Michael Winterbottom: Interviews

Introduction

ix Introduction Within minutes of meeting Michael Winterbottom, even the savviest journalist learns one thing about the affable, boyishly handsome British filmmaker: he doesn’t like to be pigeonholed. Asked a personal question , he demurs. Loath to psychologize his characters or intellectualize the artistry behind his craft, Winterbottom often reverts to the plainest language he can find to address questions about style and motivation. “It’s just a story that interests me,” might be the commonest refrain of the interviews gathered in this book, regardless of whether they appeared in mainstream newspapers or highbrow film journals. It isn’t that Winterbottom is willfully evasive or contemptuous of the newsmedia discussion format. Quite the contrary: he’s consistently garrulous and enthusiastic when speaking to the press, quick to laugh and brandish his Lancastrian wit, always conscientious about elucidating what he can, within certain limits, without ever coming off as overearnest or self-absorbed. Though fluent in literature, world politics, and film history, his responses tend to focus on describing the work at hand, the technical process and actual circumstances in which his cinema is created, rather than the big ideas or social issues they engage. It’s as if he worries that prattling on about sociopolitical themes and deeper layers of meaning will overwhelm what for him is absolutely essential: the stories, the relationship between characters, the sense of lives being lived onscreen. And for all his restless energy, expressed as much in his light-speed conversational style as in the pace, breadth, and scope of his prodigious and notably eclectic artistic output, traits only the rare interviewer fails to mention, Winterbottom prefers to keep things simple, as authentic as possible. One of the first times we met, shortly after he finished shooting his big-budget period Western The Claim, he remarked in an interview included in this volume (Smith 2000), “If you have dreams as a director, you don’t want to be worried about how your dreams will be interpreted. If you’re having the dream, you don’t necessarily want to be analyzing x introduction them. I don’t start off with a particular end product or message in mind, or feeling like I must do a film now that exposes things, or that is more political or more social. I look for the logic of the story to point the way toward how the film should be made.” Winterbottom’s propensity for keeping things simple in his approach—working with small crews, available light, handheld digital cameras, radio mics, and minuscule budgets—belies the dramatic complexity and often disorienting kineticism of his films, which are firmly rooted in the dizzying milieu of the varied locations he shoots in. Apart from the docu-realist authenticity these techniques afford in capturing the specificity of place, which have come to define his preferred working mode from Wonderland on down to A Mighty Heart and Genova, they also allow him to work with fewer constraints than most filmmakers. He’d rather be out in the streets than locked on a studio lot surrounded by people and lighting equipment, or waiting for line producers to cordon off public spaces and then coordinate masses of extras. The fewer the limitations and barriers, the more immediate and visceral his films become too, and the happier he is, a point he returns to again and again in these interviews. No wonder so many of his movies (Butterfly Kiss, Welcome to Sarajevo, In This World, The Road to Guantánamo) have taken the form of a road journey. Early in his career, Winterbottom explained to Time Out’s Geoff Andrew some of the basic underlying principles of his first feature film, Butterfly Kiss, the story of two wayward young women on a killing spree, set along nondescript highways in northeast England: “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 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 of red-brick towns and beautiful dales. It’s the anonymity of the place that...