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Jim Hosking stopped reading reviews after his first feature film, 2016’s The Greasy Strangler, received a zero-star write-up from The Observer in the UK. “I thought it was a typo, like they’d forgot to fill in one star. Because I’d seen one-star reviews before, but I’d never seen zero stars,” the filmmaker says. “Yeah, that was bad. I got a bit burnt by reviews early on.”
It’s perhaps unkind of me then to recite the New York Times′ recent review of his latest film, Ebony & Ivory, which is screening at the Sydney Underground Film Festival this month. “This anti-comedy from the writer-director Jim Hosking is a singularly annoying and abrasive experience,” goes that one.
“Singularly annoying? Oh god,” says Hosking. Harsh, sure. But the review instantly caught my attention. Because a film that sparks that sort of reaction from a critic can’t be all bad.
“I appreciate what you’re saying,” says Hosking. “And if my intention in making the film was to push people’s buttons, I guess I’d be rubbing my hands gleefully and thinking, ‘I did it’. But that’s not what I was trying to do. I’m coming from a pure place of just doing what my instinct tells me to do, and doing what I enjoy. And so now, in a way, I find it a bit sad.”
Director Jim Hosking: “I think my work is some kind of delayed, traumatic response to my childhood and my schooling.”
It’s always uncomfortable when you find yourself apologising to an interview subject for inadvertently hurting their feelings two minutes into an interview, but it’s not the response I was expecting. “I suppose I’m too close to it to understand why it’s ‘singularly annoying’” Hosking continues.
“Some things are just a strong flavour. I equate it to going to a dinner party and being sat next to someone who’s dressed in a striking way with a grating voice and a loud character. Someone would really enjoy being sat next to that person and someone else would think, ‘Why can’t I be at the other end of the table?’ It’s just how it is. ‘Singularly annoying’, though?”
Ebony & Ivory, like Hosking’s other films, is indeed a singular experience, thanks to his uniquely demented humour. It’s a film about Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder (played by Sky Elobar and Gil Gex, regulars in Hosking’s troupe) decamping to McCartney’s “Scottish cottage!” on the Mull of Kintyre to write their 1982 hit, Ebony and Ivory – but that’s like calling Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! a buddy comedy. I didn’t even mention the prosthetic penises. Or that Hosking’s characters talk like they’re stuck in Twin Peaks′ Black Lodge.
“I like the challenge of trying to run with something and seeing how far I can go, and that’s what Ebony & Ivory was,” says Hosking. He wanted to make a minimal film with only two characters, one key location, a small budget and total freedom.
“The idea to do a fake history of how Ebony and Ivory came about just tickled me, because it felt completely illogical. But now people keep asking me, ‘So why did you come up with that idea?’ and the answer is I don’t know,” he says. “I had wanted to make something with Gil and Sky, and one of them is black and one of them is white, so maybe it was as simple as that?”
Speaking over Zoom from his home in London, looking like a pubescent Jarvis Cocker in a baseball cap, Hosking says he never went to film school. He was a copywriter, working in advertising, before he moved to New York in his late 20s to work for MTV. “I started directing those little promos they have with the MTV logo at the end of shows, where you can do wilfully obscure and strange things.” (When I ask his age now, he declines with a “nah mate, that’s off the table.” )
‘A lot of the films people talk about as being explorative are just the equivalent of listening to Coldplay.’
In 2010, he made a short film called Renegades that got into Sundance; then in 2016, The Greasy Strangler – about a sweet virginal son and his overbearing father who douses himself in hot dog grease and moonlights as a vicious serial killer – which debuted Hosking’s outre sensibility.
“The New York Times ran an article at the time calling it the weirdest movie ever, that kind of thing,” Hosking recalls. “If I read that about someone’s film, I’d think their objective was to try to make the weirdest film ever. And I’d think, well, that’s a bit lame, isn’t it?”
Hosking’s muse is more complex than mere provocation. His idea of a funny film, for example, is Allan King’s 1969 drama A Married Couple, a gruelling dissection of a marriage falling apart. “I think my work is some kind of delayed, traumatic response to my childhood and my schooling,” he says. “It’s that British thing of feeling repressed for so long that when you get a chance to express yourself, you release the stopper and it just comes shooting out.”
When Hosking was eight, he was sent to an all-boys’ boarding school. “It was a place where we were all called by our last name, no individuality or idiosyncrasies were recognised. And my dad was in the army. He’s never understood anything I’ve made or why. Not that he’s watched a great deal. But he did say about Ebony & Ivory, ‘I don’t understand why you’ve made this. How have you made a film that’s 90 minutes long and it has nothing to say about that song?’ That’s the kind of conversation we have.”
Hosking, with Gex, on the set of Ebony & Ivory.
Working in advertising also affected his outlandish intent. “I started in commercials and I always had a lot of shame about that and a distaste for peddling stuff. Everyone in commercials talks about them being ‘aspirational’ and it’s quite a nauseating word, so I always went the other way with it and put in the kinds of people who really shouldn’t be put in the spotlight when you’re trying to sell something.”
As polarising as his films might be, Hosking has a cult fandom. Fans on Reddit quote obscure lines from his films, like demanding recipes for “Rum and a Ramble”, a particularly brown cocktail from his second film, 2018’s An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn, his attempt at a mainstream comedy starring Aubrey Plaza and Jemaine Clement.
“‘Attempt’, that’s a sad word,” laughs Hosking. “But I guess it was. I was trying to make a kind of shaggy dog story, a screwball-ish romantic comedy. I remember telling my now ex-wife, ‘I really thought it was going to connect with more people than it has’, and she said, ‘Come on, have you seen it?’”
Hollywood star Elijah Wood has been a supporter and executive producer on Hosking’s films dating back to The Greasy Strangler through his production company, SpectreVision. But even the pull of Frodo Baggins can’t always help with securing finance.
“I’m not really interested in making films that fit neatly into a genre or that are easy to pigeonhole, so it can still be a struggle to get the money if it’s not obviously commercial,” says Hosking. He cites the recent A24 comedy Friendship, starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, which earned acclaim for its “absurdist” leanings.
When Stevie met Paul, allegedly.
“The films I make are way off the map compared to something like Friendship, which is a pretty well-established kind of comedy formula. So I’m just constantly surprised at a) how conservative most people are, but also b) how comedy is treated in such a different way to any other film genre. You can make a drama that’s really gritty, really upsetting, and you will easily find a distributor, it will be celebrated, people will go see it, and it’s just f—ing misery, you know? But you try to make a comedy and it’s really hard. People don’t take comedy seriously. They think it’s trivial, and there’s a snobbishness around it.”
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Lest he seem deluded, Hosking’s aware his films aren’t mainstream fare. “It’s not like I’m sitting here and feeling upset like, ‘Oh god, why isn’t Ebony & Ivory in every single cinema?’ I know what I’ve made is not for everybody; I’d be an idiot if I thought it was. But there’s a difference between understanding that and also feeling like, actually, there could be a bigger audience for this if people were exposed to it and got a chance to see it. But film is just a weirdly conventional medium. Even a lot of the films that people talk about as being explorative are just the equivalent of listening to Coldplay.”
He has a couple of new projects in the works: a film called Gleek, which is the first he’ll direct that he didn’t write, and another set in Japan. “I suppose that one’s pretty out there. It’s not a comedy. It’s more a kind of erotic nightmare.”
Hosking just wants to make films on his own terms. “Everything I do, I want it to feel like it somehow has my fingerprint on it. I’m not trying to have any particular sort of strategic career path, I’m just trying to do what comes naturally to me and I hope it feels like only I could have made it. I do enjoy doing things where it feels like even I don’t know whether it’s funny or boring. But to me, that’s interesting rather than ‘singularly annoying’.”
Again, I’m sorry I brought it up. “It’s gonna plague me for a while,” says Hosking.
Ebony & Ivory screens at the Sydney Underground Film Festival on September 12.
