Michael Winterbottom: Interviews

Wings of Desire

3 Wings of Desire Geoff Andrew/1995 From Time Out (London), no. 1304 (16 August 1995). Reprinted by permission. A busy man, Michael Winterbottom. Having already attracted attention for TV work like Love Lies Bleeding, the Roddy Doyle series Family, and the opening episode of Cracker he went on to make his first, low-budget (£400,000) theatrical feature, Butterfly Kiss, before following that with the BBC film Go Now (which premieres at the Edinburgh festival) and, currently in pre-production, a TV movie of Jude the Obscure. Right now, however, it’s Butterfly Kiss that’s of interest: an edgy, discomforting tale of two none-too-bright young girls on a murder spree in north-east England . Winterbottom made the film—which stars Amanda Plummer as volatile psychopath Eunice and Saskia Reeves as Miriam, a naive homebody whose admiration for her new-found mentor impels her to indulge, even to become an accomplice to Eunice’s murderous deeds—in close collaboration with screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, with whom he had previously worked on the TV dramas The Strangers and Forget About Me. The inspiration for the story was twofold: “The true story of a guy who’d killed his baby boy—his wife had forgiven him but he couldn’t forgive himself—and Frank wanting to do something about an abusive relationship where, from the outside, you can’t understand why one person stays with the other but for some reason they just can’t leave. Our interest was in the relationship between Miriam and Eunice—we didn’t want it to be a psychological study of a murderer—and the killings actually came quite late into the story, as a series of tests for Miriam ’s belief that there’s good in everyone. So it was the consequences of, rather than the reasons for, Eunice’s actions that concerned us.” As seems inevitable these days in films about serial killers, Butterfly Kiss adopts a pretty non-judgmental attitude to Eunice and Miriam’s 4 michael winterbottom: inter views exploits, even going so far in its depiction of their male victims as to echo Miriam’s dismissal of one of them as “a pervert . . . who deserved to die.” Did Winterbottom feel the movie expresses a moral point of view? “It has no particular moral as such, but it is a moral film. Clearly, Eunice does feel she’s evil and needs to be punished, while Miriam runs around saying, ‘Look, I love you; if love can redeem sin, I am that person.’ But Eunice can’t see that. So it’s a perverse love story. “Of course, what Eunice does is terrible, and that’s acknowledged in the film; but one thing we didn’t want was to have Eunice make a big speech whereby you’d realize she’s actually a nice person but something had happened to her. We simply wanted to show Miriam proving her love. And it’s that love, hopefully, which will make audiences stay with these characters, who basically make the film quite hard to watch.” That Winterbottom and Boyce were keen to offer something rather more complex than your run-of-the-mill serial-killer saga may be gleaned from the fact that its two leads start calling each other “Eu” (you) and “Mi” (me), which ties in with Miriam’s assertion that her friend merely acts out the desires the rest of us dream of perpetrating: Eunice as the emergent id to Miriam’s repressed ego. “One thing that attracted us,” concedes Winterbottom, “was to take two opposites, neither of which is complete: Eunice is aggressive, experienced, Miriam does nothing at all. So that’s certainly one possible idea. But it’s not as if we wanted the film to be read in one particular way.” Likewise, on the conceit of producing a British variation on an essentially American genre: “We liked the idea of a British road movie, which is so anachronistic it’s a terrible idea. In Britain, you don’t have that same sense of a journey, of freedom, as you do in America. But Butterfly Kiss is about people going round and round, not going anywhere; everywhere looks the same, clogged with traffic. Miriam and Eunice don’t even have cars—half the time they’re walking along the side of the road! At the same time, it’s also a movie specifically set in the north-east, but we wanted to get away from those images...