WRITTEN, PRODUCED & Directed by joe mcgowan
An overdue catch up down the pub between two old friends is thrown into chaos by the inclusion of a terrifying third wheel with an embarrassing secret.
about the film
P is for Penis was a Semi-Finalist at our BIFA qualifying Kino London Short Film Festival in 2024. It also won the Audience Choice award at the BIFA Qualifying Exit 6 Film Festival. Other notable festival highlights include the BIFA Qualifying Sunderland Short Film Festival and The Shortest Nights, The Romford Film Festival, London Lift-Off Film Festival, and the Funny Life Film Festival where it was nominated for Best Screenplay. Other awards include Best Micro Short and Best British Film at the Lit Laughs International Comedy Film Festival, Best Comedy Film at the WILDsound FEEDBACK Film & Screenplay Festival, Best Comedy Short at the London Seasonal Short Film Festival, and Best UK Comedy at the London Worldwide Comedy Short Film Festival.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Joe is a London born and Essex-raised filmmaker with over ten years of experience as a director and editor in the TV commercial and branded content world. Comedy caught his eyes and ears at a young age, listening to Blackadder cassette tapes late into the night and being shattered for school the next day. His love of comedy and passion for filmmaking allow him to explore the funny, silly, and absurd and have an absolute blast doing so! Joe’s comedy work has racked up millions of views across social media, won numerous awards at film festivals in the UK and internationally, and has been featured on BBC Radio. Not bad for an Essex boy!
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH Joe
Welcome back to our Short of the Week series. What have you been up to since we featured your last short Couple Noises ?
Thanks for having me back! It’s been a busy year for me. Have been up and down the country on the festival run with P is for Penis, have worked with British comedy legends Kimberly Nixon (Fresh Meat) and Simon Greenall (I’m Alan Partridge) on some training videos for a company set up by John Cleese in the 1980’s, worked with Kelly Brooke and Big Narstie on a campaign for SlimFast, and most importantly got married in June. How time flies!
Tell us about the genesis of P Is For Penis. Where did the idea come from, and how did you develop that idea into the short that's now made its way out into the world?
My end goal is to work in sitcoms, so I treated this as practice in creating a scene that you’d expect to see in a sitcom show. Comedy and conflict are my happy place when watching films or TV shows, and I’ve always found the dynamic of someone oversharing a secret about another person in a social setting a great setting for some real comedic sparks to fly.
I don’t know exactly how I landed on a misshapen penis being somebody's deepest and darkest secret, but once I thought of it the ball started rolling from there. The big question was what peculiar shape could it be to create a double-take moment in the film, but also lead to some snappy jokes for the script. I was in the car with my wife (who was my girlfriend at the time) and was brainstorming this out loud to her. I started going through shape options like a square, a triangle, a parallelogram, before moving onto letters from the alphabet. I thought a lower-case ‘T’ would be funny and said that a ‘T’ with two O’s from the testicles would spell the word ‘Too’, and maybe there’s a joke there. My wife, who this isn’t her sense of humour at all, turned to me and said ‘Well, if his penis was shaped like the letter ‘P’, it would spell the word ‘Poo’. I simply looked at her adoringly and said I love you so much, and quickly came up with the title after she said that. I started writing it in December 2023, and by March 2024, the film was done and dusted, and I proposed to my wife to be!
What were some of the main obstacles you experienced when making P Is For Penis and how did you overcome them?
The main challenge was time. I hired a pub called The Virgin Queen in Bethnal Green for eight hours, 7am-3pm. The pub opened at 4pm and the script was 13 pages long. I had originally planned some more cinematic shots with a dolly and track, some fun POV shots with a fish eye lens, and a dramatic lighting change when Perry realises Tim and Dom know about his appendage. Very quickly into the shoot, those bells and whistles were cut. We were shooting on two cameras (thank God), and we locked them off and cross-shot all the coverage. It still has that sitcom feel to it that I wanted, but it also comes across as an extended sketch rather than a cinematic short film, like I’d originally intended. It was a big lesson in what you can realistically achieve with a tight turnaround.
The other challenge was shooting the nudity. The pub was fine with it as long as we covered the windows so the public couldn’t see anything. The problem with that was that the windows had no curtains, and there were a lot of windows. When it came to shooting those shots, we used an old trick I’d learnt from a gaffer to block light out quickly from windows. We sprayed the windows with window cleaner from a spray bottle and stuck sheets of tin foil on them. Took fifteen minutes to block out all the windows with the whole crew on board. Would highly recommend this method if you’re in a pinch.
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences and some of the festival circuit highlights.
Sitting in an audience when P is for Penis is screening has been a real treat. Overall, it’s had a fantastic reception and get’s lot of laughs, which, as the writer, director, producer, and editor of the film, is amazing to hear live. It’s become a BIFA qualifying short, been played on BBC Radio as a radio sketch, and won multiple awards at film festivals. The highlight on the festival circuit was winning the Audience Choice awards at the BIFA Qualifying Exit 6 Film Festival. The films that were winning all the awards were incredibly cinematic films, with heavy subject matters, and had funding from the BFI and other film funding outlets. To see my self-funded short about a maniac with a funny shaped knob standing with these juggernaughts in the short film world was very gratifying for me.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
‘Bad Thoughts’, Tom Segura’s Netflix sketch show, is a must watch for any twisted sickos like myself. If you like my film, this is a show you need to check out.
I’d like to recommend some short films I’ve seen over the last year that stood out to me. James Button’s latest absurd short, ‘The Quackening’, is a must see. Twenty minutes of non-stop madness and big laughs. ‘Daddy Superior’, directed by Benjamin Partridge. Such a wholesome and hilarious masterpiece of a short film. This is the perfect small cast and one location comedy short. ‘Us & In Between’ directed by Katia Shannon. A wonderful, heartwarming tale of two people finding love in their later years. Beautifully shot too.
What are you working on next?
Earlier this year, I directed a National Film & Television School comedy short called Pushing Up Plastic. Set in the near future, a couple finds out their microplastic test results from their solicitor to see if they can be legally buried without becoming an environmental hazard, or risk being recycled. It’s got a Wes Anderson meets Edgar Wright aesthetic to it, and it's been a lot of fun to work on. It should be on the film festival circuit next year.
I’m slowly writing a short mockumentary called Good Egg, which revolves around an omelette chef who works in a Chinese restaurant, so he rarely has anything to do. I’m also writing a sitcom pilot that’s a mash up of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia meets Lord of the Rings.
