Last night, Sacha Baron Cohen sat down for a live Q & A after a screening of his new film, The Brothers Grimsby, debuting in theaters March 11th. Here are the highlights from the talk:
How did the film come about?
Phil Johnston, who wrote Wreck It Ralph, came and said what would happen if James Bond had a brother and who would be the polar opposite of James Bond. We realized he is a ruthless killer, and so you want to put him with someone who is full of love. James Bond is a complete loner, and to have this guy who is obsessed by family – James Bond is a womanizer and this guy is a one-woman man. James Bond is a man of no words and this man is a complete blabbermouth. If you look at all of the spy movies, they’re always somewhere on the spectrum of who all sleep with women or kill men so part of this movie is Nobby’s attempt to humanize his brother.
On the creative process:
We first try and establish the genre, so with Borat, the rule was to do all the jokes within the genre, so if it could happen within a documentary, it couldn’t happen in Borat, that goes for everything including the camera angles. With this spy movie, we didn’t want it to be a spoof and we also didn’t have the money to make it look like a Bond movie which is why we made it into an arrival to this type of genre and then drop this complete idiot in the mix and see how he affects the plot.
Inspiration behind film-making:
I now make movies with the philosophy of, if I see them in twenty years, will I be proud of it or embarrassed by it rather than if it will be a hit at the box office. So I think if the movie appeals and if it hits a nerve, even if it takes a while to find its audience, then it survives. For example, the morning of Bruno being released, I thought what am I doing because it was so extreme. At that point of time, no major studio movie about a gay movie actually had a plot where the gay people did not die at the end of the movie, where they were lynched or died of AIDS. In our movie, they were living happily ever after with an adopted kid, and that movie was probably too provocative at the time and needed time to settle in. People watching it now, where gay marriage is more acceptable and gay culture is more accepted, it’s actually being received better so it’s actually more about the framing of the movie rather than the movie itself.
This movie is not about Grimsby, the town, but it is about dispossessed communities that are nowhere near urban centers. In media, you have this view of people who live on welfare who are takers from society, the real enemy of the newspapers are the people who are having kids to receive welfare, and so I tried to find the real Nobbies. But you realize in these communities, there are industries being shut down, where either one of the parents go off and moves out in order to find work or they go on welfare, so I really wanted to explore the vilification of the poor, where they are the scroungers of society and who are poor because they are choosing to be poor, which is a philosophy that is being talked about by the likes of Trump. But really these people have no opportunities so I wanted to take this guy who is part of this non-working class and make him a hero.