Peter Cattaneo, director
Film4 and Miramax passed on The Full Monty because they thought it was too similar to Brassed Off. Then, after our film became a huge hit, Harvey Weinstein reportedly said: “I had two films about British unemployed guys who put on a show. In one of them, they took their clothes off – the others blew trumpets. And I chose the fucking trumpets.” Fox Searchlight ended up financing it very low-budget, for almost £3m.
They wanted to do it quickly. I gave them the script – by Simon Beaufoy, who later wrote Slumdog Millionaire – at Sundance in January 1996 and we were shooting it by April. I was expecting to have to do a big sell on Robert Carlyle and Tom Wilkinson, but they said cast whoever you want. Robert felt like the right choice for Gary, the former Sheffield steelworker trying to save his relationship with his son. I just trusted he could do the humour side of things. My main concern was differentiating everyone. I see so many ensemble films and I’m like: “Which one was that?” I wanted each one to pop on the poster: the thin one with red hair, the little round one…
We shot the final stripping sequence in one day, halfway through the schedule. Had we left it for the end it would have become A Thing, making everyone tense. Robert – after talking to the guys – had specified I could only do one take of them naked. In the script, the final reveal was written as a full-frontal naked star jump. I knew we wouldn’t be able to show any genitals, so I tried to be clever: I thought about shooting it low from the crowd, with hands going up in the air to cover them. But it was too hard to pull off spontaneously. Then I realised I should just shoot in from the back, with just a row of bums.
Robert lost faith in the film – I don’t know why. He recently said Fox Searchlight took it away from me in the editing room, but it’s not true. It was prearranged that [producer] Uberto Pasolini should do his own cut. Fox had a weird way of releasing it, though, which was in America first and then here. They decided the UK premiere would be in Sheffield, with an afterparty at the Leadmill, with fish and chips as the nibbles. We thought: “Please don’t try to be all northern.”
It made $258m worldwide, the 10th biggest film that year. I realised what an enormous phenomenon it had become when Prince Charles was on the front of the Daily Mail doing the dole queue dance. It gave the British film industry a shot of confidence. A lot of films got greenlit that shouldn’t have done in the hope they might be the next Full Monty – I probably made a couple of them myself.
Hugo Speer, actor
I’d been in Brighton for a couple of years, hanging around with people playing drums under the pier. I thought: this isn’t what I went to drama school for. I moved to London and The Full Monty was the first job I got. It was a beautiful script: very funny, but with that pathos that is very difficult to get right. Being from Harrogate, I was acutely aware of the deindustrialisation in the north, that legacy of whole communities having their hearts ripped out.
I did it running on pure enthusiasm. We were all staying in a budget hotel in Brook Hill, Sheffield, hitting the bar after shooting, getting about four hours sleep a night. All six of us had one trailer to change in. We’d be hopping up and down on one leg trying to put a pair of socks on, crashing into each other. The makeup team did all our intimate waxing and shaving. The camaraderie on screen was genuine.
The climactic scene was nuts. It was in a very cold working men’s club, starting at about midday. The makeup and costume girls knew how we were feeling, so they were thrusting glasses of alcohol into our hands between takes. The extras had smuggled in booze, too. They weren’t aware we were going to go all the way – that was a bit of smarts on the producers’ part, so it was a completely natural reaction they got at the end. I genuinely enjoyed myself: how often does that sort of thing happen in your life?
The film’s success snowballed incredibly quickly. Princess Diana died two days after it was released, which gave the film an enormous boost: people needed cheering up. It was like taking my first acid trip – the world around you changes, you don’t fundamentally alter. Because I was playing this kind of hunky-funky guy, introduced as “The lunchbox has landed”, I got a lot more attention from girls. I wasn’t going to cry into my beer about it. All the Hollywood stuff was quite ridiculous. Paul Barber and I turned up at an Oscars party and Burt Reynolds answered the door and put us both in a headlock, one under each arm: “I love you guys!”
Critics generally said it was pleasant enough, but the paying public were the ones who took it to their hearts. It’s like a long-lost friend. It’s invariably on a channel somewhere. When it is, I’ll get a text from a friend saying: “I can see your bottom!”
