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Making it for love not for money

By Simon Hattenstone
April 21 2002

Keeping it simple: Michael Winterbottom

Michael Winterbottom looks a little cross when I ask him how he has managed to make so many films in so little time. "I don't make that many films," he says, defensively.

I tell him it's meant as a compliment, and he relaxes. "One reason I make quite a lot is ... one thing that's quite hard to do in film-making which in music you can - it's inherent in the process - is to work with a small group of people, collaborators."

Words tumble from his mouth in hopeless fragments, like so much scree. He's extremely bright, likeable and interesting, and he can't string a sentence together for toffee.

If we're talking about prolific, he says, he'd cite one of his all-time heroes - Lindsay Anderson, the legendary British film director who gave him his first break. Anderson was anything but prolific, I say - he made a couple of great films and then snuffed it. Precisely, Winterbottom says. "Lindsay was a hero of mine. His films were great, but watching Lindsay argue for six months with, say, Wham's managers ... he loved the conflict, he loved being the outsider - not only in his attitude to the establishment but also deliberately f...... around and pissing people off." So, he says, he learned a very important lesson from Anderson - how not to do it.

He names another hero - Ingmar Bergman, who provided a more useful lesson. After working with Anderson, Winterbottom spent six months in Sweden trailing Bergman for a documentary. "There you have the opposite: a small group of collaborators who worked together and he would maybe direct three plays in the winter, run the theatre company, write the script for a film in summer - sometimes he'd write two scripts for summer - then he'd edit them in the autumn. Bergman wrote and shot 55 films or whatever, as well as his main career being in the theatre, and he did that because he had a small team of collaborators and there was no finance-raising whatsoever. He didn't make Star Wars, he made "four actors in a room", so the cost related to the audience."

Winterbottom has a new film out next week - 24 Hour Party People. Other Winterbottom films include the lesbian heist movie Butterfly Kiss, his impressionistic portrait of London life, Wonderland, his western The Claim, his war film, Welcome to Sarajevo, and his adaptation of Hardy, Jude.

He is a promiscuous genre-hopper. Subject-wise, his films have nothing in common. And yet there is a recognisable Winterbottom style - a studied messiness, a desire to move between film and video, to confuse and explore. He tends to make the gritty poetic and the poetic gritty.

24 Hour Party People very loosely follows the Bergman template. It is written by long-term collaborator Frank Cottrell Boyce, and produced by Andrew Eaton - the team. Winterbottom grew up in Blackburn, in the north-west of England, and the bands featured in the film were the soundtrack of his youth.

The film shows how financial incompetence killed off Factory records. Owner Tony Wilson was a corporate know-nothing, who didn't even own the music rights to his bands. Yet at the same time, you can't help admiring him - he didn't own the rights because ownership was against the spirit of the adventure: he was in it for the love, not the money.

It's an attitude Winterbottom empathises with. As far as he is concerned, too much money destroys the final product. He says he hates the idea of perfection and neatness. "I like things that are not entirely coherent and consistent." At times, say in Wonderland, it works in his favour - the end result is a quite beautiful mess. In 24 Hour Party People, the approach is not quite so successful - the film is unsure of its tone and ends up more Spinal Tap than the proud tribute to a heroic failure that he'd envisaged.

But again, that's part of the philosophy - go with your instinct, and before you have time for regrets you're on to the next movie. Working as part of a team enables him to be prolific. "As a director, if you're working with lots of different producers, you're always wondering, 'Are they going to get the money now?', and they're always thinking, 'Are you going to go off and do something else or not?' The gap between films for many directors is not because people are spending five years polishing the script; it's hanging about getting the money."

Winterbottom loves the European system, used most effectively by the likes of Bergman, Fassbinder and Rohmer, where the money made by the last film is enough to finance the next film. The problem with Britain and America, he says, is that it is all controlled from the top down, by financiers who know everything about accountancy and nothing about the film-making process. If you make a successful film, you're given twice the budget for the next one - "and when you make a box-office turkey, you're sent all the way back down the snake".

Has Winterbottom never been tempted to make a big-budget film? No, he says, and then he remembers he has done - kind of - and he didn't enjoy it. The original budget for The Claim was US$35.5 million (A$70 million). "It ended up being US$21.3 million, so it was the biggest budget I'd worked with, and the one where the shortage of money was the most problematic. In the end, we had to take 20 pages out of the script the week before we made it to try and make it shootable. It's like we can make a film at US$2.8 million and shoot the script, but at US$28 million we have to cut the script by 20 pages." He stops dead, still baffled.

Winterbottom's film company is called Revolution Films. I ask him why. "Well you've got to call it something," he says sheepishly. "No, it would be great to make revolutionary films, but ..." He embarks on an intricate argument with himself about what a revolutionary film would be, and the possibility of making one. "If you want to be political, you have to do something in the mainstream, something that is going to affect a number of people. Something like Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home was bold in terms of the way it was made and the story it told, and it had a big audience because it was made for TV. But look at Ken Loach's stuff now: it's less bold and has a small audience and doesn't have as explicit a political agenda. You can't do the stuff he was doing then. I grew up watching his stuff on TV and I thought it was brilliant and radical."

As he was watching Loach films, he also became a political activist.

"I remember sitting in the Labour headquarters in Blackburn and there was a guy who drove a bus, a well-known local activist, and two of (Labour politician) Jack Straw's mates from London were up there, and this guy - every night for 50 years, he'd been out campaigning for the Labour Party, and he left the room, and these two guys were going on about what an idiot he was because he was a bus driver from Blackburn and they thought they were so clever. And that's what's happened to the Labour Party - it's just full of people who don't really have any connection with the people they're supposed to represent."

These days, Winterbottom dismisses himself as "one of those terrible people who moans from the sidelines and doesn't actually do anything about it". But there is more than one way to be political. For his next film, he is going back down the $2.8 million route - he's off to Pakistan to make a film about Afghan refugees trying to get into London. He admits it's not the most commercial project. "Is it going to play in multiplexes? No, obviously not. Is it going to play anywhere? Probably not. But the point is it will be interesting to do, and if you've got something interesting to do, then why wouldn't you want to do it? I want to do what I want to do rather than what's good for my career."



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