Michael Winterbottom: Interviews

Michael Winterbottom

64 Michael Winterbottom Sheri Linden/2004 From The Hollywood Reporter, 3 August 2004. Reprinted by permission. Michael Winterbottom’s words pour forth in a high-octane rush, a fitting complement to his nonstop work behind the camera. The Londonbased director’s surfeit of creative energy has fueled four films in the past two years alone, and he knows what he wants to do next. In the decade since his striking big-screen debut Butterfly Kiss (which premiered in the United Kingdom in 1995), he’s proved to be not only the busiest British filmmaker of his generation (he’s forty-three) but, in the view of many critics and fest programmers, the most compelling and versatile. United Artists is readying Code 46, a visionary glimpse into the near future, starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton, for Stateside release August 6, while the sexually explicit Festival de Cannes entry 9 Songs continues to stir up controversy. In the midst of all this, Winterbottom and Andrew Eaton, his partner in the British-based Revolution Films, found time to executive produce Bright Young Things (ThinkFilm), Stephen Fry’s upcoming directorial debut based on an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, about an eccentric group of socialites in the 1930s. “You have to have films that you want to make,” Winterbottom says modestly. There seems to be no shortage of such projects for Winterbottom and his core group of collaborators at Revolution, chief among them Eaton and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce. “Lots of ideas come up, so we’re usually working on three or four different ideas for films,” Winterbottom says, adding that “because we make films quite cheaply, it’s easy to finance them.” Next, Winterbottom hopes to direct an adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century experimental novel Tristram Shandy. If all sheri linden / 2004 65 goes as planned, the project will reunite the director with Steve Coogan, who toplined 2002’s 24 Hour Party People, Winterbottom’s acclaimed valentine to the music-scene heyday in his hometown of Manchester, England. Winterbottom brought two films to major fests last year. Just weeks after winning the Golden Bear in Berlin for his docustyle drama In This World, he wrapped Code, which went on to premiere at Venice. While World is very much a contemporary, ripped-from-the-headlines exploration of the emigrant experience and Code a futuristic love story with a noirish twist, there’s an urgent sense of political reality that connects the two pieces. “They started from a completely different place,” Winterbottom says, but he adds that “by the time we made Code 46, we were aware of the connections, the social relationships within the film. Having made In This World, we drew on that experience to give a texture to Code 46.” Also part of the connective tissue in a diverse body of work is a shooting style that often brings a documentary feel to the proceedings. The use of hand-held cameras and a preference for available light lends piercing intimacy to the working-class family drama Wonderland, a 1999 Cannes competition title, as well as to the DV-shot World and Code, which was filmed mainly on 35mm. “When we were filming in Shanghai or India,” Winterbottom says of the globe-hopping, sci-fi love story, “we could go out and put Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton into the middle of the street and shoot there and be relatively discreet and be able to shoot without too much hassle.” That approach, which aims to make the camera “invisible” while heightening the actors’ freedom, plays a crucial role in Winterbottom’s controversial Songs. Made for a mere £100,000 ($182,000) without outside financing and “done as almost a hobby, a part-time project,” the film drew critical praise on its premiere earlier this year at Cannes—and lots of attention for its unsimulated sex scenes, which were part of its raison d’être. “The movies should be the obvious place where you can see people making love,” Winterbottom says. With its capacity for narrative complexity and visual immediacy, he maintains, mainstream cinema should be “where you can deal with the relationship between sex and love in a sensible and interesting way. Films are becoming incredibly conservative about how they show sex.” If it receives the British Board of Film 66 michael winterbottom: inter views Classification’s OK, Songs would be the most explicit film...