In director Jim O’Hanlon’s comedy “Fackham Hall,” everything on screen is a picture-perfect recreation of classic English period dramas such as “Downton Abbey,” “Gosford Park,” or “Upstairs, Downstairs.”
Except for the dialogue and occasional sight gags, which hilariously parody the genre as thoroughly as “The Naked Gun” spoofed cop movies or “Blazing Saddles” skewered westerns or Monty Python mocked practically everything.
“It’s really funny you should say that, because in my initial pitch, I said I want this to look like – if you had the sound down – it would look like a brand-new $50 million high-end British period drama with Damian Lewis and Thomasin McKenzie and Katherine Waterston and Tom Felton.
“All these great dramatic actors looking beautiful in these amazing costumes,” he says. “And then you would suddenly go, ‘Did I just see a topless butler walk past there in the corridors? Did a guy just fall down a manhole and nobody batted an eyelid? I’ve got to turn this up.’
“And then you go, ‘But they’re talking total nonsense – has nobody noticed?’ That was always my idea, that it would play like that.”
In “Fackham Hall,” the orphan pickpocket Eric (Ben Radcliffe) gets hired onto the household staff at Fackham Hall and falls in love with Rose (Thomasin McKenzie), the sweet, unmarried daughter of Lord and Lady Davenport (Damian Lewis and Katherine Waterston).
With no male heir to inherit their palatial estate, Lord and Lady Davenport panic when Rose refuses to marry her arrogant cousin Archibald (Tom Felton) to keep the family in their home and the home in the family.
Then, when a murder takes place inside the manor house, Eric gets framed, he and Rose are pulled apart, and the Davenports and their home face their greatest peril yet.
“Fackham Hall” opens in theaters on Friday, Dec. 5. The tagline on the movie poster – “Born to aristocracy, bred for idiocy” – is just the first of 278 jokes, give or take a gag or two, in its 97-minute runtime.
Yes, someone actually counted.
“We had an executive producer who took it upon himself to list all the jokes, give them a little title, like ‘bus gag’ or ‘fox-shooting joke,’ and give them a mark out of 10,” O’Hanlon says on a recent video call. “There’s nothing that survived that didn’t get at least a seven.
“That was an early cut,” he says. “I think we added some more jokes since, and we probably cut a few, but 278 is a pretty accurate estimate.
“And, of course, as well as the individual jokes, for me the biggest joke of all is the gap between how silly all of that stuff is and how seriously the actors and the characters take it. How beautiful it looks, and the high production values.
“That gap for me is the funniest thing of all that never stops making me laugh,” O’Hanlon says.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, O’Hanlon talks about his instant attraction to the screenplay, how he found his Lord Davenport on the pitch where he and other neighborhood dads play soccer on Sundays, how a real-life English estate played its part in the film, and more.
Q: Thank you for making time to chat today about “Fackham Hall” –
A: Say it carefully, please pronounce it carefully! We’ve had one TV interview that we couldn’t do in the UK because of the title, would you believe?
Q: Oh wow, not even if you pronounced very, very carefully?
A: It doesn’t even work in my accent. I’m Irish, so I say “Fack-ham Hall” and nobody gets the joke.
Q: Well, this will be in print –
A: Good, they’ll have to hear it. Say it fast in a Cockney accent, and you’ll get it.
Q: So tell me about your reaction to the screenplay as you read it. In one sitting, I’m told.
A: The density of the jokes, first of all, was pretty astonishing. You don’t read much that has that density of jokes. But more importantly for me, it was the density of jokes that were really funny, and it was just, “Let’s just bang them out, and it doesn’t matter what they are.”
They were really – it’s a funny word to use in such a silly, ludicrous, ridiculous film – but they were very sophisticated and smart and well-crafted. Even the pratfalls and the puns and double entendres.. They all were very clever, and you sort of didn’t see them coming.
So I was just reading it, going I can’t believe this is one joke after another, and one funnier than another. And this wide variety of jokes, from silly pratfalls to very sophisticated linguistic jokes to background jokes to sound jokes. It was sort of everything, and I love that kind of humor.
Q: You’ve done many different genres of film, but especially comedies, I think.
A: I grew up on “Airplane!” and “Naked Gun,” “Blazing Saddles” and those kind of classics. And I had directed a series [of movies] called “The Touch of Cloth,” written by Charlie Brooker of “Black Mirror” fame. It was a spoof detective drama with John Hannah. We did three standalone films.
It was such fun, and I felt it was creative because at every point, you weren’t just imitating reality or trying to reproduce or reconstruct reality. Yes, we were trying to do all that, but it also had to be funny.
So the creative challenge of [“Fackham Hall” was] going, “I want a very beautiful wrought-iron sign for Fackham Hall that has to be absolutely like the kind of thing you would see in a high-end period film, but it also has to say “Incestus Ad Infinitum.” [There is no shortage of jokes about the British aristocracy’s frequency of marrying cousins.]
Q: As many jokes as there are, it’s also got quite a sweet romance storyline with Eric and Rose.
A: I’m thrilled you picked that out because that was something we talked about a lot, saying we do want a story that, despite the silliness, the craziness, the comedy, we do want people to engage with Eric and Rose’s story. To want them to be together, to want Fackham Hall to survive.
Because that’s the other big dramatic storyline: Will Fackham Hall survive in the family, or is it going to be taken over by the odious Archie?
We were always trying to find that balance, both in the writing initially, then on set, and truthfully, right up to the end of the edit. For example, there’s a moment Eric and Rose kiss, and it was undercut by something like four really funny jokes in 20 seconds after it.
And we cut those jokes because we wanted that moment to be a moment where you just go for half a minute or a minute just with Eric and Rose and their love story, and not undercut it. So we allow those moments, a chance to breathe a little bit, without immediately cutting them off.
Q: I think it works great to give Ben and Thomasin a moment of their own here and there.
A: They have a charisma and a sort of charm, I think, and a chemistry between the two of them. We did do chemistry reads between Thomasin and a couple of the actors we were looking at, very fine actors, all of them.
And we just felt the chemistry between Ben and Thomasin was sort of electric, and that pulls you a long way through the silliness going on around them. You kind of feel like they were like in the great English theater farce “Noises Off,” where they were sort of acting their hearts out in front of this total chaos,
They’re sort of almost pretending not to see it, and keeping on with their love story while the world around them goes completely berserk.
Q: Tell me a little bit about how you cast your leads. Did you target specific actors right off?
A: I mean, Damian definitely came to mind very quickly because I play football with him. We’re not best friends by any means, but we play football in the dads’ soccer group on a Sunday morning. I immediately thought, OK, who are the actors around that age who, if this was the real thing, I would cast them in a heartbeat? And do they have comic chops?
I knew from around the neighborhood that Damian definitely had the comic chops, and I thought I haven’t seen him for a long time in a comedy. So he was someone who came to mind immediately.
Thomasin was recommended by the guys at [the production company] Anonymous Content. I knew her dramatic work, but I had a sort of instinct that she had a charm and a twinkle I felt you needed for this. She read it like me. She was going on a holiday to Spain and just opened the first few pages on the plane. And she read the whole thing.
She said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, because I know it was meant not to be said to anyone, but I was reading it out to my friend on the plane because she kept saying, ‘What are you laughing at?’ So when we met, I thought, yeah, she’s bang on.
Katherine Waterston was unexpected to me when she was suggested by her agent. I wasn’t sure. You think the whole English thing. [Waterston, the daughter of actor Sam Waterston, was born in England to American parents.] But she’s totally nailed it.
Once I chatted with her and we discussed it, I realized, OK, she’s the lady of the house and she can play that British version, I suppose, of a trad wife. She’s very much the kind of we’re conservative, backward-looking rather than forward-looking, anti-feminist, just a man. One of my favorite lines is her “What on God’s flat earth is going on!”
Q: You shot much of the film at Knowsley Hall near Liverpool, which is one of those classic English estates. Was it ready to shoot? Or require a lot of set dressing?
A: I would be doing a disservice to my art department to say you could walk in and shoot it, but you could walk in and shoot a lot of it. And a lot of that furniture couldn’t be moved. It was sort of, “That’s worth half a million pounds. You can’t move it anywhere.” So we’d have supporting artists around it so that nobody sits on it.
The house had most of its own staff around, some of whom we dressed as extras, sort of to be the ones to protect the priceless statue or the priceless paintings. So there were definitely restrictions, and you had to be really, really careful with the crew. But on the other hand, we were able to walk into sets that had the most extraordinary furniture.
There was a very good base, I would say. As soon as I saw it I knew it was the one. You see the outside and you go, OK, this is perfect. Please God, let it be beautiful inside. Because you visited other places that were great outside and they’re a bit tatty inside, a bit worn-looking, or they’ve too many modern things. This we walked in, you’re like, “Oh my God. This.”
Q: You’re Irish, and not of the kind of world these characters are from. Did that play into your work on the film at all?
A: Yeah, you know, I’ve lived in the UK, I’ve lived in London for 25 years now, and I’ve spent my whole career working here. But I do still have a sort of, if you like, insider-outsider view of British cultural norms and the class system. I’m hopeful that what I have is sort of affectionate.
Not quite an outsider, but an outsider who’s been here a long time gives me a slightly different perspective maybe than somebody who’s grown up within the system. So I can observe it maybe with a touch more distance because I’m not part of either the British aristocracy or the sort of below-stairs staff. Maybe it gave a little bit of an outside eye.