World premiere of comedy film set in The Fens
Chicken Town was written and directed by Richard Bracewell, a lecturer at Norwich University of the Arts (NUA), and filmed in several locations across Norfolk.
Cinema City is hosting the event, which will include the film's first public screening followed by a question and answer session with its stars and writers.
It tells the story of two school friends who join forces with a grandad, played by comedy actor Graham Fellows, who has unwittingly grown cannabis on his allotment.
Richard Bracewell, whose previous credits include the 2015 Horrible Histories film Bill, employed ten of his graduates from NUA to work on Chicken Town as assistants and trainees in the production and makeup departments.
Mr Bracewell said he teamed youth with experience on the project, and Graham Fellows, an established name on the comedy circuit known for his character John Shuttleworth and novelty record Jilted John, was part of the cast.
Comedians Laurence Rickard (Horrible Histories, Ghosts) and Alistair Green also star.
The young characters in the film were cast from The Television Workshop charity in Nottingham, which is a BAFTA award-winning drama group whose alumni include actors Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones, The Last of Us) and Vicky McClure (This is England, Line of Duty).
Mr Bracewell described his latest film as "a story about the contradictions of modern family life; a film with both a heart and a conscience".
"If Greta Gerwig and Shane Meadows had a love child, we hope it might resemble Chicken Town," he added.
It will be released in UK cinemas on 27 June.
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- Yahoo
Bob Odenkirk Talks Potential ‘Nobody' Quadrilogy, ‘Pluribus' Hype and Not Missing Saul Goodman
Nobody has had a career quite like Bob Odenkirk. It was one thing to go from a comedy writer and performer on SNL in the late '80s to his own beloved HBO sketch comedy series, Mr. Show with Bob and David, in the mid-'90s. But to reinvent himself as an equally effective comedic and dramatic actor in his late 40s and 50s — largely due to his roles as Saul Goodman and Jimmy McGill on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul — is something nobody saw coming. The later career twists and turns for the 7-time-Emmy-nominated actor weren't over yet, as Odenkirk took on yet another challenge that nobody anticipated: action franchise star. More from The Hollywood Reporter Sharon Stone Has a "Moral Code" When Playing Bad Guys: "Villains Really F*** Up Your Life" 'Nobody 2' Review: Bob Odenkirk Faces Off Against a Scenery-Chomping Sharon Stone in Entertaining Sequel After Crediting 'Nobody' Workouts for Saving His Life, Bob Odenkirk "Never Stopped Training" for Sequel In 2019, Odenkirk starred in and produced Ilya Naishuller's Nobody right before his 57th birthday, and the actioner about long-retired assassin (aka 'auditor') Hutch Mansell released to strong reviews during COVID in March 2021. The action-thriller took in a box office haul of $57.5 million against a $16 million budget, which was music to the pandemic-stricken industry's ears at the time. Odenkirk spent years training for the action role, utilizing the same program that John Wick co-directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski designed in order to turn Keanu Reeves into John Wick. Thankfully, Odenkirk's fitness regimen helped save his life when he suffered a near-fatal heart incident on the set of Better Call Saul's final season in July 2021. Once he received a clean bill of health, he recommitted himself to his rigorous Nobody workouts regardless of his and Universal's interest in a Nobody 2. 'It was more that you've got to exercise when you get older,' Odenkirk tells The Hollywood Reporter. '[David Leitch's] 87North and [Chad Stahelski's] 87eleven are two different concerns now, but they lift from every kind of fight tradition, so there will be people at their gyms who do jiu-jitsu, karate, judo and boxing. It just makes for a more entertaining workout.' In the first Nobody, Odenkirk's Hutch has to reignite the sleeping assassin within himself after his family was frightened by a botched home invasion. This story point was inspired by a couple break-ins that Odenkirk's own nuclear family endured over the years. In the now well-received Nobody 2, Hutch, his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) and their two kids are all leading separate lives and sorely need a vacation to reestablish their familial bond. So Odenkirk once again channeled his real life by having the Mansells travel to a waterpark-centric town à la the Wisconsin Dells that his family of origin twice went to in the '70s. 'The family I grew up in, we went on two vacations in my life. There were seven kids in my family, and we didn't have enough money to go to Hawaii or Disneyland,' Odenkirk recalls. 'So we went to the Wisconsin Dells in a station wagon, and the kids were in the back, sweating and complaining. Of course, the Dells was not as impressive as it is now.' As a result, Nobody 2 director Timo Tjahjanto combined the thrilling mechanics of Naishuller's Nobody with elements of National Lampoon's Vacation. 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The biggest challenge was finding the right story. (Odenkirk apologetically asks for a brief pause.) My wife had some furniture redone and it weighs a lot. So I didn't want to watch this guy try to carry it on his own; he could have hurt himself. So thank you for waiting. Oh, don't mention it. We played around with different stories for Nobody 2, and it was hard to find a story that felt right. I kept asking myself, 'What is the real reason people liked the first one so much? What is it?' And I didn't mean the obvious stuff like the fights being good and a little more visceral than what you're used to seeing. At the core of Nobody was this guy, his family and the tensions within it that all seemed authentic. You could almost say that everything up to the bus scene is an independent movie or a Richard Linklater film about a couple coming apart because of a stupidly mishandled home break-in. But then it ramps up into this magical world that only exists in movies. So if the couple were somehow chummy and on good terms again at the end of the first film, how are they now feeling tension again? There was a lot of back and forth and a lot of outlines and even a lot of screenplays. [Co-screenwriter] Derek Kolstad and I talked all the way through it, and then all of a sudden, Universal was like, 'Okay, we're going to make it.' And we were actually like, 'Well, we haven't got the script figured out completely.' We definitely had the bones of what you see now, but it wasn't like, 'Ah, now it's done. Can you please make it?' I didn't feel that way. So we had to get to work and really focus on it, and then we arrived at a script that I thought was good. One of my goals in this story was to not have the first bad guy you meet be the actual bad guy. There's this middleman, John Ortiz's Wyatt Martin, who is a mirror of Hutch because Hutch also works for somebody [Colin Salmon's The Barber]. Are you from the Midwest? Have you been to Wisconsin Dells? I'm not from the Midwest, but I lived there for a few years and visited the Dells during that time. The Tommy Bartlett Show, Tommy Bartlett's [Exploratory], Tommy Bartlett's everything. [Writer's Note: Bartlett was a Wisconsin showman whose water-ski show served as a popular tourist attraction at the Dells from 1952 to 2020.] Wyatt Martin is our Tommy Bartlett. He owns the town [and the Tiki Rush waterpark]. He's the bad guy who's sitting behind the sheriff's desk when you meet him, but he's really under the thumb of [Sharon Stone's Lendina]. So the first film's mechanics that I thought really worked for the audience, I wanted to go through a version of those again. 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It involves boxing, sometimes. It involves yoga, sometimes. It involves all these different disciplines. [David Leitch's] 87North and [Chad Stahelski's] 87eleven are two different concerns now, but [Dave and Chad] were together at the beginning. They've done all the John Wick movies and Deadpool 2. They lift from every kind of fight tradition, so there will be people at their gyms who do jiu-jitsu, karate, judo and boxing. So they steal from all of these different fighting styles, and it just makes for a more entertaining workout. Did anyone ask you to pace yourself or dial yourself back given your health scare between films? Yeah, there was a point where I was losing a lot of weight. And people … I didn't hear about it directly, but I did eventually. I could tell people were worried, but I feel fine. (Laughs.) When you get closer to filming, you do two workouts a day, and when you're doing that, you're stressing as well. Stress drains your brain, it drains your energy and it drains your body of minerals. Did you know that? I did not. It does. 'And that's why you should take a multivitamin,' said the old man. My dad just got on me about this. I don't have a writer's credit, but I was deep into the writing on these films, especially the second film. So I didn't go home and have a massage and go to sleep. I went home and worked on the next day's screenplay: what we were going to actually say and do, and what changed and what didn't work. It always amuses me how Daniel Bernhardt keeps dying in these 87North and 87eleven movies and returning as new characters. It's a great running gag. Absolutely. There's a lot of conversation about what facial hair he can have to feign towards the idea that he's a different human. I love Daniel, and he is the man who trained me to do this. He's put in so many hours, and I have deep respect and appreciation for his friendship and skills. So I love the guy, and as far as I'm concerned, if I ever get to make another action film, he's in it. He was here yesterday. We did a workout together. Do you have another in you for a proper trilogy? Well, I genuinely like doing action scenes. They're fun to invent. They're actually similar in creative joy to sketch writing. They're three-to-six minute pieces, generally, and if you do them right, they have a story to them. You should be able to describe a fight with a few words; you shouldn't say, 'And then they fight!' Because then you're just making a blah action film. You should say, 'The duck boat fight is a fight where he's trying not to fight. This is a supremely out of control fight. He's lost control, completely. He is genuinely out of energy, and he really won't make it through this.' Each fight should have a character unto itself, and it should have a little bit of a journey, just like a sketch. So I was surprised to find that parallel, and I spent so much of my life writing sketches and loving that form. So I'd do more [Nobody]. I'd love to do more of it, but I don't think I'm going to dig right in. I have another action film called Normal that's coming out [at TIFF 2025], so that's already in the can. But, right now, I think I want to do some comedy if they'll let me. You recently reunited with your collaborators Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn at San Diego Comic-Con. How much have you let them tell you about their new series ? Nothing. I don't know a damn thing. But I know it's going to be massive. Massive! It's going to be the biggest thing, well, since sliced bread, but really since Game of Thrones. You probably know what's biggest [lately], but probably since Severance. I know Severance, in its way, is a big, big effort. So I think that [Pluribus] is going to be the next big show, and I can't wait. comes out three years to the day since went off the air. You played that collective character of Jimmy/Saul for 14 years. Do you miss him at all? No! He was great, and I enjoyed playing him. Both Hutch Mansell in Nobody and Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul have a lot of impacted frustration inside them. They're guys who, for different reasons, have pretty big chips on their shoulders, and that's hard to play after a while. You can't just carry that guy around all the time. So I'm fine with moving on from them both, although I would do more Hutch. I would do a third or fourth [Nobody] film. It would be about the journey of the family and the tensions that change as you move from one chapter to the next. You tell yourself, 'This is going to be it now. I'm going to enjoy this chapter of my life and I'm going to be carefree.' (Laughs.) But then you find that it has just as many frustrations and shortcomings as the last chapter. Earlier this year, you also reunited with your brother, Michael McKean, on Broadway in . Was that new context both strange and interesting after three years together on ? Broadway was a strange experience. It was very unique in its tensions and pressures, but Michael has done it many times. So he was actually a source of calm and confidence and joy because he's a blast. Nobody got more laughs than Michael McKean in that show. He was so funny, and he's one of the funniest and best actors in America. God, what a blast it was to be around him for that. ***Nobody 2 opens Aug. 15 in movie theaters nationwide. Best of The Hollywood Reporter The 25 Best U.S. Film Schools in 2025 The 40 Greatest Needle Drops in Film History The 40 Best Films About the Immigrant Experience Solve the daily Crossword
New York Times
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Dirty Dishes in the Sink? He'll See You in Court.
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Yahoo
9 hours ago
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Bob Odenkirk Discusses How Hard It Is to ‘Turn a Comedy Writer's Body Into an Action Hero's Body'
According to comedy and, now, action great Bob Odenkirk, Nobody can turn a Saturday Night Live writer into a stone-cold killer. Throughout the history of comedy and drama, accomplished performers in both genres have always wanted to know what life was like on the other side of the fence. That urge for greener grass has long helped SNL to attract A-list movie stars who will slap on a silly costume and try out their best impression in hopes of getting a few laughs to go with their Oscars, but efforts to move in the opposite direction have yielded mixed results. For every Robin Williams who blows us away in Good Will Hunting, there's a dozen Dane Cooks starring in awful child abduction dramas like the 2011 disaster Answers to Nothing. Then, even more rare is the comedian who doesn't just become a dramatic actor, but a bona-fide action star on top of that. Odenkirk is one of the seldom few comics to pull off such a career turn with the Nobody film series, which just released its second installment today. In a conversation with Variety, Odenkirk explained that it took him years to shed the shape of a professional funnyman and become the semi-retired black ops assassin Hutch Mansell. And it's a good thing, too, that Odenkirk kicked himself into shape for his Jason Bourne arc – the first formidable foe he faced following the two-year training regimen was a widow-maker heart attack. During the talk, Odenkirk, 62, revealed that, leading up to the filming of the first Nobody, he spent two years training with the movie's stunt coordinator Daniel Bernhardt so that he could perform all the fight scenes himself and not rely too heavily on a stunt double. But, as Odenkirk discussed during the Variety talk, the comedy legend's quest to throw a convincing punch required him to become a punchline. 'I was trying to turn a comedy writer's body into an action hero's body,' Odenkirk recalled of that grueling two-year training period. 'I laughed a lot, but it was not a fun laugh. It was an embarrassed kind of red-faced laugh.' And, as Odenkirk has previously mentioned, all that exercise ended up being even more valuable in his own life than it ended up being onscreen. Odenkirk accredited his ability to survive a heart attack while on set for Better Call Saul in 2021 to the rigorous training he completed for Nobody. Thankfully, Odenkirk has the natural work ethic to transition from comedy to action as well as to live long enough to enjoy the rewards. 'I put in the hours because I'm kind of nuts that way,' Odenkirk said of his transformation. 'I can be really determined and unflagging about these things. With the first film, I was challenging myself. When you get older and you turn 50, you think, what can I do that will make me a different person, because I've been this guy for long enough.' Becoming an action star this close to retirement age is an accomplishment in itself, and doing so after subjecting your body to 50-plus years of the comedian's diet and exercise is downright unheard-of. Imagine how blown away we would all be if Lionsgate suddenly announced that the next John Wick movie will star David Cross. Get more Cracked directly to your inbox. Sign up for Cracked newsletters at Cracked News Letters Signup. Solve the daily Crossword
