-
Michael Winterbottom on Code 46: Typical Love Story in an Atypical World
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
67 Michael Winterbottom on Code 46: Typical Love Story in an Atypical World Wendy Mitchell/2004 From indieWIRE, 6 August 2004. Reprinted by permission. Usually, I’d be offended at being offered only ten minutes of interview time with a filmmaker; but with Michael Winterbottom, I almost want to encourage him to stop talking and get back to work as soon as possible . Since his 1994 debut feature, Butterfly Kiss, Winterbottom has established himself as one of the more eclectic and prolific contemporary filmmakers. In the past five years he has given us a masterful slice of life of damaged Londoners (Wonderland), a Western (The Claim), the Manchester music history/comedy 24 Hour Party People, and the vérité Afghani refugee story In This World. Now Winterbottom returns with his first science-fiction film, Code 46, which he made with longtime collaborators Andrew Eaton (producer) and Frank Cottrell Boyce (screenwriter). Code 46 is set in the near future, when the world is divided into megacities and desert slums, and travelers need special “papelles” (like passports or visas) to travel between cities. William (Tim Robbins) is an investigator who suspects a worker named Maria (Samantha Morton) of forging papelles. They have a brief affair, hindered not only by his family back home, but also a violation of Code 46, the government’s law that prevents them from being lovers because of their genetic makeup. The film focuses on their emotional turmoil but Winterbottom also explores life in this futuristic society: viruses that allow for specific feelings, memory erasure procedures, cloning consequences, hybrid languages, and a depleted ozone layer that makes it dangerous to venture outside during daylight. During our ten-minute chat, thanks to his rapid-fire talking, Winterbottom discussed his team’s script collaboration process, twenty-first- 68 michael winterbottom: inter views century architecture, the challenges of futuristic filmmaking, and more. We didn’t make it to my questions about Oedipal themes in Code 46, the importance of music in his films, the explicit sex in his forthcoming controversial feature 9 Songs, or what he’s working on now. No doubt we’ll find out soon enough. iW: You’ve worked so much with [screenwriter] Frank Cottrell Boyce, how does your collaboration process work? Specifically with Code 46, did he show you a script, did you come up with the idea together, what was the genesis? MW: The idea comes up between us really, Frank and I and also our producer, Andrew Eaton, who we’ve worked with the whole time. Having finished 24 Hour Party People, we were thinking of things to do and gradually we came up with the idea to do a film set in the future. We talked about it for a couple of months. We talked about the idea of it and the world of it, and then Frank started writing the screenplay. iW: Is there a lot of collaboration after he starts writing? MW: Yes, there is. Particularly on Code 46. Because Andrew and I were off making In This World, about two refugees, we got this idea of people having no papers and trying to travel from one place to another and the problems that creates. And a lot of that world—refugee camps, people in deserts, people outside the system, without papers, excluded—those elements are part of the social fabric of Code 46 as well. iW: Are you a sci-fi fan, had you always wanted to make a sci-fi film? MW: No, not really, I was a bit naïve and innocent. It was a lot of fun starting from scratch: What do we want this world to be like? How does this world work? That side of things was interesting. But from my point of view, Code 46 wasn’t a reference back to many previous science-fiction films or novels. It was looking at the world as it is now and drawing on our experience from different places, especially drawing on the cultures of the places where we were filming. Part of deciding what this world would be like was going to look at locations. We went to Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Hong Kong, India, and joined up bits of those cultures into the culture of Code 46. iW: Most sci-fi films tend to get bogged down with gadgets or fancy sets, and this was more about human interaction and how society had changed—why was that your focus? MW: I think that’s what interests...