Here’s A Filum They Hope Will Kill ’em In The Aisles
The Sydney Morning Herald – 19th November, 2011
By Karl Quinn
Gina Riley sports her unmistakeable Kim pout alongside British co-star Richard E. Grant on the set of The Kath & Kim Filum at Montsalvat.
It’s a beautiful day at Montsalvat, but rain is on the way, so Rick McKenna, executive producer of The Kath & Kim Filum, is juggling things to beat the weather. Trouble is, there’s a lot more things to juggle than in his usual realm, television.
“I’m having to come to terms with the Rubik’s cube of filmmaking,” says McKenna, whose wife, Gina Riley, is at this very moment into her second hour of lying in a bed in the Great Hall – which doubles as a room in a castle in Italy – for a scene in which her character, Kim, says not a word.
“In TV, you can make little decisions without it really affecting anything,” McKenna says. “But the size of the machine here, if you make one small decision you drive everyone bonkers.”
RIGHT: The foxy ladies in the TV series.
But a little craziness is a small price to pay if the foxy ladies from Fountain Gate can successfully leap from small screen to big.
McKenna, Riley and Jane Turner, who plays Kath Day-Knight, are so convinced they can they have put the lion’s share of the money into the movie.
“Is it a gamble?” McKenna asks. “Absolutely. But it’s a considered one.”
The last fresh material from the team was in 2007, but the website still attracts 30,000 unique visitors a month. Among the show’s fans is actor Richard E. Grant, known on set simply as “REG”, who was offered a part after meeting McKenna at the launch of Bill Granger’s restaurant in London.
“I play the page who works for the king of Papilloma, this invented principality on the bottom of Italy,” he says.
Magda Szubanski’s Sharon falls for him. “And the more disdainful and cruel my character is to her, the more she interprets it as a sign of true love. She’s hilarious.”
Is it a class comedy? “In a way I think it is,” Grant says in his most impeccably plummy voice. But, he adds, “the suburban foxy ladies win out, at all costs”.
Filming is due to wrap next week, and the movie should be released in the middle of 2012.
