Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon Make A TRIP TO SPAIN In New Trailer

It’s been four years since THE TRIP TO ITALY. Now comes IFC’s third film in the series, THE TRIP TO SPAIN, from director Michael Winterbottom.

After jaunts through northern England and Italy, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon embark on another deliciously deadpan culinary road trip. This time around, the guys head to Spain to sample the best of the country’s gastronomic offerings in between rounds of their hilariously off-the-cuff banter. Over plates of pintxos and paella, the pair exchange barbs and their patented celebrity impressions, as well as more serious reflections on what it means to settle into middle age. As always, the locales are breathtaking, the cuisine to die for, and the humor delightfully devilish.

The film opens in theaters August 11, 2017.

Steve’s film career includes five films with Michael Winterbottom.

The Trip To Spain is the third in an occasional series that began with 2011’s The Trip, a film that was originally intended as a one-off. The premise of the first film was simple: actor and comedian Steve Coogan has been commissioned to write a travel piece for the UK’s Observer newspaper, and so he invites his friend and peer Rob Brydon to accompany him. For a week they travel the Lake District, visiting the area’s critically acclaimed restaurants, and after several days they are joined by Steve’s PA Emma (Claire Keelan) and photographer Yolanda (Marta Barrio), whose work will illustrate the resulting article. Along the way, the two men discuss their hopes, their fears, and the cultural history of the north of England, all the while trying to outdo each other with their uncannily life-like impressions of celebrities such as Al Pacino, Michael Caine and Sean Connery. There would, said director Michael Winterbottom, never be another.

Except there was. The Trip was followed in 2014 by The Trip To Italy, which repeated the formula by having Steve and Rob make a similar journey from Piedmont to Capri, and, as he did after making its predecessor, Winterbottom said there would never be another. Fast-forward to 2017, and Steve and Rob are making another trip, this time from Santander in the north of Spain to Malaga in the south. Once again everything is the same and yet everything is different: over the course of the three films, the two men find their perspectives shifting, both on the subject of love and family and in their search for artistic fulfilment.

The seeds for the first Trip were sown back in 2005, on the set of Michael Winterbottom’s 13th feature film Tristram Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story. Inspired by Laurence Sterne’s 18th century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a book deemed unfilmable due to its extended comic digressions, Winterbottom’s film was a pairing of two actors that the director had previously worked with: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Both appeared in Winterbottom’s 2002 film 24 Hour People, a biography of Manchester’s post-punk music scene, in which Coogan played the lead and Brydon – a TV star after the success of early 2000s BBC comedy series Marion & Geoff – had a cameo.

One fateful day it began to rain, and so Winterbottom put the two actors in the make-up truck and asked them to improvise a conversation. Recalls Brydon, “My memory of that shoot is that I was probably trying a bit harder than I would now. I mean, I’m naturally more inclined to entertain than Steve is. I take more pleasure in making people smile than he does. And what happened that day was that Michael told us, ‘Just talk.’ Now, Steve and I can do that very easily, so in we went, and we did it. We ended up at the beginning of the film and it became a very popular part of it.”

Two years later, Winterbottom took the two for lunch, and he told them about his about his idea for a project that would later become The Trip. “And initially we both said no,” says Brydon. “I thought, ‘We’ll never get enough good stuff.’ Thankfully I was wrong.”

Coogan agreed with Brydon’s original misgivings. “I thought what we did was quite funny,” he says, “but I didn’t think it would stretch to a whole film. But Michael kept pushing it, even though we really didn’t think that was the case. So it’s really Michael who’s responsible for it. Of all the things I do, The Trip is the thing I’m least in the driving seat for, really. With all the other projects I’m involved with, I’m usually there from the conception of it, but with this, Rob and I are simply wheeled out by Michael, prodded with a stick and made to perform, as it were. It was Michael’s conviction that it would work.”

Says Winterbottom, “In Tristram Shandy it seemed to me that the scenes with Steve and Rob improvising – especially in the opening – felt like they were funniest bits and the most enjoyable bits to do. And certainly the easiest bits, from my point of view, because I didn’t have to do anything except watch them.”

Further inspiration came from Tristram Shandy’s author, who gave Winterbottom the idea he needed to bring the two back together. “After Tristram Shandy,” he explains, “Sterne wrote another book, called A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, which was mocking travel writing. In the 18th century there were a lot of books about travelling and people going on a grand tour. He was mocking that, and making fun of it, but in a very enjoyable way. So I felt that it would be in the spirit of Sterne to do a mock travel piece with Steve and Rob.”