Get Duked! writer-director Ninian Doff shares his ten favorite tripped-out sequences in films.
When Scottish filmmaker Ninian Doff showed his debut feature film Get Duked! at SXSW 2019 (under its original title Boyz in the Wood), it picked up the Midnighters Audience Award, and jumped straight into our top ten premieres from that fest, alongside films like Booksmart, The Art of Self-Defense, Us and Karen Maine’s recent Yes, God, Yes.
Get Duked! sees four high school lads hike into the Scottish Highlands on a mission to win a Duke of Edinburgh Award (a real award, launched decades ago to encourage youth to learn new skills). Three of the boys are there because they’ve gone off the rails, the fourth is a friendless dork who enjoys navigating the outdoors. Things take a weird turn when they come up against a gun-happy aristocrat. And, warns Doff, things get “very bizarre” when the cast take “hallucinogenic rabbit droppings (standard plot I know)”.
With Get Duked! at last coming to screens thanks to Amazon Prime Video, we asked Doff for the ten trippiest, weirdest, drug-fuelled film sequences that have inspired—or warped—him over the years. “I’m sure there’s a million others I’ll be ing for weeks but these are the ones that really stuck in my head.”
“I think the first film I ever saw was Pinocchio. It messed me up! It’s a nightmare! Pure Cronenberg body horror as far as four-year-old me was concerned and I’ve been too scared to ever watch it again. The nightmarish image of terrified children slowly morphing into donkeys after drinking beer and smoking is burned into my brain forever. Thanks, Disney.”
“Mean Streets—okay, not a film you’d immediately expect on this list but when Harvey Keitel gets wasted in the bar and suddenly the angle switches to a camera literally strapped to his body to perfectly visualize his drunken state, right down to the camera collapsing on the floor with him… it’s incredible. I think because it’s also otherwise a serious naturalistic film and then you get this almost music-video visual in a 1973 film. It reminds you of how punk rock Scorsese really is—it’s bold, fourth-wall-breaking and technically genius, too, as that rig must’ve been hell back then with big clunky heavy film cameras. No GoPros back then!”
“This technique got reused brilliantly again to show an intense state of drugged minds in Requiem for a Dream where now, with much smaller and lighter cameras, they could push it even further and do long takes with the camera literally strapped to the cast.”
“Trainspotting was a life-changing film for me. It came out in my early teens and as a Scottish teenager it was (and still is) the coolest, most energetic and unpredictable film I’d seen. Danny Boyle juggles the magically surreal with the depressingly miserable in a way that still feels like a near-impossible tightrope walk. Drug visuals normally use post-production or animation but here the in-camera simplicity of Renton slowly sinking into the carpet grave as he overdoses is so simple and perfect. (Shout-out to the nightmare of ceiling baby in this film too, though.)”
“An obvious choice, but the carpet slowly crawling up the legs of a man on the phone in the lobby is a beauty that stayed with me for years, and though I’ve never taken ether in Vegas, I imagine Terry Gilliam’s visuals in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are very accurate for the experience too.”
“Continuing the focus on accurate, heavy post-production visual trickery, Enter the Void pops into my head. One long extended DMT (and god knows what else) mind-melting journey. I saw it on the front row of a giant cinema screen and Gaspar Noé’s visual heaven and hell never lets up. (Warning: if you do watch this on a big screen, there is an internal angle in a sex scene that you may never fully recover from but, hey, all part of the magic of the movies.)”
“All the films so far have been a bit too serious, let’s lighten it up. The drug sequence in Lord and Miller’s 21 Jump Street is so infectiously daft it had to make the list. The eyebrow-moustache animation speaks to me on a deep level.”
“On the total other side of the scale let’s include Ari Aster’s Midsommar, which reminds me why, despite making such a tripped-out film myself, I’m actually quite terrified of drugs and loss of control. There’s a beautiful visual of grass growing on hands before it all goes a bit wrong… This film is the equivalent of eating a pot brownie at a festival and thinking it’s wonderful and pretty for the first twenty minutes and then wondering why you’re just getting higher and higher and oh god when will it stop oh god this isn’t fun now and oh god why am I dressed as a bear now oh god oh god. Makes me feel a bit anxious is what I’m saying.”
“Ben Wheatley’s film A Field in England was an exercise to prove to himself that he still could shoot a film in a week on a low budget (spoiler: he could). Deranged magic-mushroom hallucinations are at the heart of it and simply by using clever mirrored images, close-ups shot on a toy camera lens and nausea-inducing fast edits of dual angles of the same portrait shot, he manages to up the visual scale of what literally is a few blokes in a field, to become a deranged, seventeenth-century drug movie. A testament to how editing and sound design can make the simple feel epic.”
“The Holy Mountain—let’s end on this. Okay, ittedly hard to say what’s a trip in this film and what’s just a normal Wednesday afternoon in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s brain, but pretty much every frame of this film fits the bill for this list. Beautiful, bonkers, impenetrable, hairy magic.”
‘Get Duked!’ is out August 28 worldwide on Amazon Prime Video.
