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Vogueing the Jihadi role

July 10, 2010, 1:00 PM

Before becoming a film director, Christopher Morris made a name for himself in the UK with satirical radio and television shows such as The Day Today and Brass Eye, lampooning current affairs coverage with intelligent, but pitch black humor. He has now brought his highly controversial brand of comedy to the subject of Islamist suicide bombers in his feature debut Four Lions, which is screening at KVIFF.

You said in an interview some years ago that you didn’t see much comedic possibility in tackling the War on Terror and Islamic fundamentalism. How come you subsequently ended up making Four Lions?
I needed a comic clue before getting stuck into it – it’s when people behave in a venal way, even when they are advertised as masterminds of terror. I was reading an interview where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was one of the plotters of the 9/11 attacks, was being interviewed by a journalist from Al-Jazeera and he wanted to come across like a learned Sheikh, so he got dressed up and starting waving his finger and giving all sorts of grand statements and quotations from the Koran. And the journalist who was Muslim realized that his Koranic quotes were wrong all over the place. And so did all the other guys in the room who were basically his co-plotters. And they were all pissing themselves laughing, and taking the piss out of this guy who is now on trial in the US for organizing the 9/11 attacks. So he looks ridiculous, and that would be a comic scene if that was part of the film. And if you get several of those, it starts to break down the way the thing looks at first inspection.

Besides terrorism, you’ve previously taken a humorous swipe at other sensitive subjects such as pedophilia. Is there any subject even you would consider taboo?
I think it’s entirely to do with what you find in the subject and whether you find something that’s funny, that’s going on inside a situation, which has a grossly serious label. You can find humor in severe prisons; you can probably even find humor in torture. But the challenge is you have to find it. You can’t just go “I insist that torture is funny, therefore you will laugh.” You have to work something out of it. It’s the same with the film. Obviously, blowing people up is not in itself funny, but messing up a plan or struggling with your capacity to pull something off and the ideology that is driving you into it… maybe that is…

You will find the complete interview in today´s issue of Festival Daily.

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