"This Filthy Earth" is inspired by Emile Zola's "La Terre" and John Berger's "Pig Earth". What particular elements of these works did you wish to translate to the screen?
I think that the spirit of both Zola and Berger translate to the screen. The film is a celebration of the great outdoors, the landscape. There was quite a thorough deconstruction job done on Zola's "La Terre". I took a long time to break the novel down before I approached [co-writer] Sean Lock and then eventually Film Four. We had the guts of the original as a springboard but took it hither and thither. John Berger's work has always been inspiring and there is a considered and succinct way in which he writes. You savour the sentences, and this informed our approach to the writing.
Sean Lock's background as a stand-up comedian obviously accounts for some of the film's humour, but the way you invent new words is particularly interesting.
Sean and I spent weeks inventing a language for the film. A 'gramlot'. We never wanted it to be specific, it was as much about the onomatopoeic and the textures of the words as it was about what they meant. I had been inspired by the language that Russell Hoban had invented for both his novel "Riddley Walker", and a short film he made with David Anderson called "Deadsy". Sean brought his remarkable skills as a wordsmith and dialogue writer to the project, which made a lot of the earlier drafts great fun to work on. We generated yards of the stuff. Created a whole thesaurus. I sometimes think now, with hindsight, that subtitles might help some of the language.
The film contains many religious elements and has an almost Biblical Old Testament structure. Was this to further define the community in which the characters exist and outline the kind of values to which they adhere?
It was indeed, but a lot of that work had been done by Zola. We ran with the idea. The performance of the priest was never written that large but the actor who plays him, Robert Hickson, took it into another dimension, especially towards the end of the film with his improvisation. And of course the Jesus Christ character was there from the get go. Zola had him fart in people's drinks a lot. It was all very Viz and Johnny Fartpants!
