An interview with Tim Doiron and April Mullen, directors of Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Way of the Tosser
North Americans aren't supposed to know what 'tosser' means. It's surely some small print minutiae of the Pax Americana, whereby we send over our actors and they give us sitcoms that never end in return. But apparently Canadians Tim Doiron and April Mullen are on to the intricacies of British slang. It's what makes their debut feature Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Way of the Tosser, one of the funniest films around this year.
Making a film about Rock, Paper, Scissors (or RPS), is very timely because as Mullen says "RPS is going big these days... anyone can play - that's the beauty". But as audiences will find out watching the film, once one becomes professionally competitive rules creep in - there is a difference between impromptu street RPS and tournament play. And it's this formulisation that gives Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Way of the Tosser the keys to the comedy castle: that gap where something so simple, like playing RPS, becomes built up and warped into absurdity.
After assembling the basic idea for a character driven comedy along the lines of Christopher Guest's films, the cast went to a RPS qualifier at a Niagara Falls casino and then on to the World Championship in Toronto. By participating in an actual tournament their characters built up an ending to the film before it had even started. Notably the competitive side of RPS came into play as the newcomers encountered pros for whom gamesmanship and psychology is everything. Doiron was convincingly crushed after an onlooker discovered his style "he knew" (Doiron's character never throws paper, a rather crippling handicap in RPS).
A cross between documentary and mockumentary, Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Way of the Tosser is certainly more Spinal Tap than Dodgeball, although the training montages are worthy of that film and Rocky. Featuring a number of RPS experts as talking heads, there's defiantly both a fondness for the sport of RPS at work, and a love of the characters, however daft "....give it more heart, more creative drive". The principal cast all come from the same theatre school in Toronto, forming the nucleus of the production that was gradually built around them.
Part of the strength here is the look of the film. Both Doiron and Mullen had a firm idea visually of what they wanted "70s style den, lots of yellows and browns". Shot principally on location at Mullen's cousin's house, the set has a convincing feel that adds to the characterisation. With no disrespect intended towards the real-life house occupants, one can easily determine without hearing a single line of side-splitting dialogue that 'here be nutjobs'. The immediately identifiable costumes were sourced by Mullen, mainly from second hand shops and the ubiquitous LA based Buffalo Exchange.
Doiron and Mullen await the reaction of Rock, Paper,
Scissors: The Way of the Tosser with the RPS community at large - "hope
it's going to be positive". And frankly the less we say about Cup-a-farts
the better. As Doiron describes his native audience "some get it, some
don't".
This interview originally appeared in the Cambridge
Film Festival daily newspaper 2007 - www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk
