Interview by Ben Falk
We found ourselves with something on our hands that was never going to fit into 29 minutes. We wanted to do a proper school trip and we realised it needed a bigger canvas and more time.
It was difficult. The first thing we did was write the script. We didn’t take any money from anyone for that. We basically wrote it on spec with a little bit of subsistence from my company Cave Bear Productions.
We were absolutely rigorous in making sure we re-established all of our characters for anyone who hadn’t seen the TV show before. It was really important that audiences could enjoy the movie in its own right. It was important not to have too many in-jokes. When you’re thinking about your fans, you need to deliver what they want and expect but we definitely always had half an eye on trying to expand that fan base.
Then I discovered the hell of film finance compared to television! We made the movie about two weeks faster than The Inbetweeners Movie, but we’re never going to make as much money. If we make a quarter of that money we’ll be happy. But we did think in commercial terms. We talked a lot about American movies and how they build their comedies and how they deliver those set pieces. We were very much looking at American mainstream comedy as our inspiration and while we have probably a tenth of the budget of those movies, our aspiration was to deliver as many jokes and as much ambition as we could.
I always feel that it’s a slightly unfair to critise TV to film conversions for being episodic. I would argue that great comedy movies, even if they didn’t come from TV shows, feel a bit episodic by their nature.
What have I learned? Carry a lot of Nurofen. Be ready not to sleep much. A 90-minute script is a lot harder than a 30-minute script. I’ve learned how you make things funnier in post. I’ve also learned that everyone always wants more. Visually, you have to push yourself so hard. People are arriving to watch the movie having paid £10 and they want a visual feast.
Ben Cavey’s CV
His first notable job was as a script editor on Holby City. “It was one of the hardest jobs of my life, but I learned a lot about scripts and narratives. It was certainly being at the coal face of script work.”
No-one remembers his first sitcom. “It was Roman’s Empire, with Neil Dudgeon. It was the first time I worked with Elliot Hegarty, who directed the Bad Education Movie.”
He started his own production company, Cave Bear Productions, earlier this year. “It got to a point where I was running two very large departments at Tiger Aspect and I just wanted to get back to being nearer to the shows. The company was about doing less projects and me being more involved.”
Roman’s Empire and Bad Education both had unsuccessful US pilots. “I was very proud of both of them, but it’s a real learning curve. You’ve just got to enjoy the race, because you’re very lucky to even make a pilot."
The Bad Education Movie is in cinemas now
