Why this ‘unhinged’ killer gnome comedy took 10 years to bring to life

It’s been more than a year since I was greeted by an array of cheery garden gnomes at Melbourne Showgrounds, a few steps down from where they film MasterChef, and I’ve been patiently waiting for them to come to life in a murderous rampage ever since. (Well, all of them except the giant Queen Elizabeth II gnome. As Gnomes producer Richard Kelly jokingly told me on set when I visited, she actually doesn’t kill anyone – “out of respect”.)

But for the production team behind this “unhinged” new horror-comedy which just dropped on Stan*, the wait for on-screen carnage has been more than a decade.

“Gnomes is a big swing,” Kelly says. “You know, ‘killer garden gnomes’ is a fun pitch, and everyone goes, ‘Yeah, that’s fantastic’ … But it’s an ambitious project. It’s the kind of project that Australia doesn’t normally make.”

“It is definitely one of the craziest shows I’ve worked on,” says Megan Smart (Class of 07, Black Snow), one of the series’ stars. “But it’s good crazy! … When I first read the scripts, I was laughing out loud. I thought it was so funny, and so unlike anything we’ve done in Australia.”

Set in the fictional small town of Nompton, Gnomes follows the local police department in its attempts to save the community when an ancient “gnome queen”, last weaponised in WWII, awakens all the lawn ornaments in the midst of Nompton’s inaugural “Gnome-a-Palooza” festival. That sentence should give you a sense of the silliness. Never mind the fact that the show opens with an eyepatch-wearing Nazi who is seeking world domination but draws the line at “slut-shaming”.

“I wrote these scripts with my husband [Paul Verhoeven], and a lot of our days were spent just trying to make each other laugh,” says writer Tegan Higginbotham, who also stars in the series. She’s been on board with the project since the start, first developing it as a web series with Joel Cohn (The Mirror), who came up with the concept in 2016.

“When we were initially developing it, Stranger Things had just had its moment – that’s how long ago it was – and everything that was being pitched was like ‘Stranger Things meets this, Stranger Things meets that’. I didn’t allow myself to watch it because I didn’t want [Gnomes, another ’80s-influenced show about supernatural forces in a small town] to become a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.”

Billed as “Hot Fuzz meets Gremlins”, however, it is a show that wears some references on its sleeve.

Megan Smart, who plays straight-laced senior constable Ellie McKay alongside her former flame Arnold Kipps (Asa Butterfield, Sex Education), says the former was a crucial influence in setting the tone. She watched the film, a 2007 cop comedy written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, on the flight from London to Melbourne just hours after getting the part.

“The directors did a really good job of making sure everyone was in the same world, and giving that same brand of comedy,” she says.

“I think I was the worst at breaking, though. I’m so bad at keeping a straight face, and it was such a funny shoot. There were times when I had to leave the scene because I was laughing so hard and ruining it.”

Gremlins was much more of a reference point for the gnomes themselves – from the funny little noises they make to the way they were crafted. Any gnome that has close interaction with someone on the cast is a puppet, operated by an on-set puppetry unit.

“We always knew that we wanted the show to have that kind of analogue feel,” Kelly says. “Obviously, [Gremlins] was made in the ’80s before digital effects were as much of a thing. But [having a] practical puppet brings a tactile kind of feeling. You’ve got something there for the actors to react with.”

Crucially, however, Kelly had never worked with puppetry before: “Down the track, we realised, ‘Oh, when you want to shoot five seconds of footage with a puppet, that will probably take you half a day!’

“I think Darren Gilshenan [who plays Nompton’s clueless mayor] spent about three days fighting a pirate gnome in a hallway.”

“We found a way to make it all work, and the result was great … But it was a really challenging show.”

And that’s before you even get to the visual effects. After shooting wrapped, the show took another year to come to life in post-production with more gnomes added via VFX from 3D scans of real puppets.

“There are nearly 700 visual effects shots in the show, which is a huge number for a six by half-hour comedy,” Kelly says. When he told the post-production team they had 677 shots to work on, he recalls them saying “Oh, so you’re making Mad Max: Fury Road?”

For the record, that film had more than 2000 VFX shots, but it also had a budget of $US150 million ($215 million).

“[Gnomes] is very technically ambitious, and that technical ambition comes at a high price point,” Kelly explains. “We knew that in Australia, we had this really robust financial partner in Stan. We knew that we could access Screen Australia finance, potentially state agency support and the offset. But we also knew we were going to need some really muscular international partners on board in order to get the budget to where it needed to be.”

That explains a few names you’ll see in the show’s intro credits. The series is co-produced by LA studio Happy Accidents, which has landed global distribution deals with Disney+ in the UK and Ireland. And the series will also be distributed in Germany through Network Movie, a subsidiary of public broadcaster ZTF. (Yes, they’re cool with the Nazi stuff).

With the show always eyeing off international markets, it was also necessary to have an international star in the lead. And the series’ visual identity is deliberately muddled too. While Nompton is very much set in Australia, the police cars and uniforms look much more American.

Tegan Higginbotham says that “universal feel” had been deliberate since the very beginning: “We wanted this to be your town and every town”. But it’s also indicative of a broader trend.

“I think we’re seeing less of ‘the Australian industry, the American industry, the British industry’ – they’re all becoming one industry,” Smart adds. “It’s not about just streaming it here. It’s going to sell everywhere, and I think that’s a wonderful thing. Our stories are getting more international.”

That global reach undeniably helps a kooky show like this find a viable audience. Especially coming off the back of Widow’s Bay, another proudly bonkers comedy-horror, that just swept the Emmys. But Kelly says it’s still a difficult task to get projects like this off the ground.

While horror is booming on the big screen, Kelly says, “if anything, we’ve seen the market for streaming contract a little. It’s possibly even a little more risk-averse than even it used to be.”

There are no current plans for a second season of Gnomes, but it’s something the creative team is open to.

“I grew up admiring the Sarah Connors [Terminator] and the Ellen Ripleys [Alien] of the world,” Higginbotham says. “And there was one day where Matt [Okine] and I were running around with shotguns and having debris thrown at us, and I was like, ‘this is the greatest thing that ever happened’.

“We’re comedians, so we always get to play. We get to make fun television shows. But do you get to dress up as action heroes? No, you don’t get to do that. It was so exciting.”

Gnomes is streaming on Stan now.

*Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.

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