Interview – Gravity Boots

 

Heckler sat down with Michael Cleggett and James Lloyd-Smith from Gravity Boots to ask them the important questions.

 

Heckler: How was the Ed Fringe?

Matthew Cleggett: Good.

James Lloyd Smith: Yeah, good.

M: Yeah, busy, we did twenty-six shows, so that was fairly long.

H: Because you were doing some shows before in Adelaide which were just to refine your material, so how did that pay off? How much of that stuff made it all the way to the end of the Ed Fringe?

M: Just the one sketch made it through. We kind of had in our heads the Edinburgh was pretty set so we were just doing [the Adelaide shows] for own purposes.

J: Yeah and just it turned out “Panthers” didn’t really go well over there they didn’t really take to that so we did this “Inventors” thing at a showcase and it smashed, it went really well, so we just switched them. Get rid of that get in that.

M: Yeah that one went really well. Our producers in Edinburgh also run this showcase show at midday at Pleasance Courtyard, and it’s decent sized, and because she produces us she lets us do it. So we did four last year, and every time we did it it just bombed.

J: Just finding something right for that ten minute spot was really hard.

M: And then we just thought, well, why not do “The Inventors”? Because when we wrote it we thought, this might be good for a showcase piece. And it just went really well, and in the right way. Because we had to fly when people come out, and you just get people going “not for me” and people going “yeah that’s really good”. Because you want people who aren’t going to like it to not like it, you know what I mean?

J: So it has to be kind of, I guess surreal and odd but not too much. Because that’s what we did on the last Edinburgh, I think, we were too weird in the ten minute spots, and it’s just ten minutes of “What the fuck are these guys….” Just too strange, too bizarre. With “Inventors” you can really grab onto it.

H: Tell us a little about Gravity Boots.

M: We were in drama centre at Flinders together, drama centre acting course, and we did this class where we had to make a radio play, and we just started writing stuff together and it just got really weird and funny and from that…

J: Comedy Night! We did stand-up training at uni with Caleb Lewis, and Stephen Sheehan was there that night too: he’s our director now. And we had our [comedy] sets, we did all that in class, and then we were like do you care if we do something in between? Caleb said yeah, go for it. So we did one, read it to him, and he said yeah it’s really good but if you do one you have to do two. So we wrote a couple and it went really well.

M: And from that we asked the director of drama if they mind if we do a show and we just put on like an hour and a half, just all bunch of sketches we wrote, and it was pretty rough but it just went well and it was the first time we actually were Gravity Boots. And from that we got seen by some producers and they asked us if we wanted to do some stuff off Fringe in 2011, when we were in fourth year, so we just did an off-Fringe show up at Gluttony. And we just did a little show there again and they liked that again and then we started doing monthlies and they asked us if we wanted to go to Edinburgh in 2012. We just kind of had a goal and did everything from there since.

H: Last time you had a show there was a leadership spill which might have pulled a bit of focus. What advice do you have for artists not wanting to promote a democratic crisis?

M: You don’t have it…

J: Yeah, do it with somewhere without democracy.

M: Do it in international waters.

J: Go to somewhere with a dictatorship…

M: Yeah where it’s got a really set leadership.

J: Where nothing can happen.

M: Yeah like Saudi Arabia or something.

J: Do they have elections?

M: I don’t know. I don’t want to say anything internationally controversial. But yeah I think I remember that, actually. I think I remember coming out of a show but going, “Rudd’s prime minister again.” “Oh, shit.” Didn’t affect our turn out, actually, we had a really good night.

H: Oh, good.

J: I think it helped us maybe.

M: Yeah everyone got bored of it.

J: Maybe do a show on a night leadership thing…

H: So maybe plan a crisis of democracy?

J: Do a show on that night it normally goes well.

H: Is heckling allowed?

J: Never had ‘em. Isn’t that weird? Never. We’ve never had people fall asleep, people snoring…

M: We’ve had walkouts. Only in Edinburgh, though. Edinburgh’s the only place we’ve had some of the bad stuff. But we don’t care. But we’ve had things like walkouts and people start a standing ovation in the same show. So it’s like, good. It’s pretty subjective.

J: But I don’t know I don’t think heckling…

M: If I could give my preference I would say not allowed, but I don’t think that’s going to stop people. It’s not the kind of show people would want to because they get scared.

J: I think we could cope, though.

H: You have a lot of improv about high concept fart jokes and masochistic robots who deliberately misbehave for the pleasure of getting punished. Where do you get this stuff from?

M: Sometimes it’ll be a concept, and sometimes it’ll be a voice we want to do. I remember with the Androids it was something like, Hey we should do something where we kind of talk like [hollowly] “Hullo, Captain.”

J: That’s pretty much it.

M: Alright, we’ll do something around that. And sometimes it’s what’s a stereotype we can have a go at and do it really weirdly.

H: Have you gone too far with your comedy? What’s the line Gravity Boots doesn’t cross?

J: I think we’ve come fucking close. Hangman was treading the line. Have you seen hangman? Everyone goes away in the intervals and we like to have a surprise when people come back. And it was us hanging from nooses. And we did this whole sketch of just these guys being hung. And the reaction from people coming back in was really mixed. Like people were laughing and other people were not impressed.

M: I heard my brother come in and go, “Jeez, that’s fucking morbid.”

J: Just us hung on stage like that.

M: One lady said that’s the funniest thing she’s seen anywhere, in any show, she came in and just went: “Blerggh-ah!”

H: What’s your favourite Internet-related indulgence?

M: Like pornography?

H: It can be that but it could be like a YouTube video. Go with pornography.

M: Just general watching pornography by myself.

J: I watch porn.

M: It’s not my favourite thing.

J: Fail things are funny. The people falling down the stairs.

M: Yeah they’re good. And the lady doing the grape squashing, and she falls in. That and pornography.

H: What can you tell us about your work on Danger Five?

J: Lot of fun. We just kinda like worked out the characters, got there and went and had a lot of fun.

M: We were just in the one episode, as a couple of speaking side characters, and we had a script and did a read, and we kind of starting to do it a little bit weird and they were pretty happy for us to do it because it’s a pretty loose show. And there are not that many takes of things because they go pretty quick. And we just decided to go with the mindset of if we’re gonna do something we’ll just kind of, if it’s just even a small little bit, we’ll just do the weirdest thing we could think of.

J: We’d do it fucking big, and we’d figure he’ll tell us if he doesn’t want it. So we’d be in the background spitting in books, just going mental. I remember one time I got a note, “Jimmy, can you open your eyes for this scene.” Because I did the whole thing with my eyes shut.

M: One bit we’re told to stare into each other’s eyes, we’re meant to be doing something like painting or something, and we’re just staring into each other’s eyes and it’s a good five minutes before we’re meant to start filming and one of the guys says, “These guys have gone all method on us.” Because we figured if you wanna do something [unusual] you think, “I’ll do it maybe on the second take.” But we were a bit scared they’d go, “We’ve got it,” and move on, that we might not get a second chance. So we thought might as well try to ruin it and if they let you do it they might keep it.

J: [Laughing] Try and ruin it. Try and pull focus. Say we wanna be the fucking mains, look at us in the background.

H: If there was a dessert named Gravity Boots how would you make it?

J: Ah, in a tractor.

M: What do you mean, “in a tractor”?

J: You shake it to mix it…

M: It’s a mango that’s had its seed taken out, and then filled with panna cotta, and then shaken on a tractor, and then covered in–

J: It can only be served by koalas…

M: You have to trust the koalas. And it’s covered in too much cinnamon that it burns your mouth.

J: So that that cinnamon thing happens.

M: Smooth panna cotta covered in powdered cinnamon.

J: The koala definitely takes your wallet.

M: And bites you. And scratches you and doesn’t give you the mango you have to fight it out of its hands. And he’s always trying to offer you gum nuts instead.

J: You can only win if you have hand guns.

M: You have to kill them. So it’s shaken in a tractor, brought to the koala, and the koala comes within a metre of you, and then refuses to give it to you, and starts offering gum nuts, and you have to shoot it dead to get to the mango. Which tastes like cinnamon.

J: Too much.

M: Too much cinnamon and panna cotta.

J: And then you win.

M: And then you win twenty five million dollars.

J: You win the dessert life.

M: You’re on the front cover of Dessert Life Magazine. With “Winners are Grinners”.

J: Holding up the corpse of the koala.

M: Yep.

J: Either that or just some fucking lasagne.

M: Cold lasagne.

J: With sugar on it or some shit.

M: Instead of meat it’s got fish, and instead of sauce it’s got sugar. And it’s not cooked. So it’s uncooked pasta, sugar, fish.

J: I think that’d be it we could go for another twenty minutes if you want.

H: No, no. That’ll do.

 

The Gravity Boots show “Can you believe we’re in a forest?” will be showing at the Tuxedo Cat for the 2014 Adelaide Fringe.