‘We ran out of parts for people’: How Spice World became the ‘must be in’ movie of the Nineties

As the yacht drew into Port de Cannes and the camera shutters went into overdrive, it seemed from a distance that five disparate versions of Audrey Hepburn were making the grandest of entrances. Sporting the sunglasses and headscarves of 1950s starlets – variously paired with leopard-print chiffon, rainbow crop-tops and sports-branded underwear – this was a ragtag bunch of ingenues. There was an elegant one, a redheaded one, a childlike one, one who looked a bit angry about something, and one seemingly fresh from a set of mixed doubles.

Waving to the hordes of screaming fans on the docks, the Spice Girls swept ashore at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival ready to strut, pose, backflip and karate-kick their way right through the silver screen. A global phenomenon, they had arrived at the celebrated movie conference to promote their debut cinematic endeavour, Spice World: The Movie, released 25 years ago this week, and even somewhere as star-studded as Cannes had rarely seen such scenes of frenzied fandemonium.

“The Cannes Film Festival is quite an earnest place, and it brought this burst of colour into a black-and-white world,” says Barnaby Thompson, Spice World’s co-producer. “We put them on the roof of the Hotel Martinez and there’s 10,000 people outside. I don’t know what Beatlemania was like, but there was a real sense of excitement about everything.”

The buzz around the band – who’d had four UK No 1 hits in the previous 12 months and hit the US top spot with “Wannabe” during filming – would make the movie a $100m (£83m) success on the back of a $5m (£4.13m) budget, not bad for a largely plot-free hodgepodge of celebrity cameos, surrealist dream sequences, Tardis tour-buses, movie pastiches, Girl Power wisecracking, and close encounters with horny aliens, which was panned by critics at the time.

Over the intervening quarter-century, however, its stature has grown to that of credible cult classic: an end-of-innocence snapshot of an unrepeatable moment in both British cinema and pop music, when pop stars could still be a little magical and unreal, and their movies pure primary-coloured lark.

Much of the retrospective appeal of Spice World is a result of the unashamed debt it owes to classic Ealing comedy and the cinematic oeuvre of The Beatles. “A Hard Day’s Night was always one of my favourite films,” says Thompson. “And so the idea of doing A Hard Day’s Night with a female group was very appealing.”

In fact, Spice World was more of a catch-all homage to all of The Beatles’ films. Its scenes of Spicemania were pulled straight from the Hard Day’s Night playbook, but the girls’ tour bus – a union-flag-festooned double-decker from the outside; inside, the size of a small house, with individual quarters for each Spice that allowed Victoria Adams a full mirrored wardrobe and Emma Bunton a swing and a slide – was a flagrant nod to the Fabs’ communal house with four front doors in Help!.

Likewise the comic-book character work, including Richard E Grant’s role as the Spice Girls’ manager, clad in the bright-coloured suits of a mid-ranking Batman villain, and Richard O’Brien as a creepy paparazzo climbing out from under beds and inside toilets to try to snap the girls.

The more bizarre sequences, meanwhile, could have fallen straight out of the drug-drenched script of Magical Mystery Tour. Take Michael Barrymore’s turn as an unintelligible drill-sergeant-cum-choreographer called Mr Step, a flash-forward of the girls as middle-aged mums, or the iconic scene in which aliens descend to meet the band then try to feel up Mel B.

It all worked, Thompson believes, because of the postmodern “movie within a movie” framework of the film – “There’s basically a producer and a writer pitching the movie to the Richard E Grant character as it’s unfolding” – a premise that allowed Spice World to shoot off at self-parodic tangents without becoming too much of a mess. “We wanted to do a film that was very much in the spirit of the girls, and they didn’t take themselves seriously,” Thompson says. “There’s the Roger Moore character, who is very much a satirical take on [then-manager] Simon Fuller, so everyone was happy to make fun of themselves.”

“The Beatles did the whole thing about being pursued by the reporters, and it was very much a caper,” says the film’s co-writer Kim Fuller, brother of Simon and at one time a regular contributor to TV comedy shows such as Alas Smith and Jones, Spitting Image and The Tracey Ullman Show. “But Spinal Tap was partly what I was thinking of – it was an ironic send-up.”

That Spice World became such a madcap blitz of a movie was largely down to Disney’s addiction to schmaltz. The Spice Girls had been eyeing up the big screen ever since they took control of their own “manufactured” band after having been put together by audition in 1994. “When we got together … one of the first things we said was ‘It’d be really great if we could do a movie,’” Emma Bunton said in 1997. “We said to ourselves, ‘We’re not just a band, we want to try everything.’” “We always wanted to go out and conquer the world,” added Melanie Chisholm. “We’re just pushing it to the boundaries and seeing how far we can go.”

As their star ascended with “Wannabe” in 1996, Simon Fuller touted them around Hollywood studios and sold an option on a Spice Girls film to Disney. “I read it and it was very much in the Disney mould,” says Kim, who was denied the chance to contribute to Disney’s script. “It shows their family relationships, one’s from a single parent… it was very much a progressive Disney story, and they all come together and they all overcome their issues and become a famous band.”

The Spice Girls rejected the proposal. “Although the perception was that they were brought together and manufactured, they were actually very much in control of what they would and wouldn’t do,” says Kim. “So turning Disney down was fine.” Instead, once Disney’s option had expired in November 1996, Fuller was granted free rein to work on a script, spending time with this “force of nature” of a band to get “an angle on their characters and lives, where they’d come from, and what their attitudes were”.

The writing process was a back-and-forth collaboration. “We got the idea of ‘Let’s send up a week in their lives,’” Kim says, “and I would go to them and say, ‘What do you feel about this?’, because I wasn’t necessarily sure that they would happily show themselves up in this slightly mad, over-exaggerated way. They would come back with ‘How about if we do this in that scene?’, so it worked in that way, more like a dialogue backwards and forwards… I remember saying ‘I want to do something where someone falls in the river’ because it’d be funny if they’re doing a stunt on a boat. And Geri said, ‘Victoria should do that.’ The whole concept was there in front of me, the celebration of female friendship – it was them; they did that – and I put it into a structure and made it daft and funny.”

Thompson, who had previously worked on Wayne’s World and Coneheads with Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, stresses the simplicity of the film as being key to its success. “The simple idea that they’ve got this concert to do at the end of the week. They’ve got the press after them. And that’s kind of the plot. That very much came from the purity of A Hard Day’s Night. Nothing happens in A Hard Day’s Night. Ringo gets sulky, goes off for a wander. It was about creating a vehicle for the girls’ personalities, their outlook on the world.”

By January 1997, the script was semi-complete and the Spice World ball was rolling. Impressive names began to leap aboard the union jack bus, with the girls themselves doing their fair share of casting. “Geri and Emma said, ‘You are going to be in this film, aren’t you?’” Grant recalled at the time. “I was flattered they even knew of my existence.”

Barry Humphries took the role of media-chief villain Kevin McMaxford, Jason Flemyng his newsroom sidekick, and O’Brien his sinister agent stalking the girls. “It does represent that we have been hounded since day one by the press,” Halliwell said in 1997. “They’re everywhere,” Chisholm added. “You wonder when you go to bed at night if there’ll be one hiding under your bed.”

Roger Moore signed on as the band’s record-label chief, Elvis Costello as a barman, and Meat Loaf as the girls’ bus driver when the original choice, Frank Bruno, stormed off set because the band wouldn’t sign autographs for a young family member. “I found out what his biggest hit was, ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’, so we’ve got to put that in somehow,” Kim says. The thing Meat wouldn’t do for the Spice Girls, in one of the movie’s most memorable lines, was unblocking the bus toilets. “I said, ‘Do you mind saying that?’ And he said, ‘No, I’ll say whatever you want.’”

Xural.com