Well known for his work as the script editor on Red Dwarf (the new series of which is out next year), Miranda, and The IT Crowd, Andrew Ellard is Graham Linehan and Doug Naylor’s go-to collaborator for comedy. He recently wrote AfterDeath, which won the Nocturna Film Festival Dark Visions award and more. “AfterDeath is a story where five characters wake up dead and have to figure how to solve that particular problem,” Andrew begins. “The director of the movie will tell you that they were inspired by No Exit, the Jean-Paul Sartre play, where we get the phrase ‘Hell is other people’. I was drawn in by the challenges of writing something that was due to be contained in a very small environment, and fascinated by questions of how we deal with religion and how we feel about a set of rules we allow to be imposed on ourselves.”
I wanted to find out more about his writing process: “With movies, I start with the big premise question and work outwards, whereas for comedy I tend to start with characters and then build an environment around them that gives them the best chance to do funny and interesting things.” Andrew had a delightful way of making it all sound so easy, I wanted to find out what mistakes people often made in comedy: “What sticks out more than anything is passive protagonists; I’ve seen an awful lot of first time writers in particular write from personal experience, but it means the main character if often just them, which is fine, but of course they think they’re right about things. So they write a main character whose life would be perfect, if it wasn’t surrounded by idiots. The truth is in programmes like Seinfeld the characters are absolutely the cause of their own downfalls. I often think – and I’ve nicked this from Graham Linehan, he did it first – if you take a filter off people it’s going to give you some good stories.”
words LUKE OWAIN BOULT