Michael Winterbottom: Interviews

Michael Winterbottom: Genova

135 Michael Winterbottom: Genova Colin Fraser/2009 From FILMINK, November 2009. Reprinted by permission. The small British town of Blackburn, Lancashire is mostly famous for two things: four thousand holes and one prolific director. Not that a young Michael Winterbottom filled his days counting to see if indeed there were as many potholes in his home town’s roads as John Lennon had famously sung about in the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life” (a task completed, incidentally, by a council worker reporting on the shabby state of Blackburn’s traffic system). Winterbottom had other things on his mind. Speaking down the line from his (hopefully hands-free) car phone, Winterbottom chatted with FILMINK en-route to his office in London’s digitally hip inner city suburb of Clerkenwell. He’s an enthusiastic man whose tumbling speech suggests a brain running faster than his mouth, as it tries to keep up with his prodigious output. That’s no small task given that he’s directed nineteen films since 1990, as well as a number of television programs. Winterbottom has two more projects in postproduction , and another two in pre-production. In between all of that, he has also found the time to have a family. Being a father, albeit an absent one (his ex-wife, author Sabrina Broadbent, documented their life in a novel about a character’s failed marriage to her notoriously forgetful filmmaker husband), is part of the inspiration for his latest film, Genova, the story of a recently widowed man who takes his daughters to Italy for a break. The road to Genova was, to continue the Beatles analogy, a long and winding one. Before the dawn of the multiplex, dirge-filled, dark-age movie shacks forced the inquiring Winterbottom to look elsewhere for entertainment. “There were only a couple of cinemas, and it was hard to see anything that wasn’t mainstream,” he says. “Maybe that was part 136 michael winterbottom: inter views of the attraction. You had to seek it out.” Fresh from film school in Bristol, Winterbottom got a job in a cutting room as an assistant editor. He learned the trade, and was soon directing drama for Thames Television . The mainstream, however, was not to his taste following formative years spent running 16mm prints of new German cinema at a film club in Oxford. “That’s where it all started,” Winterbottom explains. “You could see that they were quite simple really: they weren’t complicated films to make. The mechanics of projection are quite similar to the mechanics of filming—I got a sense of how it works.” In 1990, Winterbottom teamed up with screenwriter and fellow Thames alumni Frank Cottrell Boyce to forge what has since become a very profitable partnership. Starring Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner, Forget About Me marked their first collaboration (they’ve worked together six times since), and it has all the hallmarks that make a Winterbottom film: an intimate story, a small cast, and a tight crew working on a low budget. Conflict is at the heart of a film about two Scottish squaddies hitchhiking to a Simple Minds concert in Budapest. It all goes triangular when they both fall for the same Hungarian girl. Sexual relationships such as these, and some a great deal more complicated, are often a springboard for exploring the personal, itself a measure of Winterbottom ’s work. While it’s easy to tease out a few recurring threads, the overwhelming commonality when discussing Winterbottom is variety. Loathe to make the same film twice, he’s a director who happily tackles ideas as diverse as rock concerts and jailed terror suspects, with approaches ranging from guerrilla-styled shoot-and-run to the complexity of big-budget period drama and the suffering that entails (frost-bite in his case, on the snowbound set of The Claim). It’s the magic of never knowing what’s coming next that has made Winterbottom one of the most exciting directors working today. Is the challenge of diversity one that excites him? After a reflective pause, Winterbottom still isn’t entirely sure. “It has its problems,” he says. “If you make the same film each time, then people get an idea of what you make. They have an expectation. When you make a variety of films, it’s more complicated.” He stops for another rare pause before continuing at a rattling pace. “It’s more complicated on a practical level. It’s not a conscious thing that I...