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Described so eloquently as 'next level shit' by Grandmaster Flash, when they supported the great man himself last year in San Francisco, the UK's Addictive TV are certainly that. Known for their remixing of movies - particularly for sanctioned ones by Hollywood studios wanting their releases remixed into audiovisual dance tracks, the musical and visual duo have picked up awards, had nice things said about them by film stars and even Moby described them as 'a tough act to follow' when they supported him at the opening party of SXSW (South by Southwest) in Austin, Texas, earlier this year. Yes Addictive TV have been as busy as ever, remixing, among other things, the new blockbuster movie Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow! Nevertheless Graham and Tolly still found time for a few questions from the Voice about audiovisual sampling, remixing and the impending dawn of the new audio/visual age etc. 

Movie remixing is something that you guys are well known for and it's said that you were the first to officially remix a Hollywood movie, with that Antonio Banderas film - for which you won an award. How did that all happen?
TOLLY: Well, a really switched on marketing guy at New Line Cinema, the studio behind The Lord of the Rings, had seen some of the bootleg film remixes we'd made, like our remix of The Italian Job - the original 60's movie - and they simply asked if we were up for doing something similar for a promo campaign for the Antonio Banderas film Take the Lead. And yeah, it won an advertising industry award, which was great. 

GRAHAM: It was kind of like a big experiment for them and they didn't really know what they were going to get. It was a completely new idea that no Hollywood studio had ever tried before - an advert made from audiovisually sampling and remixing a film. Fantastically, they gave us total creative freedom to sample and cut-up the film, and we were given over five hours of un-edited footage. They loved it, and now it's been downloaded over a million times across the web, and led directly to us making the US network trailers for that Samuel L Jackson movie Snakes On a Plane! 

So what was it like to be involved with Sssnakes On a Plane?
GRAHAM: The hype around that film was bloody crazy! And it was great to be involved with that. Again, the studio trusted us and our ideas and wanted to repeat a similar vibe. So this time we dropped a drum 'n' bass trailer on them - making the beats out of Sam Jackson shooting his gun and scratching him up saying 's-s-s-s-snakes!' 

TOLLY: I reckon outside of The Blair Witch Project, Snakes On a Plane probably had one the most amazing publicity campaigns for any movie ever, and being part of that was just nuts, it really was. At one point we were the only people in the whole UK who'd actually seen the film and we were getting calls from the press, like even Radio 4, asking us what all the fuss was about! 

GRAHAM: Last year we also remixed Clive Owen's movie Shoot Em Up into a dance track for its viral trailer, and the Japanese anime manga film Tekkon Kinkreet  - that was a cool movie to do, particularly as we were told the director Michael Arias really likes what we do. 

A film we want to see that we hear you guys are remixing is Marvel's Iron Man movie for Paramount. What can you tell us?
GRAHAM: Interestingly, it's the first time Paramount have ever done this, stepping into the world of film remixing and letting artists rework and audiovisually remix one of their movies - I think it's fantastic that they're doing this, and Marvel too since it's very much their baby as well. Paramount approached us after having seen our work for other studios, and every time a major player buys into the idea it's definitely a step forward for the remix genre. 

TOLLY: Yeah, and the animation and special effects are just great - we've built this whole flying sequence loop of Iron Man in the sky being chased by jet fighters that's just completely hypnotic... and Robert Downey Junior's got a great voice for sampling don't you think? 

You clearly love movie remixing, tell us why and is it something you want to see other DJs and artists embracing?
GRAHAM: Absolutely. The more artists, the better in my opinion. All what we're doing now wasn't a conscious decision we took to do something wacky - it was something we'd just wanted to do for a long time. With backgrounds in film and TV as well as music, we always wanted to do something creatively different and that was totally audiovisual. In many ways, remixing music can be so two-dimensional and we wanted to add that extra dimension.

No-one was doing it in such a complete way at the time; sure people had sampled movies and added those samples to dance tracks, but no one had really taken it to an extreme and it took a lot of figuring out and hard graft to rebuild a whole film into a dynamic AV dance remix and still make some kind of sense. One of the things we're known for now is movie remixing and studios ask us to do it officially, which is really cool. It's a funny thing getting rung up by Hollywood execs saying 'can you remix our film for us?' - because it's such a long way for them and ourselves to have come in a relatively short time. OK, so no one's released a movie remix as a single commercially yet, but the time will come, when there's the right kind of project. I think marketing movies has become more difficult and you have to think laterally now to get noticed.

TOLLY: With all the films we remix, we always aim to make something that's entertaining, funny, musical and conveys the flavour of the film. It's literally a cross between writing music and film making, and creatively involves hours of just trying different stuff out, much like any musician writing a track but with the added headache of having to think about the images! For us, the crucial thing is that both sides are created simultaneously. There's no rules on how to create this kind of work right now and ours isn't made in a 'normal' way as such, it's a technique we've very much developed ourselves from scratch.  

And with DVJ/DVD decks, AV mixers and video DJ software all becoming more available, is AV and film remixing the way you see things going?
GRAHAM: Again absolutely. For those of us who love music and film equally it's the perfect medium creatively, and it seems that plenty of people out there love to see movies remixed, whether it's at a club, a big festival or even on the web.  It wasn't an obvious idea in the beginning but I guess it's the mark a successful idea that it seems totally natural now. Well, to us anyway!   

TOLLY: Yeah, we did a recent gig with Grandmaster Flash and he seemed amazed by what we were doing and said 'man, you guys are the next level shit...!' and coming from an innovator like him that really made our decade! 

Iron Man Addictive TV Remix - Watch here »

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www.myspace.com/addictivetv - www.addictive.com - Iron Man Movie Official Web Site