Pulp Preview
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The final inspiration to get Pulp in front of the cameras came during the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con: “ I was sat next to my artist in the main convention hall at Comic-Con, looking across at the guy who’d lost $1.1 million publishing his own comic. He was a lawyer who was involved in a sexual harassment case, he actually dressed up as Tigger in court to prove you couldn’t sexually harass someone dressed as Tigger. A fascinating character. And then he lost S1.1 million. So I said to David Golding, ‘We’re going to make a film about this,’ and he just kind of went, ‘Yeah whatever.’”
But fired up, Hamdy shot off an email that day to get the ball rolling. “We were actually in the process of putting together a finance pack for another film, and we thought, ‘Well, rather than spending months on the finance trail telling people how we might be able to make a film, let’s just go out and make one.’ I sent the email on 27 July. I think we met on 4 August. We had a few beers, and the best was, could we make this film as opposed to going on this financing trail to make this other film. It was probably not the most sensible thing to do. We had 10 weeks to come up with a script and raise the finance. And we had to just believe that nothing would fail. We could not redevelop the script or recast. We didn’t have that kind of contingency. Originally it was going to be really low budget, guerrilla filmmaking without proper lights. But just by showing people the script and getting it out there, we got such a positive response, people wanted to get involved. It just grew and grew and grew.
“I don’t know if I should say this. I think there are things we would do differently if we had more time, but the film as a whole, I think, really works, and it’s got a freshness and vibrancy to it that it perhaps wouldn’t have if we had had more time. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we has to think creatively to solve problems.”
Hamdy has a co-directing credit on the film, but turned to an old mate with a bit more experience to help him out. “Shaun Magher’s got 25 years of directing animation, and graduated from the National Film and Television School. I don’t have any of that. So it made sense for him to kind of take the lead. But when we actually got on set we found we were doing a lot of crossover, and effectively acting as co-directors. And he couldn’t come back to do the pick-ups and reshoots, so I took that over.”
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