‘When it was screened in America, people hated it so much they wanted to burn the cinema down’
We’d done Kevin and Perry on Harry Enfield and Chums and thought it would be fun to make a Wayne’s World-y thing while we still had the impetus of the TV programme. I went on holiday and Dave Cummings, who’d written for Harry Enfield and Chums, did the first draft. I came back and took over. A month later, it was all happening. It was really quick.
We were given a few million to shoot over 12 days in Ibiza. The nightclub scenes were all filmed in one day and night at Amnesia. The scene in which Kevin and Perry get puked on by some clubbers was filmed in the afternoon. We invented the Inbetweeners basically! They couldn’t shut the club in the evening, so the crowd weren’t extras. They were actual clubbers, having a good night, and the DJs were actually DJing. I said to DJs Seb Fontaine and Roger Sanchez: “Do you mind if I just come and interrupt your set?”
When I was that age, it was punk. We’d go and see the Clash and the Pistols. They’d be horrible to us and we’d go: “Brilliant!” I once asked Pistols drummer Paul Cook: “Can you write something funny on my trousers?” So he wrote: “Something funny.” Eyeball Paul, the character played by Rhys Ifans, is our equivalent: the nastier he is to to us, the more we like him.
