We’ve seen writer-directors and even writer-director-actors before, but it may be time to add a new hyphenate to the filmmaking glossary: writer-director-actor-blogger. Ricky Gervais is sharing the writing and directing duties on his debut feature film This Side of the Truth, and his co-stars include Tina Fey, Christopher Guest, Jeffrey Tambor, Rob Lowe and Jennifer Garner. But he’s handling the blogging himself at his own website, rickygervais.com.
Plotwise, the movie sounds rather high concept in comparison to Gervais’s brilliantly squirmy television work in The Office and Extras. “It's a contemporary world rather like our own, but in which the human race has never evolved the ability to lie,” blogs Gervais. “I play a loser who discovers one day that he, and only he has the ability to lie. In a world where no one even understands the concept of lying, everyone totally believes, without question anything I tell them. I can say anything at all and they accept this as the gospel truth. I can get anything I want. Or can I?”
Gervais has already posted a number of pre-production videos, including his close inspection of the detailed testicle work on a scale model boar, and he offers a preview of a future project: “In the film I'm writing with Steve Merchant I'm playing a man with a bad back who sits in an arm chair all day. If I can hide a toilet in the armchair I will have created the perfect acting job for myself.”