“The script was sent to me by Jerzy Skolimowski, a personal hero of mine responsible for so many great films”, director Jan Komasa told Zavvi. “This was back when I was Oscar campaigning for my earlier film Corpus Christi, but he doesn’t take no for an answer if he wants to meet with you, he’s a former boxer so he has that persistence.
“I thought he was sending me this script because he wanted to make it himself, and because it dealt with young people and contemporary themes like my films had done, he wanted some feedback. It blew me away, and the next day he said “great - you’ve just found your next film!”
“It was a Polish film set in Warsaw in that iteration, and the satire was more specifically Polish in how it talked about class diversification, with people getting richer and staying in the country rather than emigrating. It was more of a social commentary than the film is now, and I felt that we needed to change the language, so we spoke to Jerzy’s long-time producer Jeremy Thomas, who loved it but felt it needed to be transformed to feel more British.
“We hired Naqqash Khalid, a great scriptwriter from Manchester, who rewrote it with this accurate Mancunian slang – and then we got money from Yorkshire to film there, so we moved a bit further East, and that’s where the story ended up!”
Anson Boon stars as Tommy, a teenage criminal who we’re introduced to on a night out in Leeds, posting every fight, shag, and line of drugs snorted onto his social media stories. Then Chris (Stephen Graham) comes along; a mild-mannered, upper-class man who sees the potential to rehabilitate the badly behaved boy – so naturally, he kidnaps him and keeps him chained in his basement.
The provocative thriller has shades of A Clockwork Orange in its dark humour and willingness to explore the ethics and limits of rehabilitation, so it’s a surprise that such a thorny, morally complicated story originated from a first-time screenwriter, Bartek Bartosik.
“He worked as a software engineer for a huge data company but felt chained to his computer after eight years there”, Komasa explained. “His friends wanted to cheer him up as they were worried he was falling into a depression, so they decided to get him a guidebook on how to write a movie script to help focus him, and he ended up writing this in a week.”
It goes without saying that the finished film strays heavily from that original draft, which showed huge potential – but also had some poorly conceived cliches that Komasa knew needed to be cut out.
“In the early script, there were fragments where the main character sees things that aren’t there; people would glitch and suddenly disappear after entering the room, for example. I didn’t question it, as I just assumed it was a device showing that he was detoxicating from his drug intake in the basement, but I didn’t feel it was working.
“When I brought it up, I said that we didn’t need the device as we could work with actors to show going cold turkey in a more authentic way, like Ewan McGregor’s beautiful portrayal of addiction and detoxification in Trainspotting. And then, Bartek told me this wasn’t him coming clean, this was a device revealing it was all a Shutter Island style dream, everything had been a dream since he was hit by Chris’s car at the start.
“I’d read it completely differently, but after that conversation the idea was dropped and everything became real. We found new ways of incorporating a dreamlike weirdness, like the family gathering round to watch Tommy’s TikToks on this old-fashioned 1970s TV – I didn’t want the movie to have a revelation that what we’re seeing wasn’t true, but I did want to incorporate a surreality”.
The finished script is one likely to generate fierce debate, hopping between genres as it prods the audience with deliberately provocative subject matter. For Komasa, making viewers confront the uncomfortable is a big part of what cinema is about.
“Some people aren’t comfortable with the concept of kidnapping a kid and making them better against their will – it's textbook Stockholm Syndrome, but here it’s provocative because it plays out almost like a love letter to Stockholm Syndrome and the tyranny of his captor! What makes a great film to me is using that two-hour window to nudge the audience and make them question their own feelings.
“It’s a movie about an abusive situation and you shouldn’t laugh, but you do, and you find the relationship between captor and captive growing sweeter. I approached the film like a chef wanting to create a weird new taste, because surprise is a key part of any entertainer’s job; audiences like what they know, but my goal is to make them like what they don’t, and this is a movie which explores unknown lands in our brains and sensitivities.
“I want people to love this family like their own, because every family has dark secrets – your love doesn’t justify their actions, right? I’ve spoken to people who were touched and heartbroken by this film, and others who were appalled by the subject matter; this is a Rorschach test in how an audience understands the extremes of human nature.”
This is naturally where my mind drifted back to A Clockwork Orange. Naturally, Komasa is aware of the similarities, but put that film to the back of his mind during production.
“You don’t step into Kubrick’s shoes lightly! The rehabilitation is a huge part of both stories, and everything in cinema is post-Kubrick – he's a director who exists in every filmmaker’s brain and DNA.
“My way in was using this story to explore the weird and quirky nature of love, which led me towards Phantom Thread as an influence. Sometimes you must poison someone, other times you must kidnap them, but it’s all about showing that you care for somebody deeply enough to do that...”
The Good Boy is a deeply strange film, one that no two viewers will view in the same light. But Komasa is sure of one thing: British audiences will appreciate the comedy in a way few others will.
“Poles and Brits have the same dark sense of humour where we’re okay with joking about the grey areas of life whilst sipping a cup of tea, in a way other nations find off putting. We’re easily connected that way, whereas others would hand wring and virtue signal and tell you that you shouldn’t side with a perpetrator, let alone laugh at their crimes...”
