There will be few Union Jacks flying over the Croisette this year: the Cannes
Film Festival is almost totally a British film-free zone – bar two notable
exceptions, both focusing on rock gods. One is a biopic, the other a
documentary.
Having its world premiere as the opening film of the prestigious Director’s
Fortnight will be Anton Corbijn’s Control, the hotly
anticipated screen biography of Ian Curtis, singer with Manchester postpunk
legends Joy Division. Also showing in Cannes will be Julien Temple’s
terrific documentary on the late Clash singer Joe Strummer, The Future
is Unwritten.
After the recent celebrated biopics of Johnny Cash and Ray Charles the fast
lives and early deaths of iconic rock stars clearly remain a perennial
fascination for festival organisers and audiences alike. Strikingly, Curtis
and Strummer were almost exact contemporaries and arguably the two most
important British music figures of their times. One became an enduring
symbol of psychic torment and unrealised potential, the other a rousing
rebel-rock icon who retreated from the limelight, only to die on the brink
of a major career revival. Both now enjoy worldwide reverence among music
fans.
Similar in style to his groundbreaking eulogy to the Sex Pistols, The
Filth and the Fury, in 2000, Temple’s portrait of Strummer is a
remarkable collage of rare family footage, performance clips and late 1970s
social context. In a smart sleight of hand it is narrated by Strummer
himself in a loose audio narrative pieced together from archive interviews.
It also features a starry collection of first-hand testimonials from friends,
musical partners and famous fans. Martin Scorsese, Bono, Johnny Depp and a
cast of thousands all pay their respects to the former Clash singer’s
everyman appeal.
“Joe retained a connection with his audience all around the world,” Temple
says, “a big audience of people who felt they had a kind of closeness with
him. He did insist on remaining human and flawed and contradictory and in
touch with other people. A lot of famous musicians lose that, and it’s quite
easy to do, the bigger you get. Joe was a very big star. He wrestled very
deeply with it.”
The personality cult based on Curtis is distinct from most live-fast,
die-young rock stories. An intense, charismatic figure assailed by
depression and epilepsy, he retains a huge global following almost three
decades after his death. Curtis committed suicide on the eve of Joy
Division’s first American tour in May 1980. He was 23.
He scored his largest commercial success shortly after his death with the
evergreen despair anthem Love Will Tear Us Apart, and the small
canon of Joy Division songs he left behind defined the jagged, brutal,
modernist aesthetic of postpunk. He informed many of the biggest rock bands
of the 1980s and 1990s, and helped to inspire everyone from U2 to Nirvana,
Moby to the Killers. When Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994 and Richey
Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers ominously disappeared a year later,
fans were quick to invoke Curtis as their dark forefather.
Control, filmed in monochrome, is based on Touching From a
Distance, the 1997 memoir by the singer’s widow, Deborah Curtis.
Ironically, this flagship for British talent at Cannes is directed by a
Dutchman, Anton Corbijn, and produced by an American, Orian Williams.
It stars the virtually unknown Sam Riley as Curtis and Samantha Morton as
Debbie, and was partly shot in the singer’s native Macclesfield. But Joy
Division’s central Manchester rehearsal room, immortalised in the Love
Will Tear Us Apart video, was recreated in a Nottingham warehouse. I was
there last summer when Corbijn shot a key scene in which the band learn that
they have been booked on the fateful American tour that apparently plunged
Curtis into his final depression.
The London-based Corbijn, making his debut as a feature director, spent most
of the 1980s as a photographer at the New Musical Express, where
his instantly recognisable signature style of grainy textures and deep
shadows earned him the nickname “the Dutch Master”. He then moved on to
shooting videos, conceiving album sleeves and designing stage shows for
numerous superstar bands.
Although best known today as image-maker in chief to U2 and Depeche Mode,
Corbijn’s connection to Joy Division is an obsession spanning 30 years. It
was the cult Manchester quartet who caused him to move to England
permanently in the late 1970s.
“My theory is that music really mattered here in people’s lives,” Corbijn
says. “People are so poor that it was a way out, a matter of living or dying
almost, whereas in Holland it always seemed like a subsidised hobby. When
Joy Division came out it was so fantastic. I just had to go to England, to
be where that music comes from.”
Within weeks of arriving, he persuaded Joy Division to grant him a photo
shoot, producing some iconic monochrome shots that would later immortalise
the band’s stark and gloomy image. But it was only after the singer’s
suicide that these early portraits were hailed for their eerie, prophetic
intensity.
“Nobody would publish it,” Corbijn recalls, “but the band liked it. When Ian
died, NME suddenly wanted to put the picture on the front. It was
like a premonition.”
Both Deborah Curtis and her daughter Natalie, who was just 1 when her father
committed suicide, visited the set and gave their blessing to Control.
Even so, the film-makers had to tread carefully in covering the singer’s
darker side, notably his adulterous affair with Annik Honoré, a Belgian fan,
that spanned the eight tormented months leading to his suicide.
“The one thing we told Debbie early on is we want to tell the truth, as
best as we can,” says Williams. “We want to tell Ian’s story, not Debbie’s
specific story. Even though it starts from the book we want the band’s
input, we want Annik’s input. Debbie and her never met, and probably never
will.”
Williams and the screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh met Honoré while researching the
film. Curtis was still strong in her memory. “Ian wrote letters to her
constantly,” Williams says. “I’ve seen those letters and they were sad,
beautiful, lonely. It was a huge deal. He loved Annik and I know she loved
him.”
Reborn as New Order after Curtis hanged himself, the surviving members of Joy
Division have approved the script and supplied sound-track music. However,
the bass player Peter Hook lambasted Corbijn for his hands-on methods last
year. “We don’t tell him how to direct, why is he telling us how to make
music?” Hook protested. “The band are supportive of Anton, period,” Williams
insists. “We met with New Order several times. They read the script, they’re
aware of the story we are telling. They know Debbie’s book.”
Control was shot on a tight budget of less than £3 million. Williams
initially showed the idea to some Hollywood studio executives, but the
box-office appeal of a black-and-white film about a long-dead cult singer
eluded them.
“Various people said, ‘Get an Alist actor! Make it big!’” Williams laughs. “
‘Black and white? No one sees black and white . . . Anton who?’ A couple of
them even said, ‘What if you told it from the perspective of if he were
still alive, looking back on his life . . .?’ So stupid.”
The Joy Division story has already been told on screen before, as one subplot
of Michael Winterbottom’s irreverent Factory Records postmortem 24
Hour Party People. The Factory founder Tony Wilson has a producer credit
on both films, although the two are very different in tone and focus.
As part of his research for playing Curtis, Riley visited the Epilepsy Society
in London to study the effects of the seizures that, he feels, contributed
to the singer’s suicidal depression. “The side-effects of the medication
could be pretty soul-destroying,” Riley says. “Being in love with two women,
the fear that comes along with epilepsy, the future and the unknown . . . I
think it was just a massive combination. It was all too much for him.”
If Corbijn’s Control and Temple’s The Future is
Unwritten share any common ground it is that both were made by directors
who knew and loved their subjects. The difference between Strummer and
Curtis, argues Temple, is that “Joe was a tough, survivor kind of guy”. His
film doesn’t flinch from showing contradictory sides of the Clash frontman,
who was loved and hated at the same time. And while the Joy Division singer
wore his psychic trauma or all to see, the Clash singer internalised his.
“Joe had a dark, introverted aspect which he normally didn’t show that much,”
says Temple. “But it was there. I didn’t want to wash a lot of dirty linen
in public but I did want to make a film that would be useful to people who
didn’t know him. I’ve always felt that he was a kind of philosopher.”
The 60th Cannes Film Festival runs May 16-27 (www.festival-cannes.fr
).
Two different worlds tore them apart
Kevin Cummins, photographer and close friend of Ian Curtis:
The film’s not going to offer me a huge insight into Ian’s life. It’s loosely
based on [Curtis’s widow] Deborah’s book, but I think the film’s been taken
out of her hands a bit.
They’ve made Ian’s affair with Annik more central, apparently. Ian and Deborah
were just kids when they got married and the book isn’t about living with a
rock star and the marriage falling apart; it’s about two kids who got
married too young and then drifted apart because their worlds changed.
They should just rerelease the first two albums. That’s far more biographical
than any film made by people who didn’t know him that well.
Ian’s lyrics were pretty dark and onstage he’d get lost in that darkness
sometimes. Being close to him, either onstage or in front of the stage, was
quite dangerous. You didn’t know what was going to happen.
