How some of Chicken Run’s best nuggets were written in a west Cork cottage
THE renowned scriptwriter behind the long-awaited Chicken Run sequel has revealed how his Irish background inspired some of the characters in the much-loved movie.
John O’Farrell, who has also worked on TV series such as Spitting Image and Have I Got News For You, said he got his comic skills from his father, who grew up in Galway.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘My dad was where I got my comedy from and his Irish sense of humour has been passed down. [In the film] the chickens are able to find comedy in the middle of all this trouble, these chickens are going to be executed and they’re still able to make gags.
‘I think there’s something there in the way that the Irish brought humour to their situation, and I think that’s come through in the culture that has affected me.’
For Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget, which was released on Netflix last week, O’Farrell sent scripts from a cottage in west Cork to co-writer Karey Kirkpatrick over in Los Angeles.
‘I actually spent some time writing scenes in a cottage in west Cork when I was over there last summer,’ O’Farrell said. ‘I was sending those over to LA from a place on the Sheep’s Head Peninsula so some of the writing of the movie did happen in Ireland.
‘In the original Chicken Run there were actually two Irish pigeons who would be watching and taking the mickey out of the chickens. In this film we’ve got a scouse chicken, and I always think scouse humour is very influenced by the Irish.’
Dawn Of The Nugget – whose star-studded cast includes Thandiwe Newton (Crash, Mission Impossible), Bella Ramsey (Game Of Thrones, The Last Of Us) and Zachary Levi (Shazam!) – flips the script of the original Chicken Run, with the protagonists hatching a plan to free other chickens from a poultry farm instead of escaping themselves.
‘It’s like Mission Impossible with chickens,’ O’Farrell said. ‘We’ve twisted it on its head and done a heist movie.’
O’Farrell said working on the 2000 original was a ‘life-changing experience’ but there was a kind of ‘magic’ about the sequel.
‘It was a life-changing experience for me because from that I got Mrs Doubtfire in the West End and a Live Aid musical,’ he said. ‘It’s weird because we wrote [the sequel] a long time ago, before lockdown, and now everyone is saying “oh look it’s your film” and I’m thinking, “I remember that”.
‘It’s really satisfying because you pass it over to animating directors and voice people and they bring the whole thing to life so there’s some magic involved in it.’
O’Farrell splits his time between writing West End musicals, working on novels and co-hosting the satirical podcast We Are History. But he said writing gags for Dawn Of The Nugget was a unique challenge.
‘It’s a week’s work with animation [to tweak the script] so you’ve got to lock the script completely,’ O’Farrell said. ‘You can’t try things out, so it’s got to be a really tight script. It’s a fascinating and very disciplined medium compared with, for example, Spitting Image, where we were just chucking stuff at the wall and seeing if it stuck.
‘There are many more scenes in the second film where humans and chickens are in the same shot and suddenly you’re writing this scene and [the production team] are saying “that’s tens of thousands of pounds”.’
While reviews for the sequel have been mixed, O’Farrell would not be drawn on whether he thinks it tops the original.
‘The love has grown for the first film over the past two decades,’ he said. ‘I think they’re both great films. What was great about the first film was how original and fresh it was.
‘[The second film] is a great story with great jokes and great characters so I’m proud of what we’ve written and how it’s been realised.’