I interviewed Garth Jennings, director of “Son of Rambow,” for the “A Moment With” series in the Seattle P-I. You can find that short feature, a selection of choice bits from the 20-minute phone interview, here. Here is the complete, edited interview.

The film premiered at Sundance in 2007 and opened the Seattle International Film Festival last year. What took so long for it to get released?

We had things work out in regards to the licensing of the “Rambo” clips and it just took a while to… It was all very amicable, and it’s all worked out great, but it just took a while to go through that procedure. It’s just one of those things. You’ve seen it now and you know that there are quite a lot of clips in there. Anyway, it’s done now and we’re quite happy that it’s coming out.

The film opens with Lee Carter bootlegging “Rambo” with a bulky home video camera. Will you put a disclaimer on the film reading: “We do not condone the bootlegging of movies”?

Or don’t touch any live wires, don’t drive cars unnecessarily into walls… There’s quite a lot of things we could actually pre-warn people about. Hopefully they’ll work it out for themselves.

Will shows the resilience of a cartoon character when he executes the stunts for Lee, being launched into the air from a catapult and such, but as it continues they become more vulnerable. Like when Will jumps into the lake and then it turns out he can’t swim and he comes close to drowning.

That was always the plan, was to start off very much like Singin’ in the Rain, where Gene Kelly is trying to make it as a stunt man, like “I’ll do anything,” and it’s all great, he doesn’t get hurt, but gradually he goes along and by the end most things turn out to be disastrous.

They become a little more mortal by the end.

Exactly.

To me, they are protected by this innocence as they start enacting these stunts.

Yes. I think that’s the thing. We wanted to try and capture that whole idea of when you’re young, you don’t consider the consequences too much. So at first they get away with it, it’s only later that… You can’t keep doing that sort of thing and not get hurt.

I love the way you hand-draw the effects when Will runs home from seeing “Rambo.” It works over the world with his imagination, with the same images and style we see in his drawings.

Yes, yes. It was lovely doing that. It was a young chap called David O’Reilly, who we met through our work on the film Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. He did some of the animation on the guide book. He was very talented. No only is a good animator, he’s a brilliant illustrator. He was able to do everything, whether it was a book or a flip-book or a sketch book or explosions in a field, he did everything.

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Just a couple of capsule reviews this week. First up, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s lovely Flight of the Red Balloon:

The shadow of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 fantasy “The Red Balloon” hovers over Hou Hsiao-hsien’s drama…. Hou’s first film made outside of Asia is his most emotionally turbulent, yet he remains, like the balloon, outside looking in, a compassionate but distant observer capturing it all with a graceful restraint and floating beauty that ultimately carried me away with it.

I liked Love Songs almost as much:

Christophe Honore continues his tribute to the French New Wave (begun with the SIFF 2007 feature “Dans Paris”) with this playful, polysexual romantic musical…. Honore drops the brightness and joy of the form into the chilly, gray winter of Paris to explore love and loss and intimacy. It is a joy, from the cute songs and sudden bursts of comedy to the profound and affecting sadness of one lover mourning the death of another while finding the strength to go on.

You can read both reviews here.

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