be a joke about penis sizes between races or anything. It becomes a bit more of a sensitive issue than you imagine at first. I think it became quite a democratic thing of me wanting them both to have the same-sized penis. Although when the prosthetics arrived, somehow Paul’s penis seemed… maybe it was just something very straight about it… like it didn’t have as much bend or maybe as much pliability as Stevie’s penis. But yeah, I probably didn’t want to repeat the joke of him having a tiny penis, so I pumped for them having the same size penis. And I can’t remember right now whether they’re uncircumcised, but I could have had them circumcised, uncircumcised – any inch length. And I know that it was recommended to me that I go for a five-inch. I replied that it sounds too small, like, isn’t six inches meant to be the average length or something? I didn’t really do any research. It was some penis information that I gleaned over the years. But I decided to make them one inch longer. And then when they turned up, they were way bigger than I expected. And then I thought, oh god, I’ve made another penis film. My son was asking me, “Why are you fixated with penises?” Well, I’m not, but I suppose there is something quite funny about the indignity of male nudity. And also, you probably don’t see enough naked men in films.
We assumed it was to push the boundaries and give two fingers to what people expect…
I don’t know that it is that, really, because I genuinely don’t feel like I’m trying to push the boundaries with anything that I’m doing. It comes from quite an innocent place of what makes me laugh or what keeps me engaged in something. I suppose that the idea of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder deciding to go for a naked swim was funny.
You’ve used Andrew Hung once more for the score; he brings so much to your films. What is the process with him?
With Ebony and Ivory, we were more specific than we usually are. As an example, there’s a scene where Stevie is trying to guess the name ‘doobie woobie’. He knows that it begins with ‘D’ and then ‘W,’ so there’s a guessing game. I told Andy that I want it to be when the quiz begins, it’s suddenly like you’re in this kind of a club, this pounding music, it’s really intense, it’s kind of like a game show or a quiz show, but it’s really just relentless club music. He started composing this thing in front of me! It’s also funny how people react differently to it. I get very excited! I’m probably quite up and down, but I can get very serious and think, oh, god, this doesn’t work, this is terrible, but with that, I’d have been giggling and really excited, and Andy’s just completely straight-faced as he’s making this music that feels so funny to me and so ridiculous in a way. It’s not ridiculous because it’s played so straight, and that’s what’s so great about it. It’s ridiculous because it’s soundtracking these two oddball characters having a silly, illogical guessing game in a Scottish cottage.
EBONY AND IVORY is in UK cinemas from September 19th. You can read our review here.
