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academy interview
Not only does he remain one of Britain’s most productive filmmakers but Michael Winterbottom is also one of its most daring and consistently experimental directors.
Though conveniently linked by the liberating use of free- wheeling DV camerawork, his two most recent projects could not be more different. In other words, typical of an almost wilful- ly eclectic filmography which has embraced everything from Thomas Hardy (Jude) and sprawling American Western (The Claim) to gritty urban domestic angst (Wonderland).
Earlier this year, Steve Coogan starred in Winterbottom’s music- driven comedy-drama 24 Hour Party People, an inspired and inventive recreation of the turn-of- the-80s North West rock phenom- enon known as ‘Madchester’.
More recently the London Film Festival featured the premiere of In This World, his account – in, as he describes it, the blurred
boundary “between fiction and reality” – of an epic 4,000 mile journey from Pakistan to Britain by a pair of young Afghan refugees. Don’t call it a drama-documen- tary, an expression he clearly hates and one he claims is “redo- lent of really awful boring things.”
Both films were produced under the umbrella of his and producer partner Andrew Eaton’s Revolution Films which was set up in 1994 shortly before their first ever collaboration on the award- winning television drama, Family, written by Roddy Doyle.
Revolution is sited in a com- fortably informal open plan office where the Lancashire-born Winterbottom, an absurdly youth- ful – looking 41, is battling to be heard above the roar of road diggers in the North London street outside. In one corner, Eaton’s shooting pool while in another, they’re putting the final touches to a birthday cake.
Amid the digger din, Winterbottom enthuses about his
Afghan ‘road movie’ the idea for which was hatched during the lead up to the last election when “the attitude to immigration on both sides was so hostile. It seemed everyone could gain votes by slagging off refugees.”
“On the one hand, you’d read often tragic accounts in the paper of some of these people and their journeys to come here, the huge cost and the incredible risks they took, about their determination and hardship. On the other hand, you had all these politicians saying you should put them in prison and then send them all back.
“There seemed to be such a gap between the two. I thought maybe one could make a film showing the journey and if peo- ple saw it they might just look at refugees in a different way – not just as people from somewhere else who are here, who live in bad conditions, have no money and do no work and who, above all, have made this incredible effort to get here.
“Was I making a political film? We started off with lots of facts and figures and I’d quite like to have done a complete agit-prop movie with lots slogans banging us all over the head about how terrible it is we do this.
“In the end we do give some facts about the overall situation but, basically, it’s the account of a journey. If for an hour and a half you can imagine you’re in their situation, you might by the end of that just begin to question why it is we’re so hostile to them when they get here.”
This compelling if inevitably simplistic record of a hazardous cross-borders overland trek from a seething refugee camp at Peshawar to a London mosque was made all the more poignant by Winterbottom’s use of two authentic Afghan refugees, 15- year-old Jamal and his cousin, Enaya, six years his senior.
Then on the eve of the LFF, newspaper headlines screamed ‘Afghan boy turns movie role into
At a time when UK film production is patchy and domestic distribution even dodgier, director Michael Winterbottom is both prolific and a maverick. Quentin Falk corners him in Clerkenwell.
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