Hungover at a wedding reception, Tom Stourton started to panic.
Stourton had been close with the newlyweds at university, but it’d been years since they’d spent much time together. As the wedding toasts began, Stourton started to dread that something awful was about to happen.
“I got into a panic, basically, that I’d been invited as a joke,” says the star of the darkly comedic new English film “All My Friends Hate Me.” “I was convinced that the groom was going to turn to everyone and say, ‘And the funniest thing of all is that Tom thought we actually wanted him to come to the wedding.”
Of course, that didn’t happen, and Stourton was left to consider whether he was “a deeply narcissistic person.”
He was also left with an idea.
“It felt like a funny setup, or an interesting one,” Stourton says. “Sort of playing with those inherent kinds of horror stakes that happen when you’re stuck in your head like that, and pairing that with a comedy.
“Just a guy who’s in a situation that should be great fun, but there’s a perceived hostility that’s wrong-footing him, and he’s tying himself in knots.”
Stourton called Tom Palmer, his partner in the comedy duo Totally Tom and told him what happened.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, what a frightening idea, you poor thing, Tom. That’s like the most dystopian concept ever,’” Palmer says. “But then equally, ‘Wow, you are seriously narcissistic, Tom. It’s your friends’ wedding and you’re constructing this narrative all about you.’”
“All My Friends Hate Me,” which Palmer produced and cowrote with Stourton, is fueled by that mix of anxiety and self-absorption. In it, Stourton plays Pete, who’s invited for a birthday weekend with friends from university, only to arrive and find that things aren’t the way he imagined they’d be. His friends seem different and a creeping paranoia washes over him.
“Every scene, it was like, How can this go wrong for him, and what’s the funniest way to humiliate this man?” Stourton says of the initial drafts of the screenplay.
“We were just chasing that feeling, unsettled, between something being just a harmless joke or literally a deep, deep conspiracy against you,” Palmer says.
A social anxiety thriller
“All My Friends Hate Me’ is particularly good when it’s exploring the insecurities of its protagonist and his neediness.
Stourton says he’s not entirely sure how much that’s due to the character Pete being a millennial in the age of social media or how much it’s just being alive today.
“It’s this sort of identity crisis that maybe is linked in part to social media,” Stourton says. “I guess social media represents that way of projecting a version of yourself, and it not necessarily being accurate.
“Also, it feels like this is a sort of time when there is a lot more existential angst,” he says. “Is it an illusion that we’re more self-absorbed, or is it just because we sort of talk about it more?”
Palmer says he thinks it might just be human nature.
“After filming, I stumbled across this book that had a letter from fourth-century China,” he says. “It’s a dinner guest kind of apologizing for something they may or may not have said, that may or may not have offended the host of the dinner party.
“It literally reads like a paranoid text that I might have sent after a wedding where I’m like, ‘Did I say something that you were annoyed about?’” Palmer says.
“That made me think maybe it is something that’s existed for as long as time.”
Pete comes to life
Writing the screenplay went swiftly, at least until the duo realized they didn’t know how it should end.
“It does make sense to start writing when you at least have a vague idea of what the end is,” Stourton says. “Because it really started to slow down when we realized we’d set all these hares running and all this intrigue and this atmosphere – now you have to end it, and what’s going to be satisfying?”
One ending tried to solve the social anxiety mystery in which Pete finds himself suspicious of his friends’ motives, but it felt too easy, like the predictable ending to a murder mystery, Palmer says.
“You lost that feeling of tension and paranoia,” he says. “The challenge became how do we have people leaving the cinema still feeling unsettled, and having conversations about their interpretations. Was it a joke? Was it real?”
Director Andrew Gaynord, who had worked with Palmer and Stourton on the BBC 3 comedy series “Live at the Electric,” helped transform the script from something that felt very theatrical into a visual story.
He also helped the duo, both of whom come from upper-crust British families – they first met as students at Eton – finetune the characterizations of Pete and his posh friends.
“I would sometimes say to Tom, ‘You’ve just done something so brilliant and vulnerable and kind of lovable, but we kind of also need to bring out some of the slightly prattish elements of Pete as well,’” Palmer says.
Gaynord added his own subtle interpretations to the characters as well, both say.
“We’re kind of from that world a bit – and we’re a little bit ashamed of it – of like privilege and university and whatever,” Palmer says. “Andrew is not at all and was able to give a lot of confidence in what characters were funny.”
He and Stourton were concerned that viewers would hate the character of Archie, who they worried was too offensive in his spoiled excesses. Gaynord assured them that Archie was just fine.
“He was like, ‘No, no, don’t worry, people will find him funny because he’s just an idiot, in fact,’” Palmer says. “You watch it in a cinema and he’s actually this light relief. People seem to want him even though on paper he’s just totally despicable.”
A similar, if slightly disturbing, realization about Pete struck Stourton during the film shoot.
“People would keep coming up to me, members of the crew, being like, ‘I absolutely hated Pete on the script, but you know, I actually don’t mind you in the film,’” Stourton says.
“I sort of pretended that was a compliment, but deep down I was like, ‘I didn’t think he was that bad, was he?’ I quite liked him.”
Ultimately, Pete just wants to be liked and respected, and maybe show his friends he’s growing up successfully, he says.
“They’re all kind of motivations that we can relate to, even if the consequences (make Pete) not the most lovable Hugh Grant-y type character,” Stourton says.
“It’s something a little bit more complicated and dark, but hopefully a bit more real.