Michael Winterbottom: Interviews

Interview with Michael Winterbottom

125 Interview with Michael Winterbottom Alex Fitch/2008 First published on the Electric Sheep website, 9 January 2009. Interview was conducted 24 November 2008. Reprinted by permission. As part of a series celebrating architecture on film, the Barbican recently screened the underrated British science-fiction film Code 46, which tells a tale of forbidden love in a city that is futuristic and yet very familiar. Just before he went onstage to do a Q&A following the screening, Michael Winterbottom discussed some of the film’s themes and ideas with Alex Fitch. AF: With Code 46, did you try to capture a particular architectural aesthetic that hadn’t been seen on film for a while? MW: No. When we were thinking of making the film it was much more about what the characters were doing, what the society was like. So it wasn’t so much about trying to find a look for the buildings or a style of architecture, it was about the function of the buildings and how the city was organized. It was to do with the relationship between the city and what was outside the city, between which spaces were safe and which weren’t, between the bureaucratic controls and complete lawlessness. It was more to do with those kind of ideas, which connect the story and the characters, than it was to do with looking for a particular style. AF: One thing that’s very interesting about the style of the film—in the program notes it’s described as “an architectural collage”—is that you mix shots of the Jubilee Line in London with shots of Shanghai and various other cities. When you set a film in the future, predicting what things will look like is very problematic, but making a city that’s “all cities ” gives it a kind of timelessness. MW: Yeah. The idea was that we’re in the future, but we’re not that far in the future, so we weren’t trying to imagine a society that had no 126 michael winterbottom: inter views connections to today’s society. Between the idea of making Code 46 and actually filming it, we did In This World, which is a film about refugees, and to a certain extent, some of the ideas about the landscape and the organization of the story came from working on that. Also, a huge percentage of buildings in London were there fifty years ago, so if you’re talking about a film set fifty years in the future, a large number of buildings from now would still be there. There’s more continuity than there is change in that respect. I wanted it to be very familiar, very recognizable , very real, and not a created world on a stage or on a set, but at the same time feel like you couldn’t quite pin down that it was like any particular kind of place that exists right now. That was the criterion: to find things that were interesting and made sense of the story and gave it a context, but were one step away from the real. AF: With that sort of retro-futurism, you seem to be following in the footsteps of Ridley Scott somewhat, by retrofitting buildings and predicting things that almost seem old the first time you see them in the film. MW: Yeah, to a certain extent, although this is different from Blade Runner . I think Ridley Scott’s a brilliant filmmaker but he was looking for an image and a style and we weren’t. We had the experience of doing In This World with the refugees that we had to get papers for—it was incredibly hard to get them across any border. So, the idea is that although things are difficult, and the environment is harsh, and the ozone layer is depleted so people don’t want to go out in the daylight, and it is very crowded, the city kind of functions. Outside, you have a chaotic desert, and all the outsiders are trying to get into the city, so instead of having the difference between different countries, you have just “the city” and “outside the city” replicated in lots of different places. So it was about looking for places that made sense of that idea and the specifics of the story, rather than looking for a retro style. What was brilliant about Shanghai as the core of the city in the film is that you have a whole...