‘GET DUKED’ IN THE HIGHLANDS THIS WEEKEND!
27th August 2020
‘GET DUKED’ opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival last year, and it was wild! Great news it’s out in the U.K this Friday on Amazon!
Four boys hit the Highlands to complete their Duke of Edinburgh Awards, and very quickly become lost (they tear up their map to make a massive joint). Not only that, things get worse when they realise they’re being hunted by the Duke of Edinburgh himself (Eddie Izzard in a creepy skin mask). What follows is some bomb-making with explosive hash, hallucinogenic rabbit shit-eating, and tripped-out farmers raving to hip hop music. Throw in some violence, biting social commentary and class warfare, and you’ve got yourself an absolute cult classic.
The film is ridiculous and incredibly funny as it sounds, and the entire cast, which also include Kate Dickie, James Cosmo and Jonathan Aris, and the boys Samuel Battomley, Viraj Juneja, Rian Gordon and Lewis Gribben, are clearly having the time of their lives. It’s dark, laugh-out-loud hilarious, completely wacky and politically astute. All in all, it’s a high-energy trip (in more ways than one). An absolute must-see.
The Director, Ninian Doff, explains how the whole crazy story even came to be.
“It’s funny, it expanded out into a wild, and hopefully surprising and anarchic story, but it did begin with the one sentence, which was ‘Four boys do the Duke of Edinburgh Award, and find themselves being hunted by a Duke.’ And that was the beginning point, which then unfolded into this crazy story about identity, and social politics and where we are today, and issues like… like you’ve got Extinction Rebellion who are like kicking off, and the youth of today should have had enough, quite rightly have had enough. There are a lot of arrogant, privileged older people who are telling everyone to be quiet and accept it, and so in the context of an outrageous comedy, I wanted to sneak in a strong, subversive political kick to be like, ‘Take over kids!’”
On setting it in the Highlands, Ninian himself being a Scottish native, he said that he “Didn’t want to do a cliched Highlands film, I wanted kinda the anti-bagpipe film. I didn’t want romantic violins and all that, so it’s a blasting hip hop soundtrack over the Scottish Highlands – which for me is how I remembered it, with my headphones on, and I thought that’d be more interesting.”
The four boys were as wild and rowdy in person as they are in the film, which meant that when asked how they found the filming experience, they all shouted over one another with “AMAZING”, “FANTASTIC”, “PHENOMENAL” and the one to top them all, “One of the best experiences of my LIFE!” As for whether they had any funny behind-the-scene stories to share, “None that we’re allowed to discuss…” is all they replied while giving each other the side-eye. Let your imaginations run wild!
‘Get Duked’ is out now on Amazon and we highly recommend it!
Laura Potier
https://flipyourwig.net/2020/07/01/michaela-coel-is-making-it-happen-for-herself/
https://flipyourwig.net/2020/08/23/i-release-my-album-and-i-think-what-an-earth-am-i-going-to-put-in-the-genre-box-meet-lido/
https://flipyourwig.net/2020/08/23/robert-pattinson-as-the-batman/
