INTERVIEWS AND FEATURES

JULIEN TEMPLE - MOFFOM 2006

"I love the social aspect of music... I love the idea of using music to fuel investigations of wider aspects of the world."

Noted director Julien Temple spoke to MOFFOM Program Director Keith Jones while in Prague for a retrospective of his music films at MOFFOM 2006 organized with the support of the British Council and Hanway Films.

"The great thing about the Sex Pistols was the people the attracted. The scenes in Oxford Street that summer were wonderful. The sun sets at Marble Arch, and so you get that incredible shaft of light, a very epic feeling. I remember Sue Catwoman walking in a see-thru raincoat, backlit in the sunlight down this Victorian Street. They were like a Velcro ball that attracted all these other people: it was like a snowball rolling down a slope."
Julien Temple on the summer of 1976
Taken from Jon Savage, England's Dreaming, Faber and Faber 1991

KJ: One of the things that was really striking in the Jon Savage book was your quote about the visual style of punk, how the weather conditions influenced the clothes that appeared in the summer of 1976, and how that unique visual look then in turn inspired you to make your first film.

JT: Well, it was an amazing freak summer, you know, with this massive heat wave that went on for three months. The reservoirs ran out of water, and you got this sense of the whole of Victorian London kind of melting in the heat, and people having to try to live outside. And along with the whole punk thing also a kind of café culture beginning, a kind of different way of living in London. One thing was that everything needed to come out from these dank, moist cellars that were actually growing fungus and mushrooms in the heat and the summer humidity, and the people seemed to be a bit like that as well. They kind of morphed into this very strange tribe of brightly dressed people, and I was really struck by that unusual image of the sun setting down Oxford Street and that very normal kind of shopping crowd blending in amongst these very strange figures moving towards the 100 Club.

KJ: At that time you were also going to film school. What was the first thing that you did to try to start filming and documenting that scene? How did you start to get into communication with that group of people?

JT: Well, I have this bizarre story about that. I came across the Sex Pistols rehearsing in a warehouse. I was walking around the empty docklands. The docks had already been closed for some time in London - they were still there back then but they've long gone since - but it was this amazing wasteland that was completely silent on a Sunday afternoon, and I heard in the distance these weird versions of Small Faces tunes being kind of wafted over the docks on the wind. So I followed that sound, very "Alice in Wonderland," down to this decrepit warehouse. And the door was open, and I went up the stairs and it just got stranger and stranger. This group were singing, "I want you to know I hate you baby" instead of "I love you baby," which at that time was like "What exactly is going on here?" It was one of those open stairwells, the kind that brings you right up into the floor, where your head comes up floor-worm level. And in that way I saw this strange band rehearsing up there. And it was the Sex Pistols.

KJ: What steps led on from that encounter, from encountering them at the rehearsal space to doing a film with them and Malcolm McLaren?

JT: Well, I asked them if I could get involved, because I was doing a little student film about Sixties London. I asked them because they were playing the Small Faces whether they'd do the soundtrack for it, and they told me to fuck off, basically. But... they were going to play a gig. So I went to the concert - and it was their second gig. The thing about it was that the crowd was just as interesting as the band, you know, with people like Sid Vicious and some of the Bromley Contingent, Siouxsie and characters of that variety. They seemed like these kind of cartoon, super-mutant X-Men or something. So I just decided to film that, really. We got a key cut to the camera room of the film school where I was studying so we could smuggle a camera out at night and have it back in the morning. Then we had to try and get past Malcolm McClaren, who wouldn't let anyone film the Pistols, so we had to smuggle this camera in and put it together in the toilets and sort of try and film from under your jacket, you know, that kind of thing. In the end we got busted by Malcolm but - because this was just me and a bunch of other art students - he realized that students with a free camera would be quite a good idea, actually, so he agreed to let us film it. In the end he even paid me a wage to do it. That was how I started working for him.

KJ: What was the first thing you did for McLaren and the Pistols? The short film that was later used as a sort-of opening act at the concerts on their first nationwide tour?

JT: That was called "Sex Pistols Number One" and it was really done at that time when they were banned and they weren't able to play for a while. We filmed a lot of stuff of them off of TV, and then cut it in with some other scenes we'd filmed. The idea was to show that whenever they couldn't play, at other punk gigs when the Pistols couldn't play, and eventually we used to show it before the Pistols came on. It was more about just letting people know what they weren't allowed to see, really. That was the whole idea behind it.

KJ: And how much of that ended up in "The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle"?

JT: Quite a bit of it, actually. We had this weird wide-angle, wide-shutter camera so we could shoot off TV screens without worrying about that flickering bar (in the image). I shot for two years in the end before we eventually made "Swindle", so it's bits and pieces grabbed whenever Malcolm threw any bit of money our way to do something. We would just film whenever, you know.

KJ: Which then became part of this fantastic visual style, a sort of quoting and grabbing things from the 1960s and recycling all types of ideas. Speaking of the visual style of the film, where did that amazing set come from for the "My Way" sequence? I know it's Paris, but what was the idea behind that?

JT: Well that was originally done for a TV show of French chansons, very traditional French songs. The singers would come down the lit stairs and sing along to a backing track. So it was there already and we persuaded them to give us an hour to shoot at lunchtime. Actually it was very funny, because just before lunch, the guy doing the song for that day was Serge Gainsbourg. He was singing a song about "Le Correspondence." I remember that well, it was about changing trains on the metro, following a girl and getting off one line before your own, just following some girl all around the Paris Metro. So he came down the stairs singing that, and then we had an hour with Sid. And the crew went off to lunch but Gainsbourg stayed behind, actually and he watched us. He was blown away by it, too. It was the first time he'd seen punk, and he was amazed by it.

KJ: And that was the inspiration for the punk sort of things he did after that, like on "Mister Iceberg", "Lady Heroine" and some of his reggae records?

JT: Definitely, I think he got really inspired by it. We used to hang out with him after that, because we were there for about a month trying to get Sid to record "My Way." Sid didn't want to record it. He didn't like the idea, and there had to be a big kind of deal struck between us where he would do the beginning like Sinatra if he could do the rest of it like the Ramones.

KJ: Well, it seems to have worked out in the end. Now that scene is quoted itself.

JT: Yeah. You could say that turned out rather nicely.

KJ: How did the animation sequences in the film come about? Because as you said, the band were sort of these cartoon-like characters to begin with, was that just a natural development?

JT: Well it wasn't natural at the time, because it was seen as a kind of cardinal sin to make super-cool rock and roll heroes into cartoons. Unlike today, where you have Gorillaz and projects like that and it's actually a cool thing to do. It was seen as kind of apostasy, as a very irreverent thing to turn someone as cool as Johnny Rotten into a cartoon. But it came out of desperation basically, of not having any footage of all these crucial moments in the history of the band. We needed to tell the story somehow. I had some friends at the film school who were studying animation and I roped them in to do it.

KJ: That whole combination, of documentary and concert scenes with the animation and also the obviously scripted sequences with McLaren and his sidekick, must have seemed pretty strange to audiences at the time. What were the responses to the film among the critics of that era?

JT: The good thing was that it was very split in terms of opinions. I think a lot of people hated it, which was good, but a lot of people liked it. We got some great reviews, actually. "A Dagger Up the Arse of the Establishment" was the headline in the Sunday Times. It was also called the "Citizen Kane of rock and roll movies," which was even more bizarre. Although part of the thing we were riding on was the Orson Welles movie, "F for Fake". We made the "Swindle" movie to kind of enrage the fans, because things had gotten to the stage where they were kind of worshipping the Sex Pistols in a way that people had worshipped bands before, which wasn't quite punk. So the "Swindle" involved was also that idea to kind of swindle the fans, as well as the record companies and the managers who were swindling the band in the first place. There were all these sort of onion layers of swindling going on around the entire project. Just like "F for Fake".

KJ: But then again, you're talking about actively swindling the record company, which it obviously is about - McLaren makes that quite clear in the film. But not long after that you started doing a lot of music videos and started to work extensively with record companies, which was sort of the birth of the music video era. How did you jump from swindling the industry to working for it?

JT: It was quite difficult for me, actually, because the Rolling Stones approached me. In England when you make a film you have to have a screening before the film gets certified, so that anyone can go to and object to it. It's part of getting the censor to sign off on the certificate. It was weird for the "Swindle" because I went to the screening and there was virtually no one there. There's never anyone there. Except that time, there was this one guy in a raincoat sitting in the back, and when the lights came on it was David Bowie, and he was saying "I want you to do a video for me." And then came the Rolling Stones...and I felt really bad about it, because they weren't exactly punk. I mean they were the Rolling Stones! And I didn't want to work with them. So I wrote this treatment for their video. I'd just been in Grenada, where they'd had a revolution, and I'd seen all these CIA types hanging around swimming pools and things, so I write this bizarre treatment that I thought they'd never do. It was kind of an elegant way of getting out of doing the Rolling Stones video, to give them a hardcore political sort of treatment that they would never think of doing. And of course they did. They liked it, so I ended up working with them. And of course I had loved the Stones as a kid, and I felt that it was a moment where Keith Richards had been out of action for about ten years and was just waking up and reasserting his role in the band, so it was actually quite a nice time to work with them.

KJ: That video ("Undercover of the Night", Rolling Stones Records 1983) was kind of a pioneering thing, because it was the first sort of "cinematic" music video. It was a kind of slightly longer format, using a narrative model... .

JT: I edited it that way by making the song longer. I didn't tell them, but we stuck an extra minute in the middle of the sing. They didn't notice, actually.

KJ: And around the same time you did these fabulous things for the Bowie videos, which were like these miniature epics, more than five minutes long.

JT: Well, the good thing about that beginning of the video period was that the record companies didn't have a clue really, about what film was... or about anything, really. As long as you got along with the artist you could get away with a lot, at least at that time. And there was something nice about it, you know, because the "Swindle" had taken three or four years to do. So there's something nice about the idea that you think of something to shoot and then two weeks later it's gone all around the world. That instant gratification was at the time quite exciting. And you felt you were involved in making the rules, inventing the grammar. You know, it was a form that hadn't been done before, so you felt that you were doing something new. Today I'm very ambivalent about videos. I think they really fucked things up on one level, but on another level, if they're good, then they're really good.

KJ: Would you do one now?

JT: Well, I'm doing one next week, for Babyshambles ("The Blinding", Capitol Records 2006). Good old Pete. If he turns up, that is...

KJ: So if you were doing that sort of thing, with the rapid turnover of music videos, all these things which were brought out in two weeks - for the Stray Cats, Dexy's Midnight Runners, numerous bands - how did that enormous buildup around "Absolute Beginners" come about? Because that's obviously a very well thought out and orchestrated sort of symphony of colors and movement and music. It was really a very ambitious project, one that had all the style and form of music videos, just played out in a much bigger form, with the production values of the great MGM musicals.

JT: The novel by Colin MacInnes was always a very interesting book, I felt. That book is remarkable because it's about the beginning of pop culture in England near the end of the '50s. It was interesting to me because it was that period before the Beatles and before that whole worldwide understanding of British pop music. It was also this time where there was the beginning of a kind of teenage consciousness, where teenagers had a certain degree of independence, both financially and philosophically.

KJ: And it also deals with the black British phenomenon, which was just emerging as well.

JT: Yeah, it was the beginning of that, with the impact of people who had come to Britain from the Caribbean in the early '50s coming through style, really. It's again that thing of Victorian London being changed by music, because these people brought fantastic music with them. Not just jazz, but ska and early Jamaican roots music. So it was a film about the beginning of teenage culture in England, and that was obviously something I was really interested in. I love the social aspect of music. That to me comes from the mid-1960s, when I first connected with music as a kid. It was a fantastic window on understanding the world, this window of music with bands like the Kinks, or the Stones, or the Who, or the Small Faces. That era was when I really connected with music. It was really directly involved in your life at that time, especially if you were growing up in London. I love the idea of using music to fuel investigations of wider aspects of the world.

KJ: It must have been damned expensive to make.

JT: It was 9 million quid, which I guess was a lot at the time for a British film. But, you know, it was worth it.

KJ: That set you up for a bad fall, though. The self-appointed style merchants of the press slated it. It was quite a backlash...

JT: I was run out of town, man! I had to go to America. That was rather weird...

KJ: All the way to Hollywood! But I really like the film. I think it holds up well today. Twenty years later there are still things that seem really remarkable about it.

JT: There are some good things and some bad things. I wasn't really happy with the casting.

KJ: The opening sequence was amazing, though. How did you physically manage to do it?

JT: Well, we had this amazing set, you know, that was built from the start with the idea of doing that shot, but the real secret of it is rehearsing it. You know, a lot. We got it on the fourth take, which wasn't bad, but we did a week of rehearsal to get it right. It was very heavily coordinated.

KJ: How much track was involved in setting it up?

JT: Well, we didn't use any track, as it was all done by steadicam. It was quite an early use of steadicam, at least in terms of using it like that. But it did involve the steadicam jumping on a crane, and off a crane, and going through taxicabs...it was quite elaborate. And even with 9 million quid we had to have half the extras run out and get changed, and then within three minutes come back out dressed as someone else and do a completely different dance routine around the corner, where the camera would meet them again. It was very exciting doing a shot like that, because every element and every person involved in it was really crucial to hitting it at the right times.

KJ: You probably had to work very intensely to get the choreographer and the cameraman to work together like in the old days, which I think is probably a lost art. I don't think anyone does things like that any more, which is a shame.

JT: Yeah, I know. It was an amazing collaboration with everybody. There were a lot of different lighting issues, there was a lot of car action - cars had to pull up at the right place for people to go through them: open the door of the cab, get out quickly, the cab drives away and there's more dancing... but it was great. That's cinema, really. It's spectacle.

KJ: One thing about your latest film, "Glastonbury", which really struck me - and this is something I've noticed occurs a lot in your work - is this sort of long-reaching and much deeper way of making ironic references or connections back to earlier moments in English pop culture. There was a lot of that in "The Filth and the Fury" with the way you use Shakespeare and Graham Greene and Benny Hill, all mixed together as part of the background to the story. And similarly in the Glastonbury film, all those elements about Stonehenge and King Arthur and Celtic England and so on, it's done with a certain sense of humor, which is itself very English. I realized that this is actually something that runs through all these films, this quintessential Englishness, but presented in a decidedly mocking way, which comes through very strongly.

JT: Well, I think humor is the best ally for any subversive filmmaker, because it hooks people into ideas that may be a little bit more complicated than they realize. If you're laughing, you're understanding, in a way. And I think the danger with the work I do is that it can be quite dense, which is also good because you can watch a film more than once and maybe see something else in it. But to get them through that first viewing, humor is a good ally. And as you said, you mustn't take yourself too seriously. I think the best way of showing any film is in front of an audience. And that's also why I think there's something great about mating music and film, since they work so well together and help get people involved. You look at things differently when they're specifically brought together, as for an event like this. You can see them in a more concentrated way. I think it's a good idea all-around.

Julien Temple's newest film, "Joe Strummer: the Future is Unwritten" premiered in January 2007 at the Sundance Film Festival. Read a review here:
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/01/22/sundance_2/

The video for "Undercover of the Night" by the Rolling Stones can be seen at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sthRYIB91P8

The video for by "The Blinding" by Babyshambles can be seen at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDHnE8BnP4I