Michael Winterbottom: Interviews

The Film Factory

50 The Film Factory Simon Hattenstone/2002 From The Guardian, 29 March 2002. Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2002. Reprinted by permission. Michael Winterbottom looks a little miffed when I ask him how he has managed to make so many films in so little time. “I don’t make that many films,” he says, defensively. Oh come off it, you’re always at it! He tries another tack. “Most people make a lot of films,” he says. Which is blatantly not true. We’re lucky to get a film every two years out of British stalwarts such as Leigh and Loach—and they’re the prolific ones. I tell him it’s meant as a compliment, and he relaxes. “One reason I make quite a lot is . . . one thing that’s quite hard to do in filmmaking which in music you can—it’s inherent in the process—is to work with a small group of people, collaborators.” His words tumble from his mouth, in hopeless fragments, like so much scree. He’s extremely bright, likeable, and interesting, and he can’t string a sentence together for toffee. If we’re talking about prolific, he says, he’d cite one of his all-time heroes—Lindsay Anderson, the legendary director who gave him his first break. Anderson was anything but prolific, I say—he made a couple of great films in an eternity and then snuffed it. Precisely, Winterbottom says. “Lindsay was a hero of mine. His films were great, but watching Lindsay argue for six months with, say, Wham’s managers . . . he loved the conflict, he loved being the outsider—not only in his attitude to the establishment but also deliberately fucking around and pissing people off.” So, he says, he learned a very important lesson from Anderson— how not to do it. He names another hero—Ingmar Bergman, who provided a more useful lesson. After working with Anderson, Winterbottom spent six simon hattenstone / 2002 51 months in Sweden trailing Bergman for a documentary. “There you have the opposite: a small group of collaborators who worked together and he would maybe direct three plays in the winter, run the theatre company, write the script for a film in summer—sometimes he’d write two scripts for summer—then he’d edit them in the autumn. Bergman wrote and shot fifty-five films or whatever, as well as his main career being in the theatre, and he did that because he had a small team of collaborators and there was no finance-raising whatsoever. He didn’t make Star Wars, he made ‘four actors in a room,’ so the cost related to the audience.” Winterbottom has a new film out next week—24 Hour Party People, a suitably bonkers biopic of the Madchester years when Factory Records redefined music with Joy Division, New Order, and the Happy Mondays. Other Winterbottom films include the lesbian heist movie Butterfly Kiss, his impressionistic portrait of London life, Wonderland, his western The Claim, his war film, Welcome to Sarajevo, and his adaptation of Hardy, Jude. He is a promiscuous genre-hopper. Subject-wise, his films have nothing in common. And yet there is a recognizable Winterbottom style—a studied messiness, a desire to move between film and video, to confuse and explore. He tends to make the gritty poetic, as in Wonderland, and the poetic gritty, as in Jude. 24 Hour Party People very loosely follows the Bergman template. It is written by long-term collaborator Frank Cottrell Boyce, and produced by Andrew Eaton—the team. Winterbottom grew up in Blackburn, and the bands featured in the film were the soundtrack of his youth. He was also attracted to a story about Factory Records because it closely reflected his own unlikely philosophy—artistic anarchy combined with a Protestant work ethic. The film shows how financial incompetence helped kill off Factory Records. Tony Wilson, the owner, was a corporate know-nothing who didn’t even own the music rights to his bands. Yet at the same time, you can’t help admiring Wilson—he didn’t own the rights because ownership was against the spirit of the whole adventure: he was in it for the love, not the money. It’s an attitude Winterbottom empathizes with. As far as he is concerned , too much money, too much corporate input, destroys the final product. The beauty of a Winterbottom film, like a Factory record, lies in its spontaneity. He says he hates the idea of perfection and...