'Glastonbury' feature

Director Julien Temple tells Dave Calhoun how making a Glastonbury doc almost gave him a nervous breakdown.

Apr 17 2004

In June 2002, the Glastonbury music festival was under threat. Pressure from both the police and the local council had forced festival founder Michael Eavis to construct a £1 million 'super-fence' around the site, and the authorities were watching carefully to see if gatecrashers still managed to invade it. It was far from certain whether the festival would ever happen again.

Mindful of posterity, Eavis asked Somerset-based filmmaker Julien Temple ('The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle', 'The Filth and the Fury') to capture the 2002 festival on film. Temple shot 250 hours of footage, but afterwards, instead of consigning this to Eavis' archive, he had the idea of making a different film about the entire, 36-year history of the festival.

Funding for 'Glastonbury' was a long time coming, but Temple shot more footage at the 2003, 2004 and 2005 festivals and also invited festival-goers to send in their own films and videos, from which he selected extracts to feature in his anarchic documentary.

Here, Temple talks to Time Out about a documentary born of the edit room and a muddy field in Somerset.

'It's a bit like a spaceship'
I proposed to Michael Eavis that rather than make a film about one year of the festival, we make a film about the history of the whole festival. I liked the idea of using Glastonbury as a mirror of the immense changes that we’ve been through in these three and a half decades. It’s a bit like a spaceship that’s travelled on this strange journey.

'The whole ethos was to assemble a mountain of film and jump in'
We put out a call for footage from the entire history of Glastonbury on the festival website. The whole ethos was to assemble a mountain of film and then jump in. I knew we'd get a response but I didn't know we'd get an avalanche of padded envelopes flying out of garages and attics and flying through our door.

'I was a bit catatonic in the cutting-room'
I lost it completely when watching the 1,400 hours of footage (including all the live-feed from the BBC). I thought I was having a mid-life crisis. I went to a very dark place. I've never been a depressive person and I just lost the will to engage after a while. I was editing it in my sleepless nights. I'd lay there and try to look at footage in my head. I was drowning in film. I was a bit catatonic in the cutting-room. It was bad.

'It's like how you play be-bop…'
I didn't want the film to have a narrator or any chronology or titles. I wanted to tell it from the crowd's point of view. One way of arranging material was to tell the story of one weekend – to start with the morning, then the afternoon, then dusk, then night, then dawn… A whole weekend. It was restricting, but it gave me some way of organising it, and from that I was free to jump around the history of the festival. It's like how you play be-bop, this approach to editing.

'It just becomes completely hollow and sycophantic'
Michael Eavis was very hands-off. He said, 'It's your film, make it the way you see it and I'll see it when it's finished,' which was great. You can't do a job where you're being told what to do by the person you're making the film about. It just becomes completely hollow and sycophantic. When people commission filmmakers to make films about them, and then get involved in the process, it's horrible. I've seen it happen.

'Our film is really an ad for Stella Artois on one level'
I had a responsibility to show the contradictions and downsides of the event. There are people who won't go any more because they think it's such a sell-out. You could make a film destroying Glastonbury. On the other hand, you could make a weak celebration of it. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. People have fought hard to keep the ethos of the event alive, and they have both failed and succeeded. There aren't many places like Glastonbury in our culture. You're not sitting around the festival and worshipping a giant beer bottle like at Reading, you know? Then again, our film is really an ad for Stella Artois on one level; it's not the official beer (that's Budweiser), but everyone walks around drinking cans of Stella in the film.

'I didn't want to wheel out Robbie Williams'
It's not a music film. Music is the fuel for the spaceship basically. In fact, I don't see any of my films as music films; I just think music is a good way of exploring the world. When picking which performances to include, I wanted to stay well clear of Glastonbury 'anthems'. I didn't want to wheel out Robbie Williams. That would be horrible. I also didn't want to include just my own cult favourites. The music is there to resonate with ideas going off in the film. I'm not a huge fan of Björk, necessarily, or David Gray. The best thing that could happen with this film, and it's happened at a few screenings, is that there'll be a kind of 'Rocky Horror' thing and the audience will shout at the screen. Certainly when David Gray comes on, there's been booing or screaming. I put him in there to wind people up.

'Ketamine is not the same as ecstasy'
I didn't want to overdo the drugs. I know that everywhere you look, it's going on, and that's part of that free space idea that still exists at Glastonbury. There are very few places where large numbers of people can do that anymore. I wanted to celebrate that and the contradiction of the Methodist farmer letting this happen in his garden. It's such a mad thing. I wanted to have fun with it, the idea that Michael thinks he can kid us that he doesn't know. Some people say there are too many stoned people in the film, but I think they're all saying something very different. Each tells a story. They're all on lots of different drugs. Ketamine is not the same as ecstasy. The drugs change over the decades too. It's another way of telling the story.

'Glastonbury' is out now.

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