Post by Fuggle on Apr 19, 2007 18:28:21 GMT -5
The directors: Julien Temple on filming Joe Strummer
Julien Temple in front of one
of the campfires in his new film,
'Joe Strummer:
The Future is Unwritten'
In the late ’70s Julien Temple filmed London’s punk scene while a student at the National Film School, eventually making ‘The Great Rock and Roll Swindle’ for Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols. Since then, he’s directed countless music videos (most recently for Babyshambles), made feature films including ‘Absolute Beginners’ and ‘Pandaemonium’ and returned to the Sex Pistols in 2000 to make ‘The Filth and the Fury’. His last film was ‘Glastonbury’, a freewheeling collage of images and a tribute to the festival. His next is ‘Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten’, a film about his friend, neighbour and Clash frontman who died from a heart attack in 2002 at the age of 50. Last week, Time Out visited Temple at home in Somerset.I was born the same year as Joe Strummer, so in a funny way I couldn’t help but go through some of the same moves as him. I didn’t go to a public school, but I guess you could say that my parents were middle-class. We shared certain things, like that pivotal moment in the mid-’60s when we were at school. The Kinks and the Stones and that whole London thing affected both of us. Then, later in the 60s, there was the hippy thing, although I don’t think I was ever as much of a hippy as Joe, who went the whole way. Then the squatting. We shared things in common.
I first became aware of Joe when I was squatting in Notting Hill, just as he was.
He was full-on. I’d come down from university at Cambridge and he was living it for real. I was aware of his first band, the 101ers, and I saw them at the Albion. His second squat was round the corner. I was aware of him, but I didn’t know him.
Then I got involved in the punk thing by meeting the Sex Pistols by chance. I was completely amazed to see Joe at the 100 Club, with his blonde hair, all punked out, totally unlike this hippy from before.
It was an amazing transformation. Then I saw the Clash. I was at film school by then and I was filming the Pistols. We would copy the key to the camera-room so we could borrow the cameras at night. We’d reassemble them in the bog of the 100 Club.
I filmed the Clash for about six months until early 1977, so the black and white footage in the new film is from then. I got to know them pretty well; Mick Jones was living in my flat. Joe was harder to get to know because he was always covering up his middle-class background. He was such a different person from before. He was wary of anyone who shared his past. He was wary if you weren’t an immaculately conceived punk, like John Lydon was.
I knew him pretty intensely during that period, but I was shooting the Pistols more and more and you couldn’t do both really because there was this rivalry. You were either in one camp or the other. You couldn’t work for Bernie Rhodes (the manager of the Clash) and for Malcolm McLaren. Other people started filming the Clash more, and over the next 20 years I only bumped into Joe very rarely. But I hung on to that footage.
I didn’t see Joe properly again until 1995 or 1996, when my wife – who co-produced the new film – said that her best friend from school was coming with her boyfriend to stay down here. Through the garden gate came Joe. It was hilarious. Later he said that he wanted to live here – and he did. He bought a farm up the road and we spent a lot of time together. I got to know him very well, we hung out together and had a great time. Through all that I really came to understand what the Clash were all about. Much more than I did before.
It was around that time too that Joe started going to Glastonbury again and the whole campfire thing became important to him. That’s why in the documentary we interview people in front of fires around the world. The eternal dilemma is how to avoid wrinkly old rock stars in armchairs wittering on. The flickering flame and the mystery of the face half-obscured give you a lot more drama visually. It’s also a great place to interview someone because they lose their self-consciousness when looking in the flames.
There’s also something about the circle around the fire. I wanted people to get the idea that Joe’s life did close a circle at the end. It was then that he allowed his whole hippy beginning back in, whereas during the punk time he cut it dead quite severely. Most importantly, I’d lived through these campfires with him and he made it clear that he thought they were the most important thing he’d ever done, more even than the music. He brought together people from madly different backgrounds: duchesses and priests and car-thieves and soldiers. It was distilled from Glastonbury, that’s where it started. He’d just say: Let’s have a fire. And he’d have one every other week! They’d go on for five days in his yard. For the film, it was a good way of getting the people who’d been close to Joe to feel part of it.
We all shared our grief when he died. It was so unexpected, he was so vital and alive. There was this sense of a bad stasis in people after it happened. For a while,
I don’t think anyone could do anything. We didn’t put on a memorial concert or anything. I never felt I would make a film about him when he was alive, but then I did feel that something could be done and should be done to communicate what this guy was about, to celebrate him. It was only after a couple of years that we could get our heads around being part of it.
The film was improvised. I had certain structuring ideas, like the fires and hearing his BBC radio show throughout the film. I wanted him to DJ his life as much as narrate it. But after that, it’s a journey into the unknown. You’ve got all this footage and you don’t know how you’re going to deal with it. It’s best to just get in there, start editing and find things that spark off each other. We did the same with ‘Glastonbury’. I like it, but it’s hard, it can feel like you’re drowning in all the options and it can get very depressing as you feel you’re getting nowhere.
‘The Future is Unwritten’ is definitely a more traditional film than ‘Glastonbury’. It has much more of an emotional pull. It’s the story of one guy and it has a more linear feel – I didn’t see the point in chopping up his life into a funny order.
People who knew Joe have a great honesty to them and incisive things to say about him. The interview with Mick Jones went on for five hours and was probably the hardest, but probably the richest as well: he had so much more at stake emotionally and creatively than anyone else. He wasn’t so worried about how he came across, but he was very worried that what he said about Joe was right.
I’ve never made a film about a friend before. You constantly wonder what he’d think: he’d probably hate the fact that I made the film in the first place. It’s a double-edged sword. You have this wonderful access and trust, but then you think: Fuck, I don’t want to let anyone down. On the other hand, you don’t want to make a fan-film, to blow wind up his bum. He wasn’t like that. The flaws and contradictions in Joe were his creative motor. That said, I’m not going to put him down. I loved him.
I’m going to do a film about The Kinks next. But after that I think I’ll have made enough music films. I’ve connected with all my subjects on a very visceral, personal level. That’s why I can make films about them. I couldn’t make a film about the Beach Boys, say. Not that I don’t like the Beach Boys, but they don’t shift things around in my head like the Sex Pistols did, or like Joe does.
"Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten’ closes the East End Film Festival at the Rio Cinema, Dalston on April 26.
The film opens on May 18.
Julien Temple in front of one
of the campfires in his new film,
'Joe Strummer:
The Future is Unwritten'
In the late ’70s Julien Temple filmed London’s punk scene while a student at the National Film School, eventually making ‘The Great Rock and Roll Swindle’ for Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols. Since then, he’s directed countless music videos (most recently for Babyshambles), made feature films including ‘Absolute Beginners’ and ‘Pandaemonium’ and returned to the Sex Pistols in 2000 to make ‘The Filth and the Fury’. His last film was ‘Glastonbury’, a freewheeling collage of images and a tribute to the festival. His next is ‘Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten’, a film about his friend, neighbour and Clash frontman who died from a heart attack in 2002 at the age of 50. Last week, Time Out visited Temple at home in Somerset.I was born the same year as Joe Strummer, so in a funny way I couldn’t help but go through some of the same moves as him. I didn’t go to a public school, but I guess you could say that my parents were middle-class. We shared certain things, like that pivotal moment in the mid-’60s when we were at school. The Kinks and the Stones and that whole London thing affected both of us. Then, later in the 60s, there was the hippy thing, although I don’t think I was ever as much of a hippy as Joe, who went the whole way. Then the squatting. We shared things in common.
I first became aware of Joe when I was squatting in Notting Hill, just as he was.
He was full-on. I’d come down from university at Cambridge and he was living it for real. I was aware of his first band, the 101ers, and I saw them at the Albion. His second squat was round the corner. I was aware of him, but I didn’t know him.
Then I got involved in the punk thing by meeting the Sex Pistols by chance. I was completely amazed to see Joe at the 100 Club, with his blonde hair, all punked out, totally unlike this hippy from before.
It was an amazing transformation. Then I saw the Clash. I was at film school by then and I was filming the Pistols. We would copy the key to the camera-room so we could borrow the cameras at night. We’d reassemble them in the bog of the 100 Club.
I filmed the Clash for about six months until early 1977, so the black and white footage in the new film is from then. I got to know them pretty well; Mick Jones was living in my flat. Joe was harder to get to know because he was always covering up his middle-class background. He was such a different person from before. He was wary of anyone who shared his past. He was wary if you weren’t an immaculately conceived punk, like John Lydon was.
I knew him pretty intensely during that period, but I was shooting the Pistols more and more and you couldn’t do both really because there was this rivalry. You were either in one camp or the other. You couldn’t work for Bernie Rhodes (the manager of the Clash) and for Malcolm McLaren. Other people started filming the Clash more, and over the next 20 years I only bumped into Joe very rarely. But I hung on to that footage.
I didn’t see Joe properly again until 1995 or 1996, when my wife – who co-produced the new film – said that her best friend from school was coming with her boyfriend to stay down here. Through the garden gate came Joe. It was hilarious. Later he said that he wanted to live here – and he did. He bought a farm up the road and we spent a lot of time together. I got to know him very well, we hung out together and had a great time. Through all that I really came to understand what the Clash were all about. Much more than I did before.
It was around that time too that Joe started going to Glastonbury again and the whole campfire thing became important to him. That’s why in the documentary we interview people in front of fires around the world. The eternal dilemma is how to avoid wrinkly old rock stars in armchairs wittering on. The flickering flame and the mystery of the face half-obscured give you a lot more drama visually. It’s also a great place to interview someone because they lose their self-consciousness when looking in the flames.
There’s also something about the circle around the fire. I wanted people to get the idea that Joe’s life did close a circle at the end. It was then that he allowed his whole hippy beginning back in, whereas during the punk time he cut it dead quite severely. Most importantly, I’d lived through these campfires with him and he made it clear that he thought they were the most important thing he’d ever done, more even than the music. He brought together people from madly different backgrounds: duchesses and priests and car-thieves and soldiers. It was distilled from Glastonbury, that’s where it started. He’d just say: Let’s have a fire. And he’d have one every other week! They’d go on for five days in his yard. For the film, it was a good way of getting the people who’d been close to Joe to feel part of it.
We all shared our grief when he died. It was so unexpected, he was so vital and alive. There was this sense of a bad stasis in people after it happened. For a while,
I don’t think anyone could do anything. We didn’t put on a memorial concert or anything. I never felt I would make a film about him when he was alive, but then I did feel that something could be done and should be done to communicate what this guy was about, to celebrate him. It was only after a couple of years that we could get our heads around being part of it.
The film was improvised. I had certain structuring ideas, like the fires and hearing his BBC radio show throughout the film. I wanted him to DJ his life as much as narrate it. But after that, it’s a journey into the unknown. You’ve got all this footage and you don’t know how you’re going to deal with it. It’s best to just get in there, start editing and find things that spark off each other. We did the same with ‘Glastonbury’. I like it, but it’s hard, it can feel like you’re drowning in all the options and it can get very depressing as you feel you’re getting nowhere.
‘The Future is Unwritten’ is definitely a more traditional film than ‘Glastonbury’. It has much more of an emotional pull. It’s the story of one guy and it has a more linear feel – I didn’t see the point in chopping up his life into a funny order.
People who knew Joe have a great honesty to them and incisive things to say about him. The interview with Mick Jones went on for five hours and was probably the hardest, but probably the richest as well: he had so much more at stake emotionally and creatively than anyone else. He wasn’t so worried about how he came across, but he was very worried that what he said about Joe was right.
I’ve never made a film about a friend before. You constantly wonder what he’d think: he’d probably hate the fact that I made the film in the first place. It’s a double-edged sword. You have this wonderful access and trust, but then you think: Fuck, I don’t want to let anyone down. On the other hand, you don’t want to make a fan-film, to blow wind up his bum. He wasn’t like that. The flaws and contradictions in Joe were his creative motor. That said, I’m not going to put him down. I loved him.
I’m going to do a film about The Kinks next. But after that I think I’ll have made enough music films. I’ve connected with all my subjects on a very visceral, personal level. That’s why I can make films about them. I couldn’t make a film about the Beach Boys, say. Not that I don’t like the Beach Boys, but they don’t shift things around in my head like the Sex Pistols did, or like Joe does.
"Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten’ closes the East End Film Festival at the Rio Cinema, Dalston on April 26.
The film opens on May 18.
