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Sundance Film Festival: Mass Walkout Over Daniel Radcliffe’s Farting Corpse in ‘Swiss Army Man’

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 02:42 PST, Jan 23, 2016

The Sundance Film Festival is officially on and many members of the audience at the premiere of Daniel Radcliffe’s Swiss Army Man couldn’t take the strain and left the theater, rather than watch his farting corpse on the screen.

Farting seems to be in the media a lot lately. The Inquisitr reported earlier on Saturday that a flight attendant had shared her funniest complaint yet from a passenger who couldn’t handle the smell emanating from another person farting on the flight.

Now, we get to hear that Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter film fame appears in a movie as a corpse that ends up on a beach, bloated and giving off copious amounts of bodily gas. This definitely doesn’t sound promising for an accomplished actor, who is currently trying to get away from his Harry Potter persona.

Some are speculating that Swiss Army Man might just be the strangest movie yet to be screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Even better, the whole thing was reportedly inspired by, of all things, a fart joke made by Radcliffe himself.

According to Vanity Fair, even the programmer who introduced Swiss Army Man at the Indie Sundance Film Festival wasn’t really sure what the film is about, but he reportedly “thought it should be here.”

Playing opposite Paul Dano, a suicidal desert island castaway, Radcliffe appears as a flatulent corpse which floats on to the castaway’s beach. Reportedly, Dano’s character has been on the island for some time. He has almost given up hope and is planning suicide, until along comes the handy and rather gassy corpse.

What apparently makes it really surreal is that Radcliffe’s corpse never stops releasing gas throughout the film, as Dano’s character tries to coax it back to life. He even ends up riding it like a jet ski back to civilization.

Reportedly, Variety summed it up perfectly by saying Swiss Army Man is like “Cast Away meets Weekend at Bernie’s, as directed by Michel Gondry.”

Filmmakers Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan were behind the film and it was while they were being interviewed that Scheinert mentioned Radcliffe’s fart joke and how it inspired him.

“Originally it was just a fart joke that Dan made to me.”

“And then, just joking along the way about how the man riding a farting corpse could be a feature, I think we stumbled on something personal. It was an opportunity to express mortality and big ideas but with fart jokes so we don’t feel too self-conscious about it being a full-on drama.”

On Kwan’s part, he said, “It was like the dumbest idea mixed with the most personal ideas and we kind of splashed them together to see what happens.”

While so many audience members might have walked out in disgust, Daniel Radcliffe himself said he found the script really funny and original. He said that when they showed him the script, he immediately thought the directors were “crazy geniuses.”

“Then I met Dan Scheinert, and the chance to play a dead guy in this context was just too much fun to pass up.”

As for Paul Dano, he said once he was into page two of the script he was game to be in.

“Like page two, once [the character] was riding the farting body, I was in.”

While it is still pretty much unclear what Swiss Army Man is all about, Kwan said one line described the movie: “A suicidal man has to convince a dead body that life is worth living. And so it’s a film exploring the contradiction and comedy and drama in that.”

However, reportedly the film cannot be considered a comedy as Scheinert was quick to stress, “Actually, it’s a fart drama.”

Having heard what is involved, readers, would you still want to watch Swiss Army Man? Let us know in the comment section below.

[Photo by Danny Moloshok/Invision/AP]

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