A Cock and Bull Story

A Cock and Bull Story marketed in Australia, New Zealand and the United States as Tristram Shandy A Cock and Bull Story is a 2005 British comedy film directed by Michael Winterbottom. It is a filmwithinafilm, featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing themselves as egotistical actors during the making of a screen adaptation of Laurence Sternes 18th century metafictional novel Tristram Shandy. Gillian Anderson and Keeley Hawes also play themselves in addition to their Tristram Shandy roles. Since the book is about a man attempting but failing to write his autobiography, the film takes the form of being about failing to make the film.

The film incorporates several sequences from Tristram Shandy. Not all of these are part of the filmwithinthefilm. The latter are limited to the story of Tristrams conception, birth and christening Uncle Tobys experiences at the Battle of Namur and Tristrams sudden and accidental circumcision at the age of three. Uncle Tobys wooing of Widow Wadman Gillian Anderson takes place in a sequence dreamed by Steve Coogan and after the cast and crew have viewed the completed film ending, with Walter Shandy fainting at the sight of his wife giving birth, the question How does the book end? is followed by the concluding scene of the novel, in which Yorick says It is a story about a Cock and a Bull and the best of its kind that ever I heard. Yorick is not in the filmwithinthefilm in this scene he is played by Stephen Fry, who appears elsewhere in the film as Patrick, a caricatured version of the actual curator at Shandy Hall. The DVD extras include a scene of Fry talking with the curator he portrays.The films soundtrack is notable for featuring numerous excerpts from Nino Rotas score for the Federico Fellini film 8, itself a selfreflexive work about the making of a film. Other nondiegetic musical references are made to Amarcord, The Draughtsmans Contract, Smiles of a Summer Night, Fanny and Alexander and Barry Lyndon. Michael Nyman, composer of The Draughtsmans Contract provides a new arrangement of the Handel Sarabande featured in the latter film, while the tracks of The Draughtsmans Contract the original soundtrack recordings, the score has been rerecorded numerous times serve as a temp track to film of the Sterne material. ........

Source: Wikipedia