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8 February 2010

Chris Morris interviewed

The creator of Brass Eye on his new film, Four Lions.

By Daniel Trilling

The arts website IFC has a rare interview with Chris Morris. The comedian behind the cult television shows Brass Eye and The Day Today usually avoids talking to the press, but was giving interviews at this year’s Sundance Festival to promote his directorial debut, Four Lions.

The film, a “jihadist comedy”, will inevitably be compared to Armando Iannucci’s Oscar-nominated political satire In the Loop (the two films even share a writer, Jesse Armstrong). Here, Morris explains the difference between his and Iannucci’s approach to comedy:

In some ways, this is a much darker film than In the Loop, which, despite being about the run-up to a war, makes it quite easy to sit back and watch and enjoy without feeling at all uncomfortable.

I absolutely adore In the Loop — I laughed from beginning to end — but it’s affirmative, basically. It’s a universal rallying cry to say, “Fuck politicians!” and “Aren’t they a bunch of conniving gits?” It’s never going to rip the carpet off from under your feet. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, ’cause I’m fairly intolerant of stuff that calls itself comedy. How rare is it to laugh at all at a film that calls itself a comedy, let alone to laugh all the way through?

And if you haven’t seen it yet, here is a trailer for the film:

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