They thought I was a little bit strange.” Richard Ayoade is best known for playing somebody a little bit strange, the oddball computer wizard Moss, in Channel 4’s The IT Crowd. But here he’s recalling the time he was working for Warp Films, directing music promos for bands such as Arctic Monkeys, when, out of the blue, one of the producers handed him a novel. It was Submarine, the much-loved coming-of-age tale by Joe Dunthorne. “And they said they thought of me as the director,” Ayoade says. “They thought I was like the character in the book, that I was a strange egg.”
A tall, tidy and slender man, with superb posture, Ayoade is not very egg-like, and, as it transpires during the course of our conversation, not particularly strange, although, in truth, he is not a relaxed interviewee — “I am very bad at giving succinct or good answers.” This in no way seems occasioned by social discomfiture. It’s more a matter of how he downloads the ideas out of his head. “In interviews, saying things in a certain order seems to privilege one thought over another, and really they tend to be much more muddled than that,” he says.
Even though he’d no doubt deny it, the 33-year-old is fast becoming a leading light of British big-screen comedy. Submarine, his debut feature as a director, is a perceptive, beautifully shot and highly amusing insight into adolescence that avoids the usual conventions: the central character, Oliver, is, on occasion, rather mean-spirited and consistently self-absorbed. It’s been a hit on the film-festival circuit, with high-profile screenings at London, Sundance and Toronto. The Hollywood magnate Harvey Weinstein outbid three other suitors to acquire the film.
“Often writers are talking about themselves and are quite kind to the protagonist,” Ayoade says. “But in Submarine, I like it that Oliver joined in [with the bullying], although in a very weak way.”
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Before The IT Crowd, Ayoade appeared on television in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (which he also co-created and directed), the satirical media-industry sitcom Nathan Barley, and Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding’s surreal The Mighty Boosh, then the bizarre Paul King film Bunny and the Bull. He is a very intelligent man. Growing up in Ipswich, he proved a bookish youngster, winning a scholarship to the independent St Joseph’s College. One can almost hear his brain rapidly processing considered answers: he is someone who thinks about what he says, rather than just saying what he thinks.
His love of cinema — “I’m obsessed with the director Paul Thomas Anderson,” he concedes; Eric Rohmer, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Truffaut and Scorsese also crop up in our conversation — came in his midteens. His father, an accomplished mathematician and engineer, worked for a while fixing television sets and video recorders, “so I had them in my room and watched a lot of videos. It was the French new wave that I first got into. Before that it was Back to the Future. And I was more of a reader, really, when I was young. I wasn’t like Scorsese, discovering neorealism at the age of six. I was relatively late to begin understanding the narrative of films. I was writing things, though, for other people to perform live”.
His creative writing on occasion took precedence over his studies, although he still received a two-E offer from Cambridge to study law. “My contribution to law has not been a tremendous one,” he says, wryly, “although in an academic environment I can do a good interview, because you are talking about things other than yourself. I did fine in my exams.” I ask how well he did. His eyes widen. “It is just awful to say what you got in your results,” he says. “It’s the most disgusting thing.”
An aversion to hubris laces Ayoade’s conversation, further inflaming his natural reluctance to indulge in self-promotion, though you can’t fault his confidence. On entering Cambridge, he enrolled in Footlights, serving as president in his final year and winning the Martin Steele Prize for his production skills. He then scooped the Perrier Award in 2001, for co-writing the comedy-horror show Garth Marenghi’s Netherhead. As a music video director, he has shot promos for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Super Furry Animals, Kasabian and Vampire Weekend and also directed the feature-length concert film Arctic Monkeys at the Apollo, in 2008.
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“I wanted to be [the Stones Roses guitarist] John Squire until about a week ago,” he says. “I think of directing music videos as an end in itself, hopefully,” he continues. “Anything that feels like it is laying a path for something else, like feature-film directing, can feel hubristic. Really, you don’t know whether you will make another music video after the first one.”
Ayoade’s modesty stems, in part, from his upbringing. He is the son of a Norwegian mother and a Nigerian father, who met in England before working in Africa and then returning to settle in Suffolk. “My mum had a chocolate shop. She’s got very good taste, and it was a very nice shop.” He really was a kid in a candy store. “Though not Augustus Gloop, stuffing my face with pralines,” he counters. “My dad’s a very clever man. He lectured in Germany, and in England he wrote about geometry. He was never one to talk about himself. For him, it’s very impolite to say anything you’ve done is of worth. Also, it’s somewhat irrelevant. I couldn’t have asked for better parents.”
His experience at school was benign, although he is aghast when I inquire whether he found his first love in the classroom, as Oliver does in Submarine. “No,” he states firmly. “Our school was all boys until the sixth form, when there was about a 3% intake of girls. I don’t know how great it was for them, encountering an advanced level of immaturity on a daily basis.”
Certainly, Submarine subscribes to the view that girls generally mature faster than boys, and in the main character of Oliver (played by Craig Roberts), Ayoade has a complicated and unlikely schoolboy hero. Ayoade adapted Dunthorne’s novel, as well as directing, shaping the author’s story of a boy who battles to save his mother (Sally Hawkins) from the predatory advances of a randy mystic (Paddy Considine), while struggling to empathise with his depressed father (Noah Taylor) and trying to lure his newfound girlfriend (Yasmin Paige) into the sack. His tools for the job include an impressive vocabulary and near-total, yet profoundly misplaced, self-belief.
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“I always liked coming-of-age films, and TV about adolescence. There are a few great European ones in the 1960s, but adolescence seems to be more an American concern than an English concern.” He cites as influences the likes of The Graduate and Harold & Maude, although also admits to a liking for Dawson’s Creek.
His next project is a screen adaptation of the Dostoevsky novella The Double, in which a clerk comes across his doppelgänger, who slowly absorbs his identity. “To me, the idea of someone appearing exactly like you and it not bothering anyone else is funny,” he says. “What a funny and humiliating thing to have happen.” At least this time, the producers haven’t said the character reminds them of Ayoade. That would be a little bit strange.
Submarine opens on Friday