Michael Winterbottom: Interviews

Michael Winterbottom: “That’s How People Are”

89 Michael Winterbottom: “That’s How People Are” David D’Arcy/2006 From GreenCine, 13 March 2006. Reprinted by permission. Take a great work of literature and try to adapt it for the screen. You have a risk, more likely a certainty, that the film won’t come close to measuring up to the original. If you bet on this expectation, you’ll rarely lose. Name anything by Henry James or Ernest Hemingway or even recent fiction by Elmore Leonard, and you’ll find the same problem. Yet Tristram Shandy; A Cock and Bull Story by Michael Winterbottom, a loose adaptation of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq. by Laurence Sterne (1713–68), breaks the mold, not because it’s rigorous, although it is in its own way, but because it takes such freedoms with the original. Out of that approach comes a film of wit with a lightness that doesn’t cheapen Laurence Sterne’s novel. It opens the book up, and, one might hope, brings readers back to it. The novel is about Tristram Shandy telling his life story and within that story is the story of Tristram’s father, Walter, planning the life of his son. From this spare décor—more spare than the Masterpiece Theater opulence now branded like Burberry for the British period drama—the camera pulls back from what looks like a countercultural adaptation to Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation, a backstage comedy about the making of a film about the novel. As the director, the Winterbottom stand-in, Jeremy Northam juggles two petty egos, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, two actors playing themselves and their roles, who steal the show that they have helped Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell Boyce write. Coogan’s ego-needs tend toward women, especially a radiant assistant (Naomie Harris) who gets aroused when the films of Fassbinder are mentioned. I did note that this was 90 michael winterbottom: inter views a loose adaptation. Brydon favors the undermining of anything that would give credibility to Coogan’s talent or stature, and he’s determined to achieve that. Think of it as an edgier version of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in The Road to the 18th Century, and then add an ensemble of Brit film insiders telling in-jokes inside a country house near the set. Just in case anyone is lost, and plenty of them probably are, Stephen Fry, as Parson Yorick, a stand-in for Sterne, reels you back in. He says matter-of-factly, “The theme of Tristram Shandy is quite simple. Life is chaotic, life is amorphous, and, no matter how hard you try, you can’t actually put it into any kind of shape. Tristram is trying to write his life story, but it escapes him, because life is too full, too rich, to be captured by art. Tristram’s father, Walter, tries to plan every aspect of Tristram’s birth and childhood, but his plans go awry.” That pretty much says it all. It turns out that Tristram Shandy, the unfilmable novel, is not so unfilmable after all. Film can accommodate most of what this novel throws at you—the first-person voice, the voice commenting on that voice, the time shifts, the abrupt changes of subject and speaker. It helps that the mix of all these techniques is a device that we take for granted. Yet film struggles to get below the surface. Capturing the spirit of a novel does that, and getting below the surface often demands abandoning a literal rendering. Winterbottom’s film is anything but that. But make up your own mind. Read the book after you see the film. GC: Had anyone else tried to make a film of Tristram Shandy? MW: I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. GC: You’ve adapted two other novels, right? MW: We did Jude, based on Jude the Obscure. And we took the story of The Mayor of Casterbridge and turned it into a film called The Claim, but it wasn’t a straight adaptation. We were just using the story. For me, the thing about Tristram Shandy is that the book itself messes around with the story. The book tells you that it’s Tristram Shandy trying to write his life story, but in fact it tells you everything but that. It deliberately keeps taking you away on any number of digressions. So, in a sense, it makes it quite easy to adapt, if you take...