Shear enjoyment

First things first: how do you persuade Nick Park to send himself up as a bird-watching pervert? “Well, he is!” laughs Shaun the Sheep the Movie co-director Richard ‘Golly’ Starzak. “He was happy with it. He thought it was really funny.”

To explain: there’s a scene early in the film where a twitcher observes a wildfowl mating ritual like a Peeping Tom. His subjects are not best pleased when they find they’re being watched. Said snooper is very clearly Wallace and Gromit creator Park in plasticine form. “It’s him shouting as well,” continues Golly. “He did this whole range of different screams. I’d never heard him scream before, so that was quite funny. Originally, it was just a bird-watcher. Then someone said, ‘Oh, Nick’s a twitcher. Let’s see if he’s up for it.'”

Shaun made his debut in Park’s Oscar-winning short A Close Shave back in 1995 and has gone on to become something of a global phenomenon. In fact, his popularity now far outstrips that of Wallace and Gromit, making this little ovine goldmine Aardman’s most bankable asset. The spin-off TV series has run for eight years and 140 episodes, which have been sold to 170 countries. He’s even managed to penetrate the Middle East, which was previously unconquered territory for Aardman. And his Facebook page boasts five million followers.

With Park’s blessing, it’s been Golly who has successfully herded Shaun, The Farmer and Bitzer the ineffectual sheepdog onto the world stage. An Aardman veteran who devised Rex the Runt, worked on Peter Gabriel’s groundbreaking Sledgehammer video, and directed the hugely successful Creature Comforts spin-off series for ITV, he’s now teamed up with comedy writer Mark Burton, whose Aardman credits include both Chicken Run and Curse of the Were-Rabbit, for Shaun’s first foray into film.

One of the earliest decisions they had to make was whether to include any dialogue. None of the characters speak in the TV series, but could the creators really sustain that for an 80 minute film? Golly felt strongly that they could. “I was quite confident about it. Aardman weren’t wholly confident. My co-director said, ‘Let’s have some fall-back positions in case it’s not working.’ So we were thinking of really daft things. In Cat Ballou, two banjo players would appear from behind a tree and start telling you the story. So it was going to be like that. Or we’d have some of the new characters speak, but they wouldn’t be able to understand the Farmer. But actually, I’m really kind of glad that we stuck to our guns. We proved it can be done.”

That must make things tricky for the voice cast, primarily Justin Fletcher and John Sparkes, who are charged with infusing grunts and mumbles with meaning. “It is difficult,” Golly affirms, “because you have to put over a lot of emotions and ideas just with noises. We tried to tell the story as strongly as we could visually, making it as cinematic as possible. Any noise is a bonus, but there are points when the noise really has to make sense. You kind of muddle through it, really. But of course everyone wants to say words or do noises that sound like words. There are a few of those in there, some ‘yeahs’ and ‘naahs’. I don’t thank that matters.”

Just to complicate things further when it comes to making what is effectively a modern-day slapstick silent comedy, those sheep aren’t exactly the most expressive of critters. “Well, yeah,” he sighs. “Not a lot to work with. It can be frustrating. I always think of Buster Keaton – the classic deadpan. The key thing in the storyboarding is that the audience have to know what a character is thinking at any given point. I think that made us better storytellers as a result.”

Expanding an episodic TV series to feature length is a challenge that has defeated many. The Shuan script took 18 months to develop from an original idea by Mark Burton. “Something we’ve never tackled in the series has been the relationship between the farmer and Shaun,” Golly explains. “Bitzer has always been the middle man and you kind of don’t know what Shaun’s relationship to the Farmer is. So we thought that’s a good place to start. The big idea was, let’s take them out of their comfort zone and put them in the most un-countryside-like place. So that was the Big City. Then we tried to work out why they went. The Trumper guy [eventually an Animal Containment Officer, voiced by Omid Djalili] was originally a farm inspector who was coming round and threatening to close down the farm. For a while, it was going to be like Summer Holiday with all the sheep on the bus travelling round Britain visiting all the sights. The idea of the city and the relationship between the farmer and Shaun was always there. But honestly, it’s been through so many iterations that it all merges into one.”

Anyone who hasn’t seen the TV show may be tempted to draw comparisons between Bitzer and Gromit. Golly is keen to emphasise the clear blue water between them. “Bitzer has always been Malcolm in the Middle – stuck between wanting to please the farmer and wanting to be friends with the sheep. Those two things sometimes clashed. We always imagined him as being like Mr Barrowclough in Porridge – eager to please everybody and taken for granted. I suppose the similarity is that Gromit’s the long-suffering brains in the outfit, who again is unappreciated by his owner. But in terms of personality, I think they’re quite different.”

Scan the credits closely and you’ll find Stanley Unwin’s name in there. That’s not a bad career move for a bloke who died 13 years ago. Turns out Golly is a huge fan of the man who invented his own nonsense language ‘Unwinese’, which was used to great effect in Happiness Stan on the classic Small Faces album Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake and in Carry on Regardless. “I just thought we need a modern-day Stanley Unwin. We need more people like that, because we could do with nonsense language. But then I remembered that I’d recorded him for Rex the Runt. We went back to that to see what we could salvage for the announcements in the hospital and in the bus station. We contacted his family and asked permission to use it and paid them a bit for it. But it was nice to be able to still use him.”

Aardman’s previous collaborations with American distributors DreamWorks and Sony have not been entirely happy ones, largely because their partners kept trying to tweak scripts to suit American sensibilities. The Shaun the Sheep movie is the studio’s first with French company Studiocanal, which has just enjoyed an enormous box office hit with Paddington – its first family film. Golly says the experience couldn’t have been better.

“They were very enthusiastic for whatever we wanted to do, quite honestly. They just said, ‘Make a really funny Shaun film. Here’s the money.’ That was great. They had no problem at all with anything we suggested. They even loved the idea of a head getting stuck inside a panto horse’s bum and all that kind of stuff. I fought really hard to keep that in,” he adds proudly.

Indeed, while the film boasts many a nod to its adult audience, including a Silence of the Lambs joke and an oblique visual reference to Alien 3, smaller cinemagoers will be delighted by more fart gags than we’ve seen in any previous Aardman production. Turns out that there’s something of a science to this, with a small flatulence committee agonising over the calibration of optimum windiness. “We were definitely weighing it up very carefully as to whether we’d got too many fart gags,” reveals Golly. “A lot of people thought we didn’t have enough…”

And you thought these guys were having far too much fun already.

Shaun the Sheep the Movie is released in cinemas nationwide on February 6. Go here for more Shaun news and here for our full review.