2005 01 15 Guardian Guide "Control"

ORIGINAL ARTICLE - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/jan/15/popandrock

Johnny Sharp hopes an Ian Curtis film won't tear fans apart

Despite existing long after the advent of colour photography, Joy Division are a band who seem to have only ever existed in black and white. Maybe that’s because their beautifully bleak music often sounded like it was recorded in black and white. But it’s probably more to do with the fact that all the best-known images of the band are stark monochrome portraits. And while Joy Division became the considerably more colourful New Order, one of their number was left behind, forever frozen in those images.

Since his suicide in 1980, Ian Curtis has looked down from many thousands of college room walls, a grey icon of alienation. So it’s kind of appropriate that a film of his life is to be directed by Anton Corbijn, whose pictures (along with those of Kevin Cummins) did so much to make Ian Curtis an icon. He captured the vulnerable, troubled look Curtis had off-stage, and the perma-startled mania that possessed him on it.

Corbijn moved to England from his native Holland in 1979 with the chief aim of shooting Joy Division, his favourite band. His first attempt was in a tube station, with the band walking off into the neon-lit tunnel, as if to “Unknown Pleasures” in keeping with the title of their debut album.

“[Those pictures] are connected now to his death,” he says, “especially the one where he looks back. It looks like a premonition, but of course I had no idea — it was purely an idea finked to the title of the album.”

Ian’s widow Deborah has more bittersweet memories of the man. Touching From A Distance, her 1995 biography on which the film is loosely being based, debunks the rock’n’roll myth by revealing Curtis as a manipulative, controlling and often cruel individual with an unsavoury fascination for the Third Reich.

Yet this unromantic approach bodes well for the film, suggesting Control (the working title) will paint a picture of the singer that goes deeper than that of the cliched tortured genius, while Corbijn’s involvement suggests the charisma of the man as a performer won’t go unappreciated.

Other positive signs include the appointments of Deborah Curtis and Factory supreme Tony Wilson as executive producers of the film, and Matt Greenhalgh, whose credits include Clocking Off and Burn It, as screenwriter.

Nevertheless, casting could be a tough call. Rumours finking Jude Law with the role have been mercifully ruled out, while other candidates have apparently been vetoed by Deborah Curtis. They could do a lot worse than check out Sean Harris’s brief but effective performance in 24 Hour
Party People.

As for the music, there’s talk of inviting bands to do covers, but Wilson admits, “I’d prefer to somehow use the original tracks.” Wouldn’t we all?

Either way, 25 years after his death, we may finally get to see a monochrome legend in living colour.