Michael Winterbottom: interview

Gleefully flitting between wry comedy, arthouse porn and probing drama documentaries, Michael Winterbottom makes filmmaking look easy, even in locations like Iran, Pakistan and Sarajevo. With his Brangelina-backed movie about the abduction of journalist Daniel Pearl about to hit our screens, he tells Dave Calhoun how he does it

The last time that this writer was in Genoa it was for a different kind of story. It was a blistering weekend in July 2001 and 30 filmmakers from the left of Italian cinema – among them Gillo Pontecorvo, director of ‘The Battle of Algiers’ – had gathered to make a collective documentary on the protests unfolding in the shadow of the G8 summit. As the demonstrations turned nasty, the Italian police resorted to tear gas and violence while protesters began hurling bricks and burning buildings. Now, back in the city six years later, I’m dodging an altogether different danger: I’m on the set of Michael Winterbottom’s new feature, ‘Genova’, and trying my hardest not to become an unwitting extra in the film.

'Welcome to Sarajevo'

It’s not easy: the director and his tiny crew are whirling a camera around a busy seaside bar in an effort to capture the reality of the buzzy, Sunday-evening vibe as drinkers spill out on to a terrace and, every now and then, I find myself trying to cover my notebook and appear as Italian as possible. Genoa is no longer threatening but, in itself, that makes Winterbottom’s presence seem out of place. His record is one of filming challenging stories in challenging places: he made ‘Welcome to Sarajevo’ in post-war Bosnia in 1997 and ‘In This World’ by travelling cross-country through Iran in 2003.

‘There are things that are very pleasant about being in Italy, but you still have the same hassles and worries,’ says Winterbottom, keen to play down the idea that he’s on a Mediterranean busman’s holiday. ‘It’s not as different as you’d imagine. Each day you’re still trying to get stuff on film. I think it’s probably nicer for my producer.’

Winterbottom has been shooting in the northern Italian city all summer, exercising his familiar, documentary-style tactic of inserting actors into real locations and letting his small, handheld camera roll on long scenes with minimal technical fuss. It’s a style of filmmaking that the Lancashire-born director has long been developing, and now even Hollywood wants a piece of his particular vérité act as he prepares to release ‘A Mighty Heart’. It’s the film version of the memoirs of Mariane Pearl, whose husband Daniel, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped and decapitated by Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan in 2002. The project made headlines at this year’s Cannes when lead actress Angelina Jolie (who plays Mariane) and co-producer Brad Pitt (whose company Plan B bought the rights to her book) hit the red carpet to support its premiere.

Angelina Jolie (as Mariane Pearl) and Winterbottom on the set of a 'A Mighty Heart' (© Alistair)

The film is a co-production with Paramount, an American studio, yet in style and substance it’s a natural successor to Winterbottom’s recent post-9/11 investigations, ‘In This World’ and ‘The Road to Guantanamo’, both of which he shot by travelling to Pakistan and recreating real lives in front of his camera. ‘We’d held out from doing films with American studios for so long, but this was too good a story and too good an opportunity for us,’ says Andrew Eaton – Winterbottom’s producing partner – of their first collaboration with a studio. ‘Paramount specifically said that they didn’t want to change the way we worked.’

Winterbottom – 47 years old and a veteran of 18 feature films – is surely Britain’s busiest director. By the time you read this, he’ll have started to edit ‘Genova’, the tale of an American man (Colin Firth) who, after the death of his wife in a car crash, moves to the Italian port with his two young daughters. While ‘Genova’ inhabits the cutting room, posters will be appearing for ‘A Mighty Heart’. It’s become a truism for observers of the director’s career to comment on how he never seems to stop working. Now, watching Winterbottom and his loyal crew move about the bar with a minimum of fuss – no lights, no cordon, no nonsense – it’s easy to see why he’s able to make so many films (12 in the past ten years, from ‘Welcome to Sarajevo’ to ‘A Cock and Bull Story’, via ‘Wonderland’, ‘24 Hour Party People’ and ‘9 Songs’): he and Eaton just get on and do things. They’re impatient, energetic people who would rather be shooting an adequate experiment than spending three years planning a masterpiece. That, and they have a smart eye for a good story (or ‘anything we can get the money for’, as Eaton describes it) – whether it’s their current plan to adapt ‘Murder in Samarkand’, the memoirs of former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, or their ability to move rapidly with newsworthy stories such as that of the ‘Tipton Three’, the three British Asians who were sent to Camp X-Ray and whose experience became the documentary ‘The Road to Guantanamo’. The latter they made for television, as it ensured a more rapid turnaround from idea to screen.

'24 Hour Party People'

As the sun sets and the crowd grows larger, Winterbottom looks intently into a monitor that’s strapped over his shoulder while his director of photography, Marcel Zyskind, moves quietly around the bar with a small camera. It’s not until 2am that Winterbottom arrives at the hotel for a chat. It’s been a tough evening: he says it’s never easy to shoot in uncontrolled locations, not least when your young actors are enjoying a drink. ‘We’re towards the end of the shoot, so it’s not a good time to know what I think of it. By this point, I just want it to end.’

I ask how he manages to make so many films. ‘I think what’s happened is that there’s always something we want to make and, from my point of view anyway, it’s easier and more fun if you’re making a film than if you’re not,’ he reasons. ‘Because if you’re not making a film, it just means that you’re trying to get one made. And trying to get one made is really boring. Also, we do make films reasonably simply and cheaply, which helps. If you want 50 million quid, it’s harder than if you want 5 million, and I think if you’re a director on your own, you’re at the mercy of a producer; but with Andrew and us, who run our own company, we decide what we’re going to do next and then behave as if it’s definitely happening and maybe take a bit of a risk financially. If we’re determined to make it, that’s half the battle really.’

It was last summer that Winterbottom shot ‘A Mighty Heart’, first for three weeks in Pakistan and then a further five in India.The project came together rapidly: Brad Pitt’s production company contacted them in May with a finished script that needed rewriting. Winterbottom then spent the next couple of months collaborating with writer Laurence Coriat, who also wrote ‘Wonderland’ for him. They went into production in July: Winterbottom first filmed on location in Karachi with Dan Futterman (who wrote the ‘Capote’ screenplay) playing Daniel Pearl and returning to real places such as the restaurant from which the journalist was kidnapped. The second, principal half of the shoot took place in Mumbai and largely in a house in a well-heeled, gated community which doubles for the home used by the Pearls in Karachi. It’s within the walls of this house that most of the film unfolds as investigators, both American and Pakistani, search for the missing journalist until Mariane finally receives the news that he’s been killed.

With Jolie playing Mariane and the unusual involvement of an American studio, you could be forgiven for expecting a different film from Winterbottom’s recent lo-fi escapades, both foreign and domestic (most notably ‘9 Songs’, which tested the boundaries between arthouse and pornography by telling a tale of two London lovers through explicit sex). But the style is familiar – frenetic, complex, with a documentary edge – and Jolie manages a committed performance that doesn’t jar with the seriousness of the story.

Winterbottom is quick to defend the film as very much one of his own. ‘It was made with a small crew, a handheld camera, with minimal lighting on set, and all the stuff in Pakistan was shot like “In This World” or “…Guantanamo”. We were running around the streets of Karachi grabbing what we could get and inserting Danny Futterman in the real locations. Also, “…Guantanamo” was about three British people caught up in the American response to 9/11 and now “A Mighty Heart” is about a person caught up in a sort of Muslim terror which, in a way, was itself a response to the American response to 9/11.’

Eaton remembers being in the middle of filming ‘In This World’ in Peshawar when they heard that Pearl had been killed. He already felt some affinity with the subject – his father was killed by the IRA in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It was also Eaton who took a finished cut of the DVD to Mariane Pearl, who was involved in early discussions about the film and now lives in Paris. ‘I sat behind her as she watched it and she was physically shaking a couple of times. She said that we’d made a really beautiful film but she found it hard to talk about.’

It’s Eaton, a clubbable and intelligent producer, who drives me around Genoa, ferrying me from the hotel to the set and back again and making sure I see everything that I can. I ask him how it is that he and Winterbottom succeed in producing so many films within an industry where so many filmmakers seem to struggle? ‘Maybe I’m just over-sensitive, but I remember one critic saying that “the problem” with Michael Winterbottom is that he makes too many films,’ he says. ‘That’s a really weird thing to say. I don’t know what he’s supposed to do. This is his job, so it wouldn’t occur to him suddenly to stop. And he’s not good at being bored. He’s more annoying when he’s on holiday than when he’s working because then he’s got too much time on his hands.

‘I don’t know: it feels sometimes like we’re making it up as we go along, but I think the key is to stay flexible. It’s easy for me to say we make it up as we go along, but it’s also easy to belittle the fact that we’ve got really good at it and we work fucking hard. It would be wrong to trivialise it and say it’s easy. I’m proud that Michael hasn’t run out of ideas and I don’t think he ever will. As you get older and your experiences change, you become interested in different things.’

‘A Mighty Heart’ opens on September 21.

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