Michael Winterbottom: Interviews

Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland

38 Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland Anthony Kaufman/2000 From indieWIRE, 28 July 2000. Reprinted by permission. In Michael Winterbottom’s wistful family portrait Wonderland, starring a cast of stellar U.K. thespians (Gina McKee, Molly Parker, John Simm, Shirley Henderson, Ian Hart), the British director does for South London what Short Cuts did for Los Angeles. Ten ordinary characters in search of an exit, looking for meaning and contentment against the backdrop of London’s everyday sights—the Southwark Bridge, the Elephant & Castle roundabout, the Brixton cop shop—banal places somehow made familiar , vibrant, and beautiful. A sense of community suffuses this South London universe, culminating in a fireworks show where the illumined faces of strangers provide a humanity not seen since the children of Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows gleefully watched their puppet show. Referencing the French New Wave is not such a stretch for this grit-inspired flick; shot on the fly for just under $2 million with handheld cameras on 16mm film, it owes more to “cinema vérité” than British kitchen-sink realism. Director Winterbottom expounds on his already eclectic career, from his adaptation of Jude the Obscure, to his acclaimed war drama Welcome to the Sarajevo, to his upcoming goldmine epic love story, starring Wes Bentley and Milla Jovovich, formerly titled Kingdom Come. (For a deeper look into that production, their website is not to be missed, www.kingdomcomemovie .com, which includes call sheets, rushes, continuity lists, virtual tours of the set, notes from the production team, editing stats, and now a voting area to choose the new title—Sierra Nevada is currently in the lead.) Winner of Best Film at the British Independent Film Awards, Wonderland was originally owned by Universal when it premiered at the 1999 anthony kaufman / 2000 39 Cannes Film Festival; it eventually ended up in the laps of USA Films, who have been putting off the release for many months and are finally opening it today in New York and Los Angeles. From Cannes, Winterbottom spoke to indieWIRE’s Anthony Kaufman about the working class, shooting handheld, the lush Michael Nyman score, and happy endings. indieWIRE: There’s a tradition of British films looking at the working class in the U.K.; what was your take on it with Wonderland? Michael Winterbottom: The film isn’t about the material conditions . It’s not an essay on the plight of the working class. I don’t want these people to be explained so much by economic things; I wanted to go beyond that. The world of the movie is just like the world I live in, in London. Part of the attraction was just to get on film what it’s like living there at this moment. So I don’t see a picture of London in the film as being this alienating or alienated, bleak wasteland. I think for me, they’re all just struggling to find some connection with other people, struggling to not be lonely, to have someone in their life, to love someone , to be in touch with their parents or their children or whatever. That’s the same for everyone. iW: How did that relate to you shooting 16 mm handheld? Did you ever consider shooting on video? Winterbottom: We did think about video. I wanted it to be widescreen , which was one issue. But also, if you shoot on video and show it in the cinema, when you watch it in the cinema, it’s quite visible, it’s quite a heavy technique. I just thought it would be too much of a barrier between what’s happening in the film and you watching it. I didn’t want to advertise the technique as much as when you shoot on video. Obviously, the 16 mm is very soft, and we shot X-chrome sometimes, so that’s even softer, and because we had no lights and we’re shooting at night, it’s quite grainy. We were aware of that happening, and we did a lot of tests on it, but even so, I still feel it’s a softer thing than a videoto -film transfer. iW: Was it mostly natural light? Winterbottom: It was all available light. Sometimes, during the night interiors, they would change the light bulb and put a brighter light bulb in. But we didn’t have any lights with us. iW: Were you thinking at all about Dogme 95? [18.190.156.212] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 04:27...