Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe on Brothers Of The Head

The acclaimed documentary filmmakers had to put their heads together to make their conjoined twins mock rock doc

Rock bands with feuding brothers have a long, chequered history, from the distinctly disharmonic Everlys through to Oasis's scrapping Gallaghers. But whatever their differences, the siblings never separate for long. Tom and Barry Howe of 1970s proto-punk band The Bang Bang have an added complication: they're conjoined twins, literally glued at the hip and sharing a liver.

They're also fictional, as featured in fake documentary Brothers Of The Head from Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe, the filmmaking partners best known for chronicling Terry Gilliam's failed Don Quixote project in the acclaimed Lost in La Mancha. So perhaps it's fitting that their first fictional feature utilizes the documentary style.

"We knew that in documentary you have a much wider palette of storytelling devices," explains the enthusiastic Pepe, "a bigger box of toys that you get to play with, and we thought why not bring that into the realm of fictional filmmaking?" "We've made lots of documentary films, it's certainly what we're most skilled in," continues the more laconic Fulton. "The appeal for us was this subject matter in this time period about that kind of music."

The story of two conjoined brothers plucked from East Anglian isolation, groomed for post-glam/pre-punk rock stardom before spiralling into oblivion, Brothers Of The Head began life as a novel by sci-fi legend Brian Aldiss. Aldiss's novel was later optioned by writer Tony Grisoni, who Pepe and Fulton got to know through Grisoni's own collaborations with Gilliam. Given the pair's first-hand experience of watching Gilliam's dreams get literally washed away, was their experience on La Mancha a lesson in what not to do?

"Actually the lesson was the reverse," insists Pepe, who together with Fulton also documented the making of a happier Gilliam project, Twelve Monkeys, in their film The Hamster Factor. "In spending time with Terry Gilliam there's all the positive things that you watch and go, 'Oh, right, that's how you make films.' You see how much fun he has making movies and you think, it's supposed to be a fun process, a process where you use your enthusiasm to enthuse the entire crew and cast so everyone is making this thing."
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