An Interview With 24 Hour Party People director Michael Winterbottom.

By Jeremiah Kipp

You could pick any member from the rogue’s gallery of characters that inhabit the mad Manchester music scene of 24 Hour Party People and make an entire movie solely about them. They run the gamut of being fiercely independent, brilliant, hilarious, larger-than-life, and even heroic.

There's the foppish television personality, Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan), who doubles as a record company impresario and compares the emergence of punk to the heyday of Renaissance Florence; the drug-addled troublemaker, Shaun Ryder (Danny Cunningham), who pioneered a new wave of dance music with his band the Happy Mondays; and the troubled young intellectual, Ian Curtis (Sean Harris), the lead singer of Joy Division, who took his life at age 23.

Director Michael Winterbottom’s new film documents all of them and more, yet the true protagonist of this vivid collage is the music that emerged from the industrial city of Manchester. The idealistic team that comprised Factory Records, including not only the bands but also the committed producers, managers and visionaries who brought it about, fused their political and artistic sensibilities (and a dash of cheekiness) to create a voice for the youth culture of Britain and changed the face of pop music.

Following a timeframe that charts the dawn of punk to the death of acid (1976–1992), these rock ’n’ roll visionaries are swept up in the party scene they created. Culminating in the infamous Hacienda Dance Club where the beatification of the beat reached its peak, their downfall comes hand in hand with their uncontrolled, hedonistic lifestyle. Whether their Quixotic dream brought about a playful revolution or merely self-destructive indulgence is left up in the air. As Tony Wilson says in the film, “We do things differently in Manchester. We let people make up their own minds.”

There’s logic amid all that chaos, which might also describe Michael Winterbottom’s diverse body of work. He made a disturbing impression in 1995 with his brutal “killers on the road” psychodrama Butterfly Kiss. His follow-up, Jude (1996), brought a sense of immediacy to the period film through his rigorous visual approach. The hand-held camerawork, making use of long takes, jump cuts, and an impulsive curiosity, became Winterbottom’s signature in films like Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), Wonderland (1999), and a haunting western set against the backdrop of the California gold rush, The Claim (2000).

Never one to sit still, Winterbottom is already working on his latest project The Silk Road, with locations in Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. But while working on The Claim in the northernmost regions of British Columbia, Winterbottom felt drawn to making a movie closer to home. 24 Hour Party People’s enticing club nights in Manchester were 15 minutes from the suburbs of Blackburn, where he grew up. “It was something I felt I knew, without having to think about it that much,” Winterbottom reflects. “This was about the music I was listening to as a kid. The characters in the film, from bands like New Order and the Happy Mondays, were a part of my generation. It’s good to have that time remembered.”

Jeremiah Kipp: When you and producer Andrew Eaton initially discussed making a film about music, you chose Tony Wilson and Factory Records as your subject. Did you share an enthusiasm for those bands and that time in Manchester’s history?

Michael Winterbottom: That was part of the attraction, being able to put all these fantastic songs in the film. The Factory attitude was essential, dealing with ideas like anarchy, chaos, letting people do whatever they wanted to do. They were in it for the fun, and didn’t treat it as a business. That was the big appeal, really. I remember Tony Wilson being on daytime TV at that time, doing the local news. It had always fascinated me that he had this entire double life running Factory Records and being a part of the nighttime music scene. If we had made the film about another record company, it wouldn’t be the same.

Kipp: 24 Hour Party People covers an expansive time period. What was the starting point for your research?

Anthony Wilson (Steve Coogan) attends a Sex Pistol's concert in United Artists' rockumentary 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE. Photo: Jon Shard.

Winterbottom: The first thing we did was meet with Tony Wilson and talk about the basic idea, because without his approval there was no film. We met a few times and he gave us hundreds of anecdotes. He was brilliant about putting us in touch with other people, too. Manchester is a big city, but the music world we were dealing with is quite small and everyone knows each other.

After interviewing everyone we could who was actually at Factory Records or the Hacienda, or were in any way involved, we wrote a draft of the screenplay. That was sent out to pretty much all the real-life characters we mentioned in the script. It was our hope to convey that the movie was a bit of a tall tale, a celebration of these real people and events. We wanted to make people happy with the way we were telling it and not fuck anyone off, even though it’s impossible to keep everyone happy. On the whole, especially after we started filming, people gradually got more and more on board.

Kipp: It must have been a daunting process figuring out the structure, since there’s so much information to choose from.

Winterbottom: Rather optimistically, I imagined it as a collage of music from all the bands in Manchester at the time, or at least all the Factory bands. We tried to shape things by having the film split into two halves, with the turning point being Ian Curtis’s death. The first part follows Tony Wilson and Joy Division, with Tony feeling as though he’s on the periphery because he’s not part of the band. He hasn’t grabbed all his chances that first time around, so he goes overboard during the second half of the film. Things shift a bit when the Happy Mondays show up. Tony tries to join in with that band, so he’s doing a ton of drugs with them and things spiral out of control.

Kipp: In the film, Tony Wilson describes himself as being an observer in his own story. In a way, the music seems like the protagonist — and the characters are there to service that experience.

Winterbottom: Most of what Tony says in the film is the sort of stuff Tony would tell us. He does like to hold the limelight, but at the same time would say things like, “The movie shouldn’t be about me! It should be about Ian Curtis and Shaun Ryder and [recording studio producer] Martin Hannett. I’m not interesting. The music is interesting.” We put that disclaimer into the film, not because it’s true but because it’s typical of Tony.

Obviously, people have their own view of things, and their own attitude toward Tony Wilson. Some people we spoke with would mention him and say he’s a cunt, a bastard, a twat, and all this other stuff. In the end, the British advertising campaign for the film had a picture of Ian Curtis with the inscription, “Genius,” a picture of Sean Ryder that read, “Poet,” and a picture of Tony Wilson that said, “Twat”.

Kipp: Your story allows viewers to see the importance of people who were not musicians, like Joy Division’s manager Rob Gretton (played by Paddy Considine).

Shirley Henderson and Steve Coogan co-star as Shirley and Anthony Wilson in 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE. Photo: Jon Shard.

Winterbottom: When you talk to anyone in Manchester, Rob Gretton is a huge hero. No one has a bad word to say about the man. Once we’d talked with a few people, it became clear he was to be a main character. It’s interesting because in the traditional rock ’n’ roll film, the bands are creative geniuses and the record company people are the shits that exploit them. I’m sure that’s true in many cases, but what was nice about Factory was that it didn’t have that shape. We could have characters be people like Rob Gretton who run the record company, and show their enthusiasm for the music. They simply love it. It was a nice irony being able to show the Happy Mondays not giving a shit about the music and just wanting to do loads of drugs. The record company actually cared more about the music than the band did, at least on the surface. It was nice to not tell the typical movie, but that’s what emerged from the actual stories people told us.

Kipp: Does the fast, do-it-yourself aesthetic of video compliment a story about the emergence of punk, which had a similar ethos?

Winterbottom: You’re certainly right that the idea was to make the film in the spirit of Factory, which is essentially the spirit of punk — and although their music isn’t punk, that was their starting point. That’s what excited them enough to say, “Fuck it! Let’s all go off and do what we want to do!” Within the filming, I tried to give the actors as much a sense of that as possible.

Using digital video helps, but the key in terms of how we made it was to not use any lighting really, or to only use the lights that existed within the club during those scenes. We would give each of the actors radio [microphones], allowing them to talk at the same time — with two people talking in one corner and two in the other. We’d shoot the entire scene in one go. It was that freedom that motivated us, allowing the actors to roam around and have the camera do what it wants to. That can be done on 35mm or 16mm or DV.

Kipp: Right, but the entire look, color, and texture of DV is completely different from film.

Winterbottom: Video does have a certain look, it’s true. At the beginning of the project, we knew there was archive footage we wanted to use, some on tape and some on film. I wanted to have different textures. When our director of photography Robby Muller came on, he was keen to stick mainly with DV. We did shoot a bit of 16mm and 35mm here and there, but on the whole we chose to use DV. We wanted to have different textures within the film where you jump from one scene to another and have a change, rather than it all being seamless. The nature of having many characters over a long period of time seems to suit that, really.

Kipp: What choices did you make in shooting the different concert sequences? One of the Joy Division songs was done in black and white. And when you recreated the Sex Pistols performance at Lesser Free Trade Hall, the entire scene looks like stock footage.

Winterbottom: That’s because some of the Sex Pistols scene was lifted from the archival footage, shot on Super-8 — or Standard 8, in fact. Instead of a choice about style, it was about finding a certain way to do it if we wanted to use that content. That dictated the entire process of our filming, which was good. It was much better for us to have The Sex Pistols in archive footage from that concert than it would’ve been if we tried to dress people up and pretend. But that meant we had to try and make the scene around that stock footage seem close enough that you could feel like it’s in the same area.

The shooting style does change as the movie goes on. With the Happy Mondays, the Hacienda, and the emergence of the rave scene, we wanted more saturated colors as a change from the Joy Division scenes. They are different eras, but the tone is dictated by the nature of what things were like. People wore different colored clothes in 1990 than they did in 1979.

Kipp: How did you go about making the concert scenes feel authentic?

Winterbottom: Peter Hook from New Order lent us bits of gear to help those scenes look right, and Martin Moscrop from [the Factory band] A Certain Ratio was the film’s music supervisor. He got the actors to play their instruments as well as they could, even though most of it was done through playback. But by the time we shot those scenes, the actors in those bands could play the songs. We would film the concert scenes with four cameras a couple of times in front of a crowd, taking all the versions of the tracks that we could find. We’d play them out to the PA system on the day we filmed, so we would have the original recording and the PA room recording. Then we’d vary between the two to find a more or less raw sound.

Kipp: It must have been an interesting process for your actors, since they’re playing real people — and some of them are well known.

Winterbottom: In terms of casting, there were several constraining factors. You think to yourself, “Do we have to cast someone who looks like that character? Are they able to sing or play a musical instrument? Can they act?” We also wanted to cast as many people from Manchester or Northern England as possible. In the end, we didn’t go for look-alikes. But it was interesting, because as we went along they seemed to become more and more like the people they were playing. There was some interaction between the bands and the actors playing them, which seemed to help quite a bit. The actors playing Joy Division and New Order met up with [guitarist/songwriter] Bernard Sumner and [bassist] Peter Hook. Paul Ryder and Rowetta from the Happy Mondays were actually in the film, so the actors were able to hear their stories and get to know what they were like.

The great thing about being in a band is you know each other really well, since you start when you’re 14, 15, 16, or whatever. By the time you’re doing records, you’re incredibly intimate and know everything about each other. A film is the opposite of that, where people come together for 8 or 9 weeks then disappear. To provide an environment for the actors, we tried to make it as much like they were in a band as possible. They all hung out when they weren’t filming together and would go off partying every night. There wasn’t a lot of difference between their time off set and on. Fortunately, the actors got on well together and still do. I think they all kind of decided that being in a band would be much more fun than being in the film.

Jeremiah Kipp is a freelance journalist based in NYC.

Links:
Official site, www.partypeoplemovie.com