ALI G INDAHOUSE Search all of phase9.tv






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And so on a hot day in May, Staines High Street was brought to a standstill when Ali G and his posse stepped out in his hometown. The pubs and buildings were adorned with the graffiti art of the East and West Staines Massives and the two customised Renault 5’s of Ali and archrival Hassan B made chase through the town. Mylod describes the practical difficulties of shooting in Staines: “the Ali G character is so bloody popular we were swamped with people like a mini version of Beatlemania - just gangs of small children and the occasional adult running around desperate for an autograph, and some of them even wanted Ali G’s.” Ha ha.

The very first week of shooting was spent in Los Angeles, capturing the film’s opening sequence where Ali dreams he is caught up in some real gang warfare. For Mazer and Mylod, stepping onto the streets of LA for their first time ever on a film set was quite mind blowing. “You’ve been working away very happily on a script for a bit and you think ‘ok a movie might happen, it might not’ but the thing about films is that everyone says ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ but 90% of films fall through at any time up to the last minute,” says an optimistic Mazer on the prospects of getting his debut film off the ground. “So to walk into the middle of East LA, you know, gangstaville, with a crew of 110, shooting a movie, was a slight mind fuck.” Mylod adds, “It was weird going in on day one of the shoot and doing this heavy sequence, but I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. We worked hard out there, but I love the way the Americans work. It was all my fantasies come true.”

But what exactly was the reaction to the film in the USA? Did they ‘get’ the joke? Mazer expounds in detail: “we did do a test screening where everyone actually laughed dramatically, which was weird because we went there with incredible trepidation expecting it to go down in deathly silence. But they loved it and I think they did get it. Obviously, certain aspects of it completely passed them by and some scenes didn’t make any sense to them whatsoever, but what they got they really got. The joke is slightly different there - instead of a gangster coming from Staines it’s a gangster coming from England, and that’s the running joke for them.”

With respect to all the other jokes in the film, were the writers not worried about crossing lines of taste and decency? “I think that I was the taste police,” replies Mylod, “and Dan Mazer has no scruples whatsoever. If something was in bad taste, the worst of taste, the more Dan would love it.” Mazer retorts: “Let’s bear in mind that it’s a 15, so it’s all kind of tongue-in-cheek. We didn’t show anything too graphically - there aren’t any breasts or any naked bodies or any shit like there was in KEVIN AND PERRY. We were very keen not to get an ‘uurgh’ reaction instead of a laugh and I think there were definitely more laughs.”

What about Charles Dance dancing in a rubber skirt? “Well that depends on your personal sexual predilections,” responds Mazer. “That was definitely an ‘uurgh’ but for some it might be an ‘aah’. Ali G has always trod a very narrow line which will appeal to some and won’t to others but we used our judgement to try and make sure there were more ‘aahs’ than ‘uurghs’ in the film.”

Concluding this interesting discourse, Mark Mylod has the final word: “Take it or leave it. I’m not going to run around with the press gang saying ‘come and see our film’… just come and see it if you think it’ll make you laugh. I think it’s really funny and I hope other people will, so anyone who doesn’t think it’s funny, well they can all go and watch IRIS.” Oooooh…

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