Michael Winterbottom: Interviews

People Who Are Excluded from Society: Interview with Michael Winterbottom

9 People Who Are Excluded from Society: Interview with Michael Winterbottom Michel Ciment and Yann Tobin/1996 From Positif, no. 430 (December 1996): 23–28. Reprinted by permission. Translated from French by Leighton Walter and Catherine Chomat. Q: What is your background? A: My family is from Lancashire, where my mother was a teacher and my father worked at Philips. We lived in a big housing complex next to a small town. The television was always on; this was how I discovered not only old films, but also the young English directors of the seventies, like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Later, I was a regular at local cinema clubs. Q: Was the choice of the Northern English countryside in Butterfly Kiss and Jude connected to your upbringing there? A: Yes, and that of Frank Cottrell Boyce, the screenwriter of Butterfly Kiss, who’s from Liverpool. It was our first feature film, and to better our odds [we chose] to shoot this unusual story in familiar places. Q: You started out by studying literature at Oxford. Were you already thinking about a career in film? A: Not yet. I was simply someone who liked movies. It was at the university cinema club that the idea germinated. After Oxford I was in Bristol , where I took film courses. I was then hired as an assistant editor for television movies. Then Lindsay Anderson did a documentary on British cinema for which I was documentarian. After this, I made several small films for television and two documentaries on Ingmar Bergman. Q: Were they personal projects? A: With my producer I proposed them to Channel Four. I was lucky because of circumstances. In fact, it was especially during the preparation , when I immersed myself in his films over six months, that I really 10 michael winterbottom: inter views became passionate, not only for Bergman’s oeuvre, in its immensity and diversity, but especially for his way of working, of controlling everything . Q: Have you met him? A: We did not film him, but he gave us several early films he had shot, and he recorded a little voice-over. He had the right to look at the editing , and we showed him the film for approval. There were two hourlong films, shot around his sixtieth birthday celebration in 1988: One, Magic Lantern, based on his personal films, was interwoven with extracts from his Mémoires in voiceover, and the other based on interviews with his collaborators. Q: Was there a cinematographic school or trend that particularly influenced you? A: The new German cinema during my years in the cinema club: Fassbinder , Wenders. In shooting Butterfly Kiss, I thought of their way of filming places that weren’t cinematographic in and of themselves, of their sense of the atmosphere of a place. Q: What was your first experience with fiction? A: It was a half-hour television program for children, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, titled True Romance—a little boy dreams of a love story with the neighbors’ daughter, but she’s too old for him. We continued with another film for children, Strangers [1989], and Forget About Me [1990], my first television feature film, which was shown at several festivals —a love story. Then Under the Sun [1992], with Kate Hardie, about a nineteen-year-old girl who decides to travel around the world, but doesn’t get any further than Spain. Q: How much freedom did you have in the choice of subjects? A: A lot of freedom. I was very lucky. I have to say that the budgets were small, but were sufficient for shooting under the right conditions. The screenplay of Under the Sun was rewritten as filming progressed in Spain. The actors were young and not particularly experienced—like me! We could allow ourselves to make mistakes without suffering any consequences. Love Lies Bleeding [1992] was an autobiographical story by Ronan Bennett, about a prisoner out on a day leave, his connections with the Irish Republican Army, which he’s part of, and with his girlfriend . Jimmy McGovern was the author of Cracker, a series for which I did the first episode, “The Madwoman in the Attic” [1993], with Chris Eccleston in the role of a criminologist who plays the detectives—an enormous success in England. michel ciment and yann tobin / 1996 11 Q: Like many British filmmakers, you know how to move from one topic to...