Michael Winterbottom: Interviews

Winterbottom Walks through Wonderland

34 Winterbottom Walks through Wonderland Jasper Rees/1998 From The Independent (U.K.), 22 November 1998. Reprinted by permission. The producer Steve Woolley was once asked to compare the American and British film industries. He said it was like the difference between the NASA program and a couple of old women in the outer Hebrides knitting jumpers. Michael Winterbottom—Butterfly Kiss, Jude, Welcome to Sarajevo—is knitting a lot of jumpers at the moment. I met him at Goldcrest’s offices in Soho, London. In cutting room 206 the final touches were being put to Old New Borrowed Blue, a romantic comedy Winterbottom shot this summer about a French Romeo who comes to stay with his old pen-pal and her husband in Belfast. In room 209, the daily rushes of Untitled Love Story, an ensemble piece about a weekend in the love-lives of three sisters, are being given the once-over. It’s lunchtime, and Winterbottom still has nine hours of filming ahead. He has the pink flush in his cheeks of the perpetually hurried. When he talks, words tumble out, clattering into one another in a manner that suggests either impatience, or a hyperactive mind, or both. But that is not why he is slightly late for the appointment, which has taken so long to fix that it almost felt as if I had been trying to get a movie off the ground, not an interview. He nipped out to film a brief snippet for a tribute to Alan Parker. You couldn’t imagine two less similar British filmmakers: one a graduate of ads, blandished by Hollywood; the other a distinctly European graduate of television documentary and drama. They have both filmed works by Roddy Doyle. For the outstanding BBC series Family, Winterbottom even inherited many of Parker’s jasper rees / 1998 35 crew from The Commitments. The younger director turned in a much more swirling, brutal account of Doyle’s Dublin than the old lag did. I had met Winterbottom before, in July, on the set of Old New Borrowed Blue. A Belfast kitchen had been synthetically reconstructed in the laboratory conditions of Pinewood. There’s nothing so cumbersome about Untitled Love Story. It is being shot throughout south London with a nimbleness unimaginable to the Hollywood space program. The roving crew is small enough to flit between locations in a couple of vans, and on set the only people in the room, apart from the actors, are Winterbottom, the cameraman, the sound man and the first Assistant Director. It is film-making pared down to a minimum. “The idea is it’s all hand-held, there are no lights, it’s 16mm film, we’re in real places: in that sense it’s like a documentary. It’s like an improvised way of filming , very simple in preparation.” The film was originally called Snarl-Up; it may be changed to Wonderland . They haven’t decided which title more accurately encapsulates London. In the meantime, the latest film to have dropped off Winterbottom ’s conveyor belt is I Want You: it is set in a ghost town at the end of the line on the south coast where, Winterbottom says, “the sea acts as a barrier and a gateway.” The film follows a man who returns from prison after nine years to force himself back into the life of his hairdresser girlfriend. But while theirs is the central thread, the town as a whole is seen through the eyes, and heard through the ears, of Honda, a gawky, mute fourteen-year-old refugee from the former Yugoslavia who lives with his sister, a nymphomaniac club singer. Honda has the antisocial habit of eavesdropping on conversations with a listening device. A budding director? “Absolutely,” says Winterbottom. “There is an aspect of voyeurism to being a director. Part of the long rehearsal period was the actors in character going off, doing what they would normally do, and me listening on radio mikes to them, recording them in a similar way to Honda. In the film you don’t find out anything about the characters. The film is organized almost like a song, with the repeats, the echoes, the choruses. The idea was that the film could work that way; that you feel like you have been emotionally involved but you wouldn’t be able to tell someone that much about who Martin or Helen are.” The star of the film, over and above a cosmopolitan cast, is the...