With a career that started in commercials and music videos, Ninian Doff saw his first feature film open last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival – but under a totally different title.
What was Boyz In The Wood has now become Get Duked!, but it’s still the same anarchic, chaotic horror comedy that it ever was, following a group of city boys on the Duke Of Edinburgh’s Award scheme in the Scottish Highlands – and finding that their city street smarts get them absolutely nowhere.
Full of references to other films, from horror favourites like An American Werewolf in London, to classic Ealing comedies and even Monty Python, it puts the “high” in Highlands, with its combination of psychedelic graphics and a large helping of hip hop. And it was an idea that started life when, as a teenager, Doff tried his hand at the award scheme – although, as he admits, it wasn’t the experience that we see in the film …….
Congratulations on the film! Where did the idea originally come from? Had you done the Duke Of Edinburgh’s Award scheme yourself?
Yes, I had done some – I didn’t get all the way to gold. I got lost in The Highlands with friends, we had some wild conversations, but it didn’t quite pan out in the same way as the film. It popped into my head out of the blue, the way ideas do, that it was this great construct for a film in that it naturally puts this disparate group together and it gives them a quest and it’s kind of full of peril, even if nothing goes wrong. The Scottish Highlands are no joke, when you’re lost in a valley, you know?
Just as a construct for storytelling, it felt very nice and when you play it into the horror genre, you think “kids on the Duke Of Edinburgh Award” and then a duke suddenly appears and starts shooting at them and you think “this is getting exciting” and it starts writing itself.
So why the name change from when it opened the Edinburgh Film Festival last year? Because then it was Boyz In The Wood.
It was Boyz In The Wood at a bunch of festivals, including opening Edinburgh, which was incredible. When I was writing it, I kind of joked it was the anti-bagpipe film. For me, I thought of my teenage years in Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands – the music being disparate, listening to hip hop while walking around beautiful landscapes is really honest to me but you don’t see it so much, so already at script stage I wanted to put American hip hop onto the Scottish Highlands.
And in an extension of that sort of energy, Boyz In The Wood was a fun, tongue in cheek, playful pun that people got and I have to say that a lot of people really loved that title and it made them want to watch it, it set the tone and it was a bit silly and all that.
But, since wrapping the film, shockingly John Singleton died, the director of Boyz In The Hood, which we were punning it on, and in the past few months, with the Black Lives Matter movement, I felt that it was about bigger cultural change than just lip service and it’s about asking yourself questions and just calling yourself out and saying are you being right? I didn’t want it to be disrespectful in any way, punning on such an iconic piece of cinema.
So it had a working title of Get Duked!, which was almost like an invented swearword from the film – when you watch the film, you understand what the chant symbolises – and as the topic came up of changing the title, I jumped on the idea. It’s a scary thing to change a title when you’ve done things like opening a film festival with the other one! But it really felt in my heart that it was the right move.
Get Duked! is released on Amazon Prime on Friday, 28 August.
