Digital Spy interview Chris Lilley - Summer Heights High is being repeated on BBC Three, the DVD is in shops now, and the soundtrack featuring the brilliant "Naughty Girl" is available to download now (click here)
Whether it was as the camp, ego-maniac, wannabe popstar Mr G, bitchy school bully Ja'mie or foul-mouthed, genital-drawing Tongan Jonah, Chris Lilley provided a large chunk of the funniest TV moments of 2008. We gave the Australian comic behind Summer Heights High and The Nominees a call to ask about the inspiration for his characters and find out what future projects he has in store.
Are you surprised that Summer Heights High translated so well to the UK and America?
"I'm so glad it has, but it was never the intention. It was always intended to be just a little Australian show. I'd done a show previously and I always thought, 'This will the show everyone hates'. I thought everyone would say, 'This isn't as good as the first one'. Somehow in Australia it just took off. It had twice as many people as watched the last one. It's been so big in Australia it's freaked me out."
Is it true you turned down the offer of an American remake?
"Oh yeah. They wanted to do that with the previous show as well. They were really persistent and really pushy about it and I couldn't think of anything worse. Not necessarily there being an American version, but just having someone else doing it and remaking it is a weird idea to me. It's not like there was just a script and then we made it. A lot of it was improvised and rewritten during the editing. It would be weird to copy that."
The characters are always so well developed, down to very small physical ticks. How long do you spend creating them?
"I spend a lot of time writing and I spend a lot of that time researching and getting out into the environment that the characters would be in. I spent a lot of time with Pacific Islander boys, just hanging with them in schools, to develop Jonah. I don’t really rehearse anything, so when it comes to playing them I try to make sure I know them well enough that it just happens. It's weird on the first day of shooting because they just come alive. Usually by the second day they are realistic."
Read the full interview here
