Having learned about film-making by starting as a runner at 17 and working his way up through the industry, Toby MacDonald cut his teeth with two Bafta-nominated short films, Je t’aime John Wayne (2001) and Heavy Metal Drummer (2005), and directed television and commercials. Now the west Londoner makes his feature debut with Old Boys, loosely based on the story of Cyrano de Bergerac. The film stars Alex Lawther (The End of the F***ing World) as Amberson, a student at a satirised version of an English boarding school. He must act as an intermediary between the daughter of the new French master and the handsome dunce who she erroneously believes is a poet.
You’ve travelled around the world with a film that has an archetypal British backdrop – a boys’ boarding school. Has there been a marked difference in the way the film has been received in different countries?
It’s interesting to watch it in different places. In China they laughed all the way through. I wonder if Harry Potter has slightly softened people up to the idea of the boarding school. But, predictably, for a film about why Englishmen are so bad with women, France has been the place where they have taken to it the most.
With the public school environment and the communication issues between England and France, it feels like a perfect movie to explain Brexit Britain.
You’re right. The false confidence those types of boarding schools can instil really seems to be coming to the fore at the moment. The notion of isolating yourself. And I suppose, the fantasy of what war can do for your character, the idea of past glory, it’s all part of it. That’s part of the fabric of those schools, and you can see how it filters into everyday life in disastrous ways.
Central to the culture of the fictional school is a game called streamers, which is played in a stream, with a square ball. Is it a real game?
Lots of those schools have their own made-up games, which are often quirks of architecture. And these games start to have a certain value in how you’re perceived at school, in terms of status. Streamers is a composite of the wall game they play at Eton, in which nobody has scored for something like 100 years. And there’s an extraordinary game called Royal Shrovetide football, which is played between two villages in the Midlands by about 200 people across a river with a giant football.
There’s a combination of violence and absurdity, the sink-or-swim aspect. We wanted something that could capture the attitude of the school in one place. It’s elaborate and pointless and has a slightly Quentin Blake aspect to it.
The period setting – the 1980s – is crucial to the atmosphere of the film. Rather than communicate through text messages and gifs, the characters create little handmade collages and VHS films and handwritten letters.
It was important that we set it then. That allowed us to visit the school at the peak of its confidence, unaware that it’s about to have to change. Then, for the Cyrano story, we really wanted the lo-fi creativity to be a wonderful part of the messages between them. We wanted to show Amberson’s creativity and imagination. And we wanted to do that through the creativity of letter writing, which is a lost joy.
Have we actually lost the skill of writing letters, or is it something like vinyl, which will be rediscovered and reclaimed by another generation?
I know that it’s a pleasure to handwrite a letter and to receive one – handwriting is so personal. We felt that was something we could capture – the joy of making something real.
You cast the relatively unknown Alex Lawther in the central role, and then his star rose quite dramatically after Channel 4’s The End of the F***ing World. What effect has that had on the way the film has been received?
Alex is so brilliant. There’s a strength to him along with the vulnerability. He’s a new kind of leading man, and I suppose that’s been an interesting thing in terms of the teenage audience that has come to the film. They’re ahead of the curve in terms of what type of actor they like to see. There is a new kind of masculinity.
Old Boys is in cinemas now
