Chris Morris, right, on the set of ‘Four Lions’.Think terrorism shouldn’t be the subject of comedy? Chris Morris says you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Morris made his name making light of hot-button subjects including drugs, crime and pedophiles in Brass Eye, a satirical spoof of news magazine shows that traded on thoroughly absurdist takes on the issues at hand. Not so absurd, though, that he wasn’t able to convince real public figures that the show was on the level. In segments that were surely a huge influence on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G and Borat characters, Morris would not only have earnest interviews with celebrities and public officials, but would even go so far as to have them record public service messages warning of the dangers of things that he’d made up entirely. In one of the most famous incidents, a conservative legislator filmed one of these PSAs about a dangerous new recreational drug and then brought up the subject on the floor of Parliament — all this about a drug that didn’t even exist outside of Morris’ imagination.
Most of Morris’ career has been spent in television and radio, but he made his first foray into feature filmmaking with Four Lions, which opens in D.C. today. The film tells the story of a group of homegrown terrorists, a cell of radical British Muslims who have it in their head that they’re going to engage in a suicide bombing campaign in London. The only problem: they’re completely inept, whether the goal is recording propaganda videos, getting training in Pakistan, keeping their activities secret or actually blowing up a target.
This ineptitude — which was inspired by actual stories of boneheaded moves by would-be terrorists that Morris came across in four years of research for the film — is fertile ground for plenty of laughs. But Morris has never been gratuitously goofy or after cheap laughs. His sharp satire has always used humor to get at more serious themes — and amid all the laughs in Four Lions, there’s plenty to think about, particularly since Morris keeps the film grounded in well-researched reality, stocked with characters who are built from real-world examples.
Morris has been touring the country for special one-off screenings for the past week, and he spoke with DCist when he was in town on Monday.
What made you decide to take on this subject for a movie?
I started to see a kind of dynamic emerging [while reading about terrorist cells], which was recognizably male, and at times idiotic. I stumbled across a book by a CIA analyst called Marc Sageman called Understanding Terror Networks, which describes this very phenomenon as the “Bunch of Guys” theory, which is basically that a jihadi cell is made of — as the theory describes — a bunch of guys trying to get stuff together, and that’s the way that these analysts understand the workings of homegrown jihadism, which is what the film is about. So it went from being a counter-instinctive contradiction to actually part of the fabric of these things that there is this sort of low level of farce, arguments, and the kind of grit between these characters that generates comedy. And once we got there, I thought, okay, we’re away, we’re off.
