Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Journey
Richard Ayoade
[Faber & Faber]
To include yourself, after just two films, in Faber’s Director on Director series (in such august company as Robert Altman and Martin Scorcese) takes big balls. Don’t get me wrong, Richard Ayoade’s Submarine and The Double are terrific films, but somehow it feels like he needs the concept behind the series explained a second time. In those previous books it’s normal for the filmmaker to cast mature reflection on their life’s work. However, here Ayoade appears to field questions literally from himself, in a kind of bizarre shadow-interview, managing somehow to parse his personality and defy the laws of physics. And in one sordid scene he takes the title Ayoade on Ayoade further than anyone thought possible or at all pleasant to think about.
What does emerge over the course of the book, aside from a rather unseemly obsession with Michael Fassbender in Shame, is a sense of the true Ayoade: smug and arrogant, a really knowing little twerp (not to be confused with the other Ayoade, who genuinely seems like a nice bloke). Furthermore his taste in film is almost laughably bad, favouring claptrap like Herbie Goes Bananas – certainly no From Russia with Love, you’ll agree. This is a satisfactory account of an artist’s oeuvre but lacks the panache that made veteran broadcaster Alan Partridge’s showbiz memoir I, Partridge such an industry standard.
Words: Eoin Tierney
