Where is the Bunny And The Bull Extended Universe? Presumably, assuming the film does well at the box office, there will be cries for a Paddington 3, and maybe a Paddington 4, and maybe a spin-off: Brown’s Avengers, or something.Īs one of the six people who did watch Bunny And The Bull, and would be interested to see the other… This is something I was going to get on to at the end of the movie, but we have kind of touched on it here. I think there’s always going to have to be a bit of magic in there somewhere, but that’s OK, that’s what I like in films. Which doesn’t bode well for kind of, you know, going on to make Dardenne Brothers movies, really. Yeah, it probably is, distressingly, the most realistic thing I’ve been involved in. You’ve sort of alluded to it there, I suppose Paddington is your most reality-set work. It goes back to Milier, and Tarkovsky, and some really, actually very good people.
You wouldn’t describe somebody’s inner monologue in a novel through that visual representation, but hopefully it gives you a way of telling the world what he’s thinking and what he’s feeling and what he’s going through without having to use too many words, and that’s sort of what cinema is best at, I think. And I suppose, just given the stuff I did when I was starting out with Garth Marenghi and Mighty Boosh and those things, it was never set in a literal universe, and its always felt like a fun sandbox, and a really nice thing that film is almost uniquely good at. There’s nothing too literal about the Paddington universe.
It’s hopefully about the impossible around the corner in the world, making the world feel slightly more magical and full of possibility than it is. Generally, it’s the – especially the pop-up book, and the Peru dream in prison – it’s where Paddington is right now without having to cut to a dream sequence. What a nice thing – I’ll put that on my gravestone, that’s a lovely way of putting it – I suppose what it’s always been, really – probably more so in Padding… I don’t know, actually that’s not true – is a way of getting inside the character’s head, in a way that takes you to somewhere quite extraordinary, hopefully. It happened in the first Paddington, where he approaches the screen, and walks into it, it happened in this one with the model of the prison it’s what I’ve come to expect from you, where all of a sudden, something that’s quite literal merges with the impossible.
You mention the hand spitting, but for me there’s something more. It’s a hard thing with films, I think the people who saw it, liked it, but it never really broke out of its very, very small niche. How come no one laughed eight years ago?” Well, they did laugh at that, but it just never really found an audience. There was a great moment, when I was sitting next to Simon, we did a couple of test screenings where you show it to – not a random audience, but a real audience of not people who have worked on the film – and the moment where Paddington spits on Nuckles’ hand got this enormous laugh, and we turned to each other going, “I knew that was funny. The spitting on the hand is the same joke.