IT’S a Thursday night in mid-January. The Sydney Opera House is lit up and a full moon hovers over the Aussie landmark.
“Not a bad place to be shooting,” says Iain Morris. “But there’s a lot more salsa music in this scene than we’d envisioned ...”
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Indeed, the Brazilian vibe floating across the water from an event at the Sydney Opera House wouldn’t really fit with any scene in the movie Morris and his fellow writer-director Damon Beesley are shooting: The Inbetweeners 2 .
The sequel to the biggest British comedy film of all time, 2011’s The Inbetweeners Movie (which also grossed an impressive $9.2 million in Australia), the new film follows geeky, sex-crazed English teens Will, Simon, Neil and Jay on a “mental gap year” backpacking Down Under.
Rest assured, lovers of crudity and debauchery, there will be “bush” jokes.
This night at Circular Quay marks the last hours of a shoot that began in early December at the Gold Coast’s Wet’n’Wild water park, then moved to Byron Bay and the South Australian outback town of Marree.
The scene being shot involves three of the Inbetweeners gang — Will (played by Simon Bird), Neil (Blake Harrison) and Simon (Joe Thomas) — asking for directions to a nightclub where their mate Jay (James Buckley) is “rocking da house” under the obvious pseudonym DJ Big Penis.
Neil struggles with the roaming on his mobile phone (“Data charges are pretty extortionate abroad, Neil,” tut-tuts Will) and a slightly hysterical woman fails to offer much help (“The menopause,” reasons Will).
After a few takes, Morris and Beesley ask the lads to take it to a “higher level”.
“A higher level of acting?” asks Harrison.
They go again. But Thomas ventures a little too high.
“OK Joe, none of that,” chides Beesley. “How much coffee have you had today?”
When the directors have finally achieved the just right level, Morris sidles up to explain how he gets the best out of his actors, who have been playing these characters since 2008, across three series of their cult TV show and (almost) two films.
Morris says on the first season of the TV show, he’d tell the actors they needed “energy and pace”.
“Now it’s all shorthand, but they know what’s needed and how to be funny, so it’s just reminding them to keep up the energy.”
Before cameras rolled on The Inbetweeners 2, Morris and Beesley (the pair also wrote several episodes of Flight of the Conchords) had a chat to the cast about how they saw each of the four spotty teens these days and “finding the truth of the characters”.
They spent the next 20 minutes laughing and promptly forgot it all as soon as we started filming,” says Morris.
While there’s a lot of love between the creators of The Inbetweeners and their cast, there’s little respect — especially since Morris and Beasley are directing for the first time on this new movie.
“We keep reminding them of that,” says Bird, during a break from filming. “They don’t really know what they’re doing.”
Thomas: “Yeah, we don’t know whether there’s going to be a film at the end of this ...”
Bird continues: “I don’t think they know about focus, for example. And will the characters be wearing the same costume inside the car as they are outside the car? I think they might have forgot about that. They’re not trained directors, that’s a fact. They’re not trained at anything!”
While the actors take very little seriously, they’re a long way from the awkward school-leavers they’re playing. The youngest of the four, Buckley is married with two kids and has just turned 27. Harrison is 29, Bird days away from 30 and Thomas is nearing 31.
In fact, when Bird was asked about the possibility of a sequel while plugging the first film three years ago, he reckoned the clock had ticked beyond that:
“We were already too old for the characters when we started the series,” he said.
Yet somehow Morris and Beesley convinced the lads to do it again, Down Under.
“They missed us terribly. Their lives were empty without us,” says Harrison.
Buckley: “I was just sick of the phone calls. They were not saying anything, just breathing down the phone. I caved in the end, out of fear, really.”
Harrison: “I could see the light reflecting off Iain’s telescope, across from my flat in London ...”
Thomas: “It was hardcore emotional blackmail, that’s what it was.”
As for the creators, Morris and Beesley say they were quite stoked at the idea of having some time away after five-straight years of Inbetween-ing. Yet only three months after the release of the first film, Morris was backpacking through Australia to research the sequel.
Perhaps “reminder” is a better word than “research” — Morris, now 41, spent some time in Queensland as a 16-year-old exchange student.
“In the most pretentious way, as we always talked about the series being a love song to suburbia, the film for me is a bit of a love song to my time as a teenager in Australia,” he says.
“I went from a private school in England to a state school in Australia — I remember wearing long trousers and carrying a briefcase and I walked into this high school in the west of Brisbane ... so it was a lot like the series.
“When I came back for the film, it was the first time I’d been back in 20 years and I remember crying and my wife laughing at me, so that was good. It’s an incredibly important place for me, Australia, so hopefully there’s a flavour of that in the film and a great affection for the place.”
Meanwhile, The Inbetweeners 2 shoot granted Beesley his first trip Down Under. He’ll head home having learnt an invaluable lesson.
“We were told you can’t drive at night in the Outback, because vehicles can get written off if you hit a kangaroo. We’re like, ‘Nah, that’s bollocks!’ We really wanted to go out and look at a location at night.
“Five minutes down the road, and after about three near misses, we hit a kangaroo. It was horrible, really unsettling. We were like, ‘Yeah ... probably take us back now’.”
Morris and the cast are in Australia this week to launch The Inbetweeners 2 with fan screenings up and down the east coast. More than one fan is guaranteed to ask whether this is really, officially, the last we’ll see of The Inbetweeners.
Morris’s response: “This is the end of The Inbetweeners ... probably.”
Bird reckons everyone may as well call it the official end, because that’s what they said about the series as well as the first film: “Turns out that’s meaningless! So, yes, this is definitely the end of The Inbetweeners.”
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