Hammer, Tongs and the DIY Inspirado of John Rambo

Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith (Hammer & Tongs)
Hometown: London
Film/Release Date: Son of Rambow (May 2)
For fans of: Stand By Me, Michel Gondry, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

Garth Jennings’ 12-year-old self didn’t catch the political subtext of forgotten veteran John Rambo’s plight. “We just thought it was a cool movie where this guy could do stuff all by himself,” Jennings remembers. “Make traps with just a knife and some sticks, sew up his own arm.” Unsung punk hero Rambo was all DIY, and Jennings was inspired.

For the first original feature in his Hammer & Tongs partnership with producer Nick Goldsmith, the now-35-year-old Jennings looked to his first VHS production, Aaron, Part 1. “It was about the head of the Ministry of Defence, which was myself, who was captured by the PLO and tortured—we had no idea who they were, they were just on the news a lot and they sounded kind of like bad guys. But my number-one guy who I’ve been training, Aaron, comes and saves me, and kicks their asses, and burns them alive in a shed. It was glorious.”

Jennings’ output has matured somewhat since. After crossing paths with Goldsmith in a pre-college art class, the pair founded Hammer & Tongs in the latter’s bedroom. Now keeping office on a converted junk barge parked in a London canal where they’ve produced videos for Radiohead, Beck, Blur and others, they made the big-screen leap—like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry before them—with their kinda alright adaptation of Douglas Adams’ literary classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 2005.

In Son of Rambow, Will and Carter—played by newcomers Bill Milner and Will Poulter—are a pair of schoolboy loners who find friendship in their love of Sylvester Stallone’s renegade, even though Will is forbidden access to pop culture as a member of the self-isolating sect of Plymouth Brethren.

Though he didn’t start making films until “much, much, much later” than his partner, Goldsmith, 37, was first exposed to Rambo—like the fictional Will and the real Jennings—through a bootleg video. While Hammer & Tongs’ budgeted music shorts were “an amazingly brilliant learning ground,” and he appreciates the lo-fi vibe of VHS, Goldsmith says he still prefers “a beautiful 35 mil with an anamorphic lens.”

Still, between the Sweded videos of Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, the revival of the homemade Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, and a wave of cassette-only releases in the indie underground, analog nostalgia is in full bloom. For Jennings, it’s a way to channel “personal and unique but [also] universal films” like Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me and “that lovely feeling of being 11.”

Click here to read Paste's review of Son of Rambow.