The Film

Hallo Panda is a romantic comedy about the absurdity of love. It is a melancholic, alcoholic, story about people and creatures trapped by an unnatural world and a distrust of their natural instincts.

In a romantic comedy, we are rooting for a guy and a girl to get together. Just like the way zoologists – and the millions besotted with pandas around the world – want the male and female pandas to get together. But pandas don’t play ball. They are obstinate in the extreme. They don’t want to mate in captivity, even though they’re dying out in the wild. It’s not just sex. They only eat bamboo despite being carnivores – which is why they have to eat so much of the stuff. One reason why they are precariously close to extinction. It’s stupidly obstinate and rather tragic, but also really rather funny. Not least because of all the endangered species that we are threatening, the ones who have come to symbolise the conservation movement are the ones doing their damnedest to wipe themselves out.

Which isn’t so far from the romantic comedy – the more obstacles in the way, the harder it seems for love to triumph, the more we want it to work out. It is the very impossibility that draws us on. For us, this is what the story celebrates. The way the heart charges into situations the head is sure must fail. The oddly honourable gleefulness of a wrongheaded leap towards spectacular disaster. No one wants to wank a panda, but no one wants them to die out. No one wants a broken heart – but that doesn’t stop us falling in love…

That’s why we want to tell this story. It’s a funny and poignant new angle on the nature of love. It delights in the absurdity of it all and the clash of romance and practicality, of science and mystery, of man and bear. A romantic comedy in which the overpowering confusion of human love is confronted by the black and white simplicity of Panda’s animal instincts is one everyone will enjoy.

Hallo Panda was first a much-loved award-winning short film made for Film4 and the UKFC. Their faith in the story has been resoundingly endorsed by the online ratings on Film4.com and iTunes, by the Facebook fan page started by devotees of its 3am C4 screenings, by all the emails from strangers who have stumbled across it and fallen in love and by the uproarious hilarity we have always encountered when pitching it.

Drawing on the classy, subtle and charming relationship-based styles of Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Cameron Crowe and Judd Apatow whilst adding in the visually seductive and wildly imaginative ethos of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, our chief aim is to make people laugh hysterically but lovingly.

A great deal of the charm of the film comes from the fact that no matter how bad things get for Mark, we’re always on his side. A crucial factor in creating this atmosphere is in making sure that the film is always as beautiful as it is funny. The finest romantic comedies are always beautiful to look at, you fall in love not just with the characters but with the world they inhabit.

London Zoo had its glory days in the 1930s and like the whole city its beauty has been gently fading ever since. Mirroring Mark’s love of his lovelorn mood, our film is washed in the warmly decaying colours of autumn: oranges and browns glowing in golden sunshine, grey rain making the sky and the ground identical bar for the splashes breaking the reflections. Like a Wes Anderson film or “Amelie”, we want the audience to enjoy the beauty of our decaying and frangible world. Nightclubs are full of moth-like men fluttering round flames and the whole of London is little more than a massive zoo in which everyone is behind a bar of some sort.

Mark has the genial drunken charm of Jimmy Stewart underneath an unexpected shambolic charisma of whilst Sarah uses her caustic Katherine Hepburn-esque wit to protect her heart from the aftermath of a failed marriage. He is a romantic, she is a realist. He’s about mystery, she’s about facts. This clash of beliefs creates their unique chemistry. And Panda? Well he is a foul-mouthed Chinese bear with the acerbic wit of Groucho Marx and the loveable grumpiness of Walter Matthau.

The relationship between Mark and Panda is central to the film. We never want the audience to question the fact that Panda talks. Panda is the only animal that talks and he only talks to Mark and even then mainly just to undermine his confidence. In some ways it could be possible to read the script as if their conversations are just in Mark’s head, but we never push the audience towards a conclusion. Panda remains believable in his own way, a splash of vivid absurdism which captures some of the madness of Mark’s new love with Sarah.

To ensure we get the interplay of man and bear working just as well as man and woman, we want to shoot everything in reality – not in post with CGI. Using cutting-edge techniques in animatronics will ensure that we get brilliant performances whilst keeping costs in check. We will record the magnificent Benedict Wong’s vocal performance as Panda fi rst and then pre-animate all of the bear’s facial performance to this long before getting to set. This will free up the actors to perform rather than trying to keep in sync with a team of puppeteers.

Using computer-controlled animatronics for all Panda’s facial movements – triggered by the actor inside the suit and running to the animation already done – we will get the perfect facial performance from Panda in every take. As well as reducing the number of technical takes, this will enable both Mark and Panda’s body artist to perform against one another with freedom – a real-life sparring partnership, not a work-in-progress to be sorted in post.

Hallo Panda is a film that has always meant a lot to us. We think it is an incredibly positive film and it has a naturally infectious hilarity that ensures those who hear about it never forget it. It is also very much a part of our oeuvre, showcasing our high-concept imagination and our unique style: left- field, but with a warm humanity that underpins the cynical innocence.

We write and direct together. To make that work, we have to do a ton of preparation. Because having properly shared and explored an idea between the pair of us, it is much easier to share it again with our cast and crew – and then with the audience. On set, we work in a loose, free, creative and enjoyable way, so that both cast and crew transfer the joy they experience each day onto the screen. Our films are films you share and love – everyone owns them, including the fans.