ayoade on ayoade: a cinematic odyssey

This week I enjoyed ‘ayoade on ayoade: a cinematic odyssey.’

I’ve enjoyed Richard Ayoade ever since I saw him on Garth Merenghi’s Dark Place, back when I was in university. The sitcom, a pastiche of 80’s television, sends up the piss-poor acting and editing that typified the era. Since then, Ayoade’s career has continued to develop, enjoying mainstream success in Graham Linehan’s ‘The I.T Crowd’ and Channel 4’s ‘Big Fat Quiz of the Year.’ His rising cache in comedy means he can now follow art-house passion projects, adapting Joe Dunthorne’s coming-of-age novel, ‘Submarine’ and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story, ‘The Double’ for the silver screen.  

It is this career as a filmmaker that Ayoade skews in his book. Being raised a comedian – he was President of Cambridge Footlights- means he’s very much the bastard child of independent cinema. Recently joining that world, but not belonging to it, means he feels no pressure to respect it. To nick a Malcolm Tucker expression: he’s outside the tent pissing in rather than inside the tent pissing out. As a result, over the course of the book the whole film industry is golden showered by Ayoade’s warped wit.

The first half of the book is framed as a series of interviews between Richard Ayoade and himself – himself because he’s the only person who has the intellectual capability to understand his answers. Think an interrogation room that pits a likeable cop against an insufferable narcissist and you’ve got the idea of how the book is framed. Here’s one such exchange:

Ayoade: Do you rehearse with actors?

Ayoade: I don’t like to rehearse. I don’t like to do more than one take. We don’t rehearse life, do we? We don’t get more than one take at our existence?

The second half of the book is Ayoade’s advice on how to make it in the film industry. He takes us from how to get a project from page to screen, even giving us a glimpse into his script for a biopic based on the life of Danny O’Donoghue from The Script. Film fans will love the latter section as it boasts a Did you know section of trivia that includes such nuggets as: ‘Did you know Mike Leigh is best friends with Michael Bay? They met through a mutual interest in their own names.’ As someone who goes to the cinema a lot, I got a lot of the references; for those that I missed, I was too immersed in the harebrained satire to care.

Ultimately, ayoade on ayoade is the antidote for people who take film too seriously.