It’s not much of a stretch to saySwiss Army Manis unlike any other film.
Think of your favourite buddy cop movie. Now, transplant the action to an uninhabited island, lose the cops, ditch the bad guys, replace one with a gassy, slowly decaying corpse…
Hmmm. OK, what about this – think Apocalypse Now, but instead of Vietnam we have magical bodily functions, and instead of Brando we have cross-dressing and navigating by erection… No? Finding Nemo, but with fart jokes and no fish? Clearly, any comparisons to this unlikely fable fall short. As Swiss Army Man directing team The Daniels explain, it all begins with a simple ‘what if?’.
“It’s interesting,” says Daniel Scheinert. “I think there are two things that happen when we come up with an idea. The first is of course the narrative. What if a lonely man came across a magical farting corpse? That has a lot of meat to it. And the other is, back in the real world we’re asking, what if this movie existed? The metanarrative is just as exciting to us as the story that we’re trying to write. The best part is, what if we made a movie about a farting corpse and it was great? What if it was beautiful? And to us, that’s the‘what if?’that really drives us forward.”
“The ‘what if?’ that got me on board for these four years,” Daniel Kwan recalls, “was what if we started a movie with a fart that made you laugh, but ended with a fart that made you cry? If that happened for even a fraction of the population, I would be so proud of myself. I’ve achieved something in human history.”
They laugh, because hey, fart jokes are funny. But therein lies a more serious, though no less hilarious truth. Body comedy is generally the domain of forgettable frat boy films and the occasional mainstream break-out – one need look no further than American Pie. Movies that aim to say something profound usually steer clear of butts, which The Daniels find bizarre. After all, it’s pretty unlikely you’ll ever be able to outrun your own.
“I find quote-unquote ‘dramas’ to sometimes be unrelatable,” says Scheinert. “But dramedy actually connects with me. Those are the most serious films to me, because I find the real world so ridiculous if you see a film that doesn’t acknowledge that – it’s like we’re not speaking the same language. The absurdity is a way to explore some really honest soul-searching. I think lowbrow humour is easy, because it doesn’t take a lot of thought to come up with a weiner joke. What people take for granted is the reason that it’s easy is because it’s universal. We thought it was just really funny at first, but also really helpful to ground our movies with the human experience. Everybody has a butt, and that’s beautiful.” The directors laugh again.
“People can’t believe there would be a movie about a farting corpse that also is philosophical and existential,” Kwan continues. “I think real life combines all of those things at once, and I can’t see why our stories shouldn’t have that as well. I think this is the most honest film we could have made. Everybody has these things, but no-one’s OK with talking about it. I think the common consensus out there is when you put a fart joke into your movie, you’ve failed. And we always wanted people to rethink those kind of things, those judgements. It allows us to be a little more open – and really, we didn’t put a fart joke in a movie. We put a movie in a fart joke.”
It’s a wonderful line, and hard to disagree with. Finding a magical farting corpse may sound like a one-trick gag – something you would struggle to stretch into a feature, let alone find some profundity in. But peculiar as it is, the movie works. It helps that Paul Dano (Hank) and Daniel Radcliffe (the dead Manny) bring legitimately impressive performances to these unlikely roles. For all its bizarre body humour, it makes us question what it is to be human – like David Cronenberg without the horror.
“I definitely think we’re trapped by the body,” Scheinert says. “It’s a terrifying thing, to be a mind trapped inside the maze of a decayed body that we have minimal control over. I think that’s part of what Cronenberg does. In our case, rather than showing off how horrifying they are, we’re trying to celebrate it all. Rather than body horror, it’s body celebration, only amplified in a really absurd way. We’re a chain reaction, where just one domino inside needs to fall and we die. It’s a pretty scary thing to think about, but the fact that chain reaction has also led to us talking on the phone right now is kind of a miracle. I have a magical body, just like Manny.”
“In the beginning we established some narrative rules,” Kwan explains, “and it took a long time to figure out what that spine was. A lot fell by the wayside, and we were always happy to see those things go, because it meant that the movie was making sense of itself, and our goal was for this seemingly unpalatable content to be an enjoyable cinematic experience with a spine and heart and resolution that felt worthwhile. It was stressful, but also fun to set those rules and stick to them. We feel pretty good about where it landed.”
Swiss Army Man(dir. Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan) is in cinemas Thursday July 14.
