''We've all had those crazy, "stoned" ideas, whether it's riding a block of ice down a hill or turning your house into a blanket fort complete with bar, lounge, and video game corner, but directing duo DANIELS turns them into ingeniously bizarre music videos, shorts, and features films. Made up of Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, DANIELS has already made a name for itself (themselves?) directing commercials and absurd music videos for The Shins, Foster the People, and most notably DJ Snake and Lil Jon's chart-topping single "Turn Down for What," but last year they took their strange prestige to another level last year with their first feature film Swiss Army Man, starring Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe.'' (No film school)
Swiss Army Man is an unclassifiable mishmash of genres ranging from the adventure of survival to the comedy, going through the fantasy and even leaving one of the most bizarre love stories seen in recent years.
Very free and full of originality, born to divide opinions between those who ended up caught in his martian charm and who, instead, ended up horrified by his generous festival of eschatology - with abandonment of the room during movie screening at Sundance - and apparent childish humor. Surprisingly, after that regrettable event, the film managed to win the prize for best director of drama at the festival, an excellent launching pad for a modest product, whose biggest publicity was the prominence of a Daniel Radcliffe completely removed from the character of Harry Potter that made him popular all over the world.
''One of the earliest things I remember the Daniels telling me was 'is it possible to make a film where the first fart makes you laugh and the last fart makes you cry?' And that felt like an impossible task, but it felt like a worthy thing to aspire too.'' (Paul Dano)
The film opens with images of different objects floating in the sea, carrying desperate messages of help from someone who claims to have been trapped on a deserted island after a storm. In his writings he does not complain of hunger or thirst, but of boredom by solitude. Next we will see the protagonist of these laments, Hank (Paul Dano) as he’s attempting to hang himself. He’s been stranded on a desert island for weeks probably and has given up hope of rescue. But just before the fatal fall, Hank spots something unusual- a dead body (Daniel Radcliffe), washed up on the beach. From the moment that Hank discovers that the corpse, surprisingly, still has the capacity to think and talk, they engage in a curious friendship that ends days of Hank's boredom.
Not even 10 minutes into the film, and we see Hank riding corpse across the ocean. Manny's body can be used as a motorboat to blast through the waters with his powerfull farts. Manny can literally be used as a human Swiss army knife.
This kind of body humor is all over the film, (we will see later that Manny's penis will be used as a compass), so if you're not into it at the very begging you will probably hated it if you get to the end.
Variety Summed up the film as “Cast Away meets Weekend at Bernie’s, as directed by Michel Gondry.”
The corpse, I mean, Manny, can speak but he has forgotten who he was, so Hank tries to explain to him what society is, talking to him about life, love, and what it means to be human in order to bring him back to life. The more he motivates Manny, the more powers his body develops to help them escape the forest.
''Manny's relationship to Hank is that of a trusting young child and his father, though not exclusively. At various points in "Swiss Army Man," the central duo could be likened to buddies in a buddy picture, boyfriend-girlfriend, Pinocchio and Gepetto, and partners in an extended outdoor theatrical improv exercise.'' ( Matt Z. Seitz )
''Regardless of whether or not audiences enjoy the film, or flatulence-related movie plots, they will walk away from the picture knowing that everyone involved was 100 percent committed to the unequivocally unique vision, whatever that is or means exactly.'' (Vanity Fair)
INTERVIEW WITH DANIELS
(TELEGRAPH)
Why did you decide to make a movie about a farting corpse? Where did that idea come from?
Daniel Scheinert: It’s funny. A lot of the time our ideas come from very circumstantial kind of situations. So when we first started out, making music videos together, we’d listen to a song, and think "Okay, so which of our friends can we cast in this? What have we always wanted to do? What are our resources?"
Daniel Kwan: There’s not ever any money so you have to be really smart about what you’re going to do.
DS: Years ago, in 2011, we were going to Alabama, where I’m from, and we were thinking about shooting a short film. And my parents live in a lake town in North Alabama, and we knew that my best friend growing up had a boat there, so maybe we could shoot off the boat, and there’s a big lake…
And so Dan pitched to me: “What if there’s a guy who’s stranded in the wilderness, who finds a corpse and feeds it beans, and it farts across the ocean while beautiful music plays and he cries?”
DS: I immediately regretted pitching. I was thinking “Oh no, this is a horrible idea.”
DK: It kind of became a recurring joke. The joke was that it was the worst idea we’d ever come up with. We’d never make that and put it in theatres across the world… And then it kind of grew. We started coming up with more of a story. And we though, what if we took that really stupid idea and poured our hearts into it?
Once it turned into a buddy film – that when we really fell in love with the idea and started devoting time to it. But that was a few years later.
At one stage, it seemed as if the movie was going to be a traditional(ish) love story – Hank finds Manny, who helps guide him towards the woman he adores. But as it went on, it became apparent that it was something quite different – more about the relationship between the two male characters, and about loneliness. Was that always your intent?
DK: Well, in some ways, we thought we were making a more conventional guy trying to get back to his girl story. But the more drafts we wrote, the more we realised… it sounds stupid when writers say “I listening to my character”, but that’s how it ended up happening. We could tell that Hank and Manny needed each other more than Hank and Sarah ever did. We just kept rewriting and rewriting, until we allowed them to fall in love. And once we allowed ourselves to write that, that story really started to grow and blossom into something worthwhile.
So that was a really interesting turning point – when we let Hank and Manny fall in love and accidentally made a gay necrophilia movie.
DS: That’s a good headline for you!
It is indeed! Bodily functions – the farting, obviously – feel very central to Swiss Army Man, while the idea that we’re all constantly ashamed, and hiding ourselves, sort of forms the emotional heart of the film. Was this also something you worked out through the writing process?
DS: Because we started with a fart joke, no matter how far we went on it, we’d always come back to “wait, but why does this movie start with a man riding a farting corpse?” That had to be central and integral to the film. And it took us a while to kind of find the movie.
DK: Because we were so ashamed of this idea, so ashamed that we were spending time on it, that kind of naturally bled into the film. That was a very relatable thing, having thoughts or ideas or neuroses that you’re too afraid to share with the world. In some ways, this movie became that: something that we were afraid to share with the world. We realised we could connect those feelings with the feelings of body shame, and put them all together into a stew of what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive.
DS: The moral of the story that we came up with – because every great story needs a moral – was that shame keeps us from love. It gave us permission to go down these deep, philosophical routes. And talk about farts. They’re the most ridiculous thing in the world to be ashamed of. Literally every human and every animal farts.
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