Thinkbox
For a comedy set behind the scenes on the chaotic making of a superhero movie, it is apt that Sky’s eagerly-awaited The Franchise should have so much out of this world talent.
The eight-episode series is the brainchild of Oscar-winning Sam Mendes and all-round comedy genius Armando Iannucci, and brought to reality by showrunner Jon Brown, a veteran of four series of Jesse Armstrong’s singular Succession.
The idea for the show came from a lunch five years ago when Mendes was sharing stories with Iannucci of just how weird it was to direct a huge tentpole production like the Bond movies, of which he helmed two.
‘Just as we were leaving I said, just as a little throwaway, there’s a comedy right there but I didn’t really mean it as anything more than a remark,’ Iannucci remembered at the show’s launch this week.
‘But he rang the next morning and said, can we meet again because I think that is a comedy and then we looked at it much more seriously.’
The show begins midway through the production of Maximum Studios’ Tecto: Eye of the Storm, and it’s fair to say things aren’t going well, much of the story told through the eyes of beleaguered first assistant director Himesh Patel (Yesterday) and his new third AD, Ghosts’ Lolly Adefope.
The appropriately stellar cast also includes Billy Magnussen, the titular superhero with an invisible jackhammer, the fabulous Jessica Hynes as director Daniel Brühl’s assistant, and an outrageously scene-stealing Richard E Grant as Magnussen’s invariably furious and frustrated co-star.
The show had gone through various iterations and ‘none of them really worked’, said Mendes, until writer and showrunner Brown, with whom Iannucci worked on sci-fi comedy Avenue 5, ‘really captured the tone we needed to make it interesting’.
‘He writes extremely funny dialogue. He also has a kind of sweetness in his tone,’ said Mendes, who also directs the first episode.
‘This wasn’t going to be a cynical satire; like, shooting people down in a cartoony world. Rather, we wanted to capture the naive hopefulness that film crews have when they start any movie.’
The machinations of the film industry may be alien to most viewers but Brown makes it relatable by focussing ‘very much below the line’.
‘There’s a director but we are really looking at the people underneath that,’ Brown told the launch at London’s BFI on Saturday.
‘That felt reliable for a workplace comedy, of being trapped in this dysfunctional organisation where you probably think you know better but you’re powerless, you’re getting these weird orders that you have to carry out.
‘So I guess it’s pretty relatable for most jobs. For me workplace comedy is my favourite kind of thing. Hopefully it’s got a heart to it that transcends the world in which it is set.’
The pedigree of the programme makers meant they were already intimately familiar with the Hollywood movie making machine.
But Mendes’ contacts book was crucial when it came to making the series as true to life as possible, putting Brown in touch with assistant directors, editors and studio people with no end of stories to tell. All on the QT, obviously.
‘The thing that was really surprising was the chaos,’ said Brown. ‘From the outside it felt like these movies are really artfully constructed and they announce so many phases in advance and there are seven or eight movies planned.
‘But when you dig into it you find out they are really chaotic and being made in this really dysfunctional way. I guess that’s surprising but also it was just fun to poke at that a little bit.’
Almost everything that happens in the series is based on truth and anecdotes, albeit occasionally twisted on its head just a little bit (or sometimes quite a lot).
‘I’ve heard stories of actors who on set or out on location and a limo drives up and the window comes down and they hand out the script pages and then the limo drives off and the actors they have no idea what they doing,’ said Brown.
'They also don’t know what they are doing often because they are in front of a green screen, they don’t really know the context of what they are saying, they don’t know what any of these words mean. And later it can be sort of rerendered into almost anything.
‘It’s amazing that we are getting our great acting talent and this is what we are doing with them. it’s quite sad.’
The Marvel universe was coming to its peak when Mendes and Iannucci had that lunch back in the day, so it made sense to place the series in their own version of that. And while superheroes no longer straddle the multiplex as they once did, it remains instantly familiar.
‘The Marvel universe was at maximum saturation level at that time and we thought it would be a good setting,’ said Iannucci.
‘Partly because whenever we were trying to cast someone even for a role for a day or two days we always get the message they were not available for 18 months because they are shouting at a green thing in a small room in Shepperton and unavailable.
‘So just to kind of vent our frustration at that we thought the superhero franchise was the way to go.’
But far from settling scores, The Franchise is a love letter to the state of movie-making - or a large part of it, at least - as it exists today. Albeit not necessarily one with a real-world happy ending.
‘We realised we weren’t making a show about a bunch of fuck-ups who were making a movie and getting it wrong, we were making something about a team of craftspeople, really, really good people, who are making something that’s really dumb,’ said Brown.
‘They put everything into it but what they’re doing might also be harming the thing the really like, the cinema they all care about. Maybe if they take a step back they realise that what they have just built is the Death Star and it’s pointing at all the multiplexes and it’s going to blow them up.’
* The Franchise premieres exclusively on Sky Comedy from 21 October. It will also be available to stream on Sky Comedy, Sky Go, and NOW.