Sightseers star Steve Oram to direct monkey comedy Aaaaaaaah!

Sightseers star and co-writer Steve Oram is to make his directorial debut on comedy Aaaaaaaah!, a film full of “sex and indiscriminate violence” in which actors will play monkeys and talk mostly “gibberish”.

Oram has assembled a comedy cast including The Mighty Boosh’s Julian Barratt, Green Wing’s Julian Rhind-Tutt (most recently seen in Rush), regular collaborator Tom Meeten, and Hannah Hoekstra, star of App and sexually explicit Dutch arthouse film Hemel.

Speaking to ScreenDaily, Oram said: “The script is in ‘human dialogue’ but the actors will throw the script away once they’ve learnt it.

“We’ll mainly use noises. It will be a combination of gibberish and monkey talk and it will be about expressing things physically. We’ve already done a bit - it has been really funny and gone very well.”

The self-financed feature, written by Oram, is due to shoot in April and is produced by Ben Wheatley regular Andy Starke and Oram’s production outfit Lincoln Film Studios (self-dubbed the English Hollywood).

According to Oram, Aaaaaaaah! is set in a “barbaric but recognisable world”.

“The world looks the same as ours today,” he explained. “The characters have jobs, for example, but it’s more brutal - it’s a dystopian twist on the world. There will be loads of sex and indiscriminate violence.”

As he described to comedy website Chortle, Oram and Meeten will play marauding characters who encroach into hostile territory where they meet Hoekstra, ‘hook up with her and start a feud between the two groups’.

Rhind-Tutt will play the girl’s angry father while Barratt is ‘the ex-alpha male who’s been deposed and has been living in the garden’.

Oram described the south London-set feature as “Romeo and Juliet meets Planet of the Apes”. “I like both those films,” the comedian told Screen.

Of the film’s unusual title, he said: “I like it because it’s ambiguous. You can say it in many different ways.”

Unsurprisingly, Oram sidestepped the studios on this one. “We didn’t bother going down the traditional finance route,” the actor admitted.

Oram has a busy slate of projects in 2014 and is hoping to reunite with Sightseers partner-in-crime Alice Lowe later in the year.

The actor-writer is also developing script Sweet Shadow, a larger budget dark comedy with veteran producer Charlie Hanson about a man from the Midlands who starts stalking people after moving to London where he becomes disillusioned by dead-end jobs.