2007 09 "Control" Feature Observer Music Magazine

 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/sep/16/popandrock.joydivision

NORTHERN LIGHTS

How to make a film about the short and tragic life of Ian Curtis? On set, and talking to the cast and to members of Joy Division, Paul Morley reports. Exclusive photographs by the director of 'Control', Anton Corbijn

001

Steven Morris cannot believe it. When he talks about what he's lived through as a simple, dedicated drummer, first Joy Division, then for New Order, he can start to sound like a post-punk Victor Meldew, increasingly indignant at the chaos that unfolded all around him mainly because he found himself, through no real fault of his own, a Factory Records recording star. Don't get him started on the Hacienda, the Manchester nightclub his two groups helped finance, early in the Eighties, for up to £10,000 a month, where he never got a free drink in eight years. He still hasn't really recovered from the time 27 years ago when Ian Curtis, his 23-year-old Macclesfield friend, and the singer in his band, killed himself the day before Joy Division were due to start their first American tour. Both his producer, Martin Hannett, and his manager, Rob Gretton, died in the Nineties, and now, would you credit it, the immortal-seeming Tony Wilson, boss of his record company, the crusading mouth of Manchester, has joined his comrades in the great Factory in the sky.

Steve acts as if he has been singled out for the strangest kind of persecution. And the farcical pain doesn't stop. In 24 Hour Party People, a conceptual comedy in at least 100 parts directed by Michael Winterbottom, Morris, just a plain, hard-working northern drummer with a stupid fondness for a quiet life, had to suffer the indignity of seeing himself played by an actor. And now - bugger - it's happened again. Anton Corbijn, the singular Dutch photographer and video maker, has made Control, a film observing this fussed-over Manchester era more through the young life and sickening death of Ian Curtis than the unique tactlessness and tactics of Wilson. Manchester as hallucinatory urban bedlam is transformed into Manchester as exotically, dangerously mundane north European outpost seething with domestic, and cosmic, secrets.

Steve will often tell you that he's not a bitter man, but surely no one should have to see their life story turned into a film not just once but twice. 'It just shouldn't happen,' he grumbles, resigned to the fact no one is paying attention to him even as they keep turning his life into fact-based fiction.

002

The Leeds musician and actor Sam Riley found out that he got the role of Ian Curtis in Control on his 26th birthday. His acting career hadn't really taken off, just a couple of roles in minor TV shows and a small part as Mark E Smith in 24 Hour Party People that never made the finished cut, while his band, 10,000 Things, had just been dropped by their record label. As an actor he'd been worried that the level of work he was being offered would interfere with his chances of being taken seriously as a musician. Now he didn't even have a music career. 'I always thought that it would really help if perhaps I got the lead in a really cool black and white movie where I talked all the way through.'

He'd auditioned a few times for Control, preparing by watching rare early videos of Joy Division and listening to the coarser, punkier group they were before, Warsaw. Sometimes it seemed as if all anyone wanted to find out was his ability to do what he calls 'the thing' - Curtis's explosive, implosive dance, an unholy combination of stasis and momentum, extreme mental pressure released through extravagant physical display. 'Can I see you move?' Anton would murmur softly in a Dutch accent straight out of a bad porn movie.

At one audition in Manchester a nervous Riley looked up and could see through the window of the audition room the red-faced, bug-eyed actor before him desperately attempting to recreate the dance. He raced downstairs to the toilets for some last-minute practice.

'Do I get music?' Sam asked. An iPod was strapped to his arm, and off he would go, spurting around the room, Anton and company watching him flail away in silence. Anton, not quite satisfied, would get up and show him what to do with his feet. 'Lighter, lighter,' he'd implore, showing the way, two grown men, one of them well over six-foot tall, flapping around an empty room attempting to pin down Curtis's unconfined, seized-up dancing.

003

A naive, resourceful 24-year-old Anton Corbijn came to England in 1979 in part because of Joy Division, one of his favourite groups. He'd been photographing Dutch musicians for a few years, but knew he needed to move into a bigger world. He left the small, timeless village in Holland where he was surrounded by a low level, austere and dramatically abstract landscape that would feature constantly in his photographs and videos. He found ways to set the musicians he photographed inside his own mysterious, playful imagination as formed by his isolated and isolating upbringing.

The trees, grain and shadows in his work with U2, Captain Beefheart and Depeche Mode, found in deserts and locations far from his home, often resembled the view he would have from his home as a youngster. A friend once pointed out that in every single Corbijn video there is a tree. Often, there is also water and, in his photographs, an atmosphere that seems to change as you look at it.

He came across the Channel in search of Joy Division, with no money, little English, and no contacts, and somehow this droll, intuitive and deep-thinking Dutchmen found them.

004

Peter Hook, Joy Division and then New Order bassist, is talking to me on the phone from his house after a weekend DJ session in Singapore. 'I played the original version of 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' and also 'Transmission' in a total dance club, and people were going absolutely crazy. What's that about?'

Hooky is the sentimentalist among the surviving members of the group, the one most blatantly proud of Joy Division's achievements, and the enduring life of the music, the one still stricken by Ian Curtis's suicide. Bernard Sumner, his old sparring partner in Joy Division and New Order, with whom he is currently in dispute regarding the future of New Order, is less likely to luxuriate in the past. 'When I saw the film in Cannes earlier this year, after Ian had died, 'Atmosphere' is played, and it's bloody heartbreaking, it really is - it's like going through it all again, to be honest. Especially with all the problems with New Order. I'm going through hell and people start to applaud! It's bizarre having your life flash back like that for other people to see. It's like when everyone laughed in 24 Hour Party People when we lost money on every copy sold of 'Blue Monday' because of the expensive sleeve. I thought, "You bastards - that's my life, that is, that really happened!"'

005

'I grew up as the son of a Protestant minister so ill, dying people and death were never far from our dinner table talk,' says Anton Corbijn. 'So it doesn't faze me as a subject. I think the things that matter in life and death, the beginning and the end, the essential things, are in my work a lot. I want my photographs to have a function. It's the Protestant thing, that everything you do has a reason, nothing throwaway. Even in my videos, even if they're funny, or bad, which happens, there are some fundamental things being told. I want that function to be showing someone in a way you have not seen them before. Make a photo that does not double up anything you have seen before. You create something that makes sense because it does not exist yet.'

006

Anton and I talk in his large, immaculate office in Shepherds Bush in the summer of 2007. After being filmed 12 months before, after two years of tough, challenging pre-production, Control has been completed. People have started to see it, and it is being liked, even loved. Anton is extremely relieved. At times it looked as if there was no chance of it ever being made and becoming the graceful, inquisitive partner to the riotous 24 Hour Party People. At times, it seemed as though Anton was going to be defeated in his objective of being the first-time director wanting to film in black and white using a first-time director of photography and an unknown actor as the main lead.

007

Sam Riley is talking to me from Berlin days after winning a award at the Edinburgh Film Festival for his spectacularly convincing performance. He now lives in Berlin with Alexandra Maria Lara, the actress who in Control plays the quietly exotic Belgian journalist Annik Honore. The sensitive, impressionable Curtis fell in love with Annik while touring with Joy Division. His toiling young wife Debbie - played by Samantha Morton - looked after their new baby back in their tiny terrace in Macclesfield while this secret love bloomed and Ian's group became post-punk cult favourites.

It's this story of a life breaking into two, into bits, of an anguished conscience expressed at the time so achingly in Joy Division's solitary official hit, 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', that Control eloquently and patiently monitors. It is more gently paced kitchen-sink art movie than sensationalising cut-up biopic - the conflict between the old working-class life Curtis was maniacally escaping and a new apparently liberating life as desired, damaged rock star, which led to mental and physical breakdown, and then suicide. 'It's like the Bible,' says Corbijn. 'You know the end. He dies. So how you tell the story along the way is more important than ever.'

As Riley lived out the role in an intense 10-week period in the old Central TV studios in Nottingham last year, he admits that the reality of playing the young singer, trapped between family and a new love, careering towards suicide, had an effect on his own life. 'I think Ian went after fame and glory and, to an extent, he did it because he wanted to look after his wife and baby. Then he started resenting them because they were spoiling his new life, and then he hated himself for resenting them. He loved them and hated them in equal quantity. And Annik seemed his future. I got wrapped inside his problems. I found it very gruelling filming his epileptic fits. I found it tough knowing where it all led. It did cause me some major heartaches and depressions ... I don't want to talk about it too much, but I committed myself so much to this, not wanting to waste this chance, terrified that I wasn't going to be able to pull it off, that I would let everyone down, that I half morphed into what was going on within the film, and there was a kind of crash, and I had to pick up the pieces. I suppose you could say I was rescued by a German movie star. I moved to Berlin within two months of finishing the film. It's looked upon in the film world as a cliche, I know, even more so given the characters we were playing, but the movie reality broke into my reality. I guess it's the kind of thing that happens when you get close to this kind of story. It can change everything. It's complicated, but I couldn't be happier and Berlin is beautiful.'

008

'Sam just went for it,' says Anton. 'He gave everything to the film. For a lot of known actors it is really scary to portray an icon because you can only disappoint. In his own life he had nothing to lose by taking all kinds of risks.'

009

'Can you believe that the film Ian went off with the film Annik?' marvels Hooky. 'How hilarious is that? 'Talk about fact being stranger than fiction.'

010

'Within 40 days of arriving in England,' Corbijn remembers, 'I had tracked down Joy Division's manager, Rob, and I met them at Lancaster Gate tube station. They were staying at a hotel nearby. That's where we did the first photographs. Being a well brought up, good young Dutchman, I wanted to shake their hands, but nobody would shake my hand. After we had done the photographs, they shook my hand. We didn't say much. I couldn't say much. Not only was my English really poor but I had trouble with accents. I could just about make out good English. The Manchester accent didn't make it easy. Also, I was in awe of them. It didn't make for much conversation.'

011

The photographs Corbijn took that day, crossing the boundaries of language, silence and shyness, helped create the enduring image of Joy Division as serious, intensely introverted post-punk rock group as much as the conspicuously inscrutable artwork of Peter Saville did. The photographs weren't rock photographs but photographs of young northerners on some unspecified mission, and Saville's designs defiantly avoided all rock cliches in the unashamed pursuit of stark, stirring beauty. At the time, such solemnity and indifference to conventional rock ideas might have seemed precious and presumptuous; in the long run it consistently maintained an insulating layer of mystery that ensured the group never dated.

The group may well have been four ordinary, mischievous young punk fans from grey, dingy Salford and disconcertingly quaint Macclesfield - with Manchester, their cultural playground, in the middle - but the contribution of Saville, and then Corbijn, alongside the way Martin Hannett transformed their violent live sound into compressed disquiet, helped present them as cryptic adventurers on a journey into awe-inspiring metaphysical darkness. These collaborators helped the group themselves believe, without being able to explain it apart from through their music, that they were more than just another group following up the influences of the Stooges and the Sex Pistols in the politically charged late 1970s.

012

As soon as Sam got the role, he asked if he could actually sing as Ian. Anton was initially adamant that you would hear no singing voice other than Ian's. Riley tried to coax his director into believing that he could pull it off. 'It seemed impossible,' he admits. But once the actors playing the band got together they all started to learn the songs and quickly, encouraged by the fact the songs were powerful but never complex, mastered instruments they'd rarely, if ever, played. James Pearson as Bernard Sumner, Harry Treadaway (Steven Morris) and Joe Anderson (Peter Hook), along with Riley, became a group, generating the unruly, insular 'us against the world' attitude that the once real Joy Division had. The fact that the acting Joy Division play those early songs with as much edgy, scared and relentless commitment as the once upon a time real thing helps lift the film above being another sterile rock biopic mime show.

Having the actors replay the urgent original group demonstrates how there were always two Joy Divisions - Joy Division's Joy Division, the one that played live with an unfettered metal fury, and Martin Hannett's Joy Division, a strategically processed studio intensification, and fragmentation, of the live entity. In the film, the bruising wildness of the live music helps make sense of the damned, psyched-out Curtis dance much more than Hannett's hallucinatory concentration, which attempted to make sense of Curtis's incredibly private thoughts.

'Up to a week before the film,' says Corbijn, 'I thought they were going to play to playback. They ended up so good they played live as Joy Division. According to Bernard Sumner, Sam had exactly the same timbre as Ian. I can't think of it any other way now. That was a great gift from the actors. They wanted so badly to be a band and they behaved like a band.

In the end, the only Joy Division music you hear played by Joy Division are the songs 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' and 'Atmosphere'.

013

One Anton Joy Division photograph in particular froze the group in time, but a time that was not necessarily 1979, or any known era - it was their own time, an otherworldly place their music seemed to slip and slither into and out of. Three members had their backs to the camera, their hands in their pockets, and were staring down a tunnel, at a distant light, at an entrance or exit. Ian Curtis, in long dark overcoat, having just remembered, or forgotten, something, had turned away from them, and was about to move in another direction, away from the light, towards what could be perceived as the unknown. It was a photograph that led you to believe how Ian, without saying much outside of his songs, in his own withdrawn, thoughtful and fundamentally disobedient way, was an artist and a star. It is such images that help fuel the continuing curiosity to find out what the hell happened.

014

'It's one of the few conceptual photographs I took at that age. I had in mind the album title Unknown Pleasures, and I had this idea that if people walk away they walk towards unknown pleasures, and I just thought it would look good if one of them looked back. It wasn't planned. It's just the way it happened. It became very iconic in the end. It looked like premonition, but, to be honest, my English was so bad I didn't understand the severity of Ian's lyrics. I could feel it, but I didn't really understand. I suppose it created an image of the music using their bodies. Initially no one wanted to publish the photograph because only one guy was looking at the camera. The group liked it and used it on the cover of the special limited-edition [French label] Sordide Sentimental 'Atmosphere'. Rob paid me £25 and a copy of the single.'

015 

'I'm bound to say this as a musician and as one of the musicians involved,' reflects Hooky, 'but I sometimes think that it's mainly because of the music that the story is still so much alive - that we did something so uniquely simple that's ended up so powerful and timeless. It reached into people's souls. It had such an impact on people's lives. Sure, there's the dead rock star thing, the myth, there's Factory, Tony Wilson, and the Hacienda, and Ian's death cemented it, but I don't think it would all still be so fascinating to people if it wasn't for the music. '

016

'I was terrified,' admits Riley, remembering the time the Control Joy Division prepared to recreate an early bona fide Joy Division gig in front of 150 extras, most of whom were hardcore fans looking for a sign of weakness. 'I was terrified just of acting, especially with Samantha Morton as Debbie, just in case she wiped me out. But to actually have to be Ian on stage ...'

Riley had already made the mistake of checking a Joy Division chatboard for reactions to him playing the role. There was mostly consternation. After early reports of Jude Law and Cillian Murphy, this unknown failed musician from Leeds seemed a comedown. 'It was like, Who the fuck is Sam Riley? Still is, to some extent.' 

Some fans even lobbied for the return of 24 Hour Party People's Ian Curtis, Sean Harris. 'I really felt the pressure then. One hundred and fifty extras all checking me out - "so what makes you think you can be Ian?" It was written all over them - "it'd better be fucking good then." I thought, They're seeing if I'm too small, too tall, wrong face, if the hair's wrong, the clothes. Actually, they were just waiting to see The Thing. They just wanted to see me dance. Once, Anton admitted he had a panic attack about casting me. He would often make me come and dance for him, just to check it was all in order. It was like, the film would work if the dance was OK.'

017

'It was important to keep the film in black and white,' says Anton, never totally convinced by colour as a way of explaining things. 'That's how I remember it. The north was so grey and Joy Division always seemed in black and white. Their record sleeves were in black and white, and the way they dressed was not colourful. I can't think of a group shot of Joy Division in colour. I have a theory that in those days before you had a hit you were only published in black and white magazines. Joy Division had never had a hit so they were never published in colour magazines! Your whole memory of Joy Division is through black and white photos, so the film just had to be in black and white. The opposition to this just made me more determined.'

018

Another film that tells the Joy Division story, Grant Gee's big budget documentary, Joy Division, is being released almost simultaneously - and then there is Chris Rodley's Factory documentary that will go out on BBC4.

I ask Hooky whether people will get sick of the obsession with Joy Division and Factory and Ian Curtis's suicide? 'Well, I've lived with it every day for 30 years, and I'm not sick of it.'

Is it just nostalgia, a sentimental retreading of a period that's over by those who cannot bear to see time slip away, a morbid cashing in?

'Bernard gets pissed off with me for being so sentimental, nostalgic and melancholy, but that's just the way I'm built. For Bernard, it's over, let's get on with something else. But I think there's nothing wrong with looking back and seeing what happened, where you've been, what difference that made to how things are now. If you leave everything behind, how can you tell whether anything special happened or not? If what you did is worthy of being history it can take being retold from different points of view.'

019

Hooky compares the two film Ian Curtises that there have now been. 'I don't think either of them got Ian 100 per cent, but that might just be my version of Ian. But they were both fantastic. Sam caught Ian as a person, the way he spoke, the way he moved, little inflections, and he's certainly Ian as a good-looking young chap. Sometimes it sent shivers down my spine. That was more the Ian I remember being with, whereas Sean in 24 Hour Party People was perhaps the better stage Ian.'

020

'I was worried that I would take away the mystery, but in the end I also wanted to tell a simple story, and take the story to a wider audience who would be interested in the story at the heart of it, if not the music,' says Corbijn. 'The cult audience knows this story. It seemed time to take it further, hopefully without ruining the secret. Making the film took the mystery away to an extent - when you are young you look up to a band whose music you love and think are half gods, and only later do you learn they were just normal lads who had a bit of chemistry.'

021

'When I saw it at Cannes,' says Hooky, 'I knew that it was a great film and that it would be very well received because even though it's two hours long, only two people went to the toilet the whole time. In fact, one of them was Bernard. The other one was a 70-year-old woman.'

022

In 2004, Corbijn worked on an epic book of U2 photographs, which involved looking at contact sheets from the early Eighties. 'It went beyond being a technical project, and I started to feel just like I did back then. Having no money, waiting for a bus, looking for somewhere to live, you're in a foreign country, unsettled, working as hard as you can to do good work, and many of those feelings were linked to Joy Division. I realised the film could be a personal project, the fact that my motivation to go to England was Joy Division. It was looking at a part of my own life as much as it was just telling the story of Joy Division. It meant so much to my life. It justified making the film for me.'

Within three days of agreeing to make the film, in 2005, he was sat, unprepared and a little bewildered, at a press conference in Manchester alongside co-producer Tony Wilson and another producer, Todd Eckert. On the way to the conference, Anton thought of the title. At the conference, it was, naturally, self-publicist Wilson who did most of the talking. Wilson never got to see the finished film, his death in early August drawing attention in the most emphatic way to how this film, as a delicate by-product of the agitating cultural commotion he helped orchestrate, is about the fierce strangeness of disappearance as much as the fearsome and astonishing miracle of appearance.

023

Wilson swoops onto set one day with his dog, one of those large, floppy William Wegman Wiemaraner dogs from a New Order video. He has no intention of getting involved, of interfering with Anton's plans, and simply works the room, like a professionally interested royal visitor, greeting the crew, joking about the clothes, checking on the odd detail, geeing everyone up, happy to see the story told through Ian. His dog runs amok, causing chaos, shitting all over the wires, bumping into scenery. Wilson keeps grinning at everyone as if the trouble the dog is causing is absolutely nothing to do with him.

024

'When I was at Tony's funeral in August,' Hooky recalls, 'I came out of the cathedral with Natalie, Ian's daughter, and they were playing "Atmosphere". Bloody hell, I said, sometimes I wished that I'd never written it - it's like Robbie Williams' "Angels" is for weddings, and "Atmosphere" is for funerals.'

025

Corbijn was finally making his first movie, but it soon became clear that no one really wanted it - or no one really wanted it the way that he wanted to do it, just following his instincts. Potential financing quickly fell away, with those prepared to give money demanding things that would have made the film exactly the conventional, crude American style biopic Corbijn was determined to avoid.

Corbijn, stubbornly, kept it alive. He took on the role of producer as well, determined now to make a movie not directly of Debbie Curtis's book, but a distinctive northern story set in the 1970s based around various memories of Ian's life in the few years between his late teens and his death. The soundtrack would just happen to include Bowie, the Stooges, Velvet Underground and Joy Division.

Corbijn ultimately financed the film himself with a couple of friends and streamlined Matt Greenhalgh's light, functional script. As the filming start date was postponed from the winter of 2005/2006, to March, to May, to July, a battered, distracted Anton was sure that this was the only film he would ever make. He was dealing with budget problems, with a lack of distribution offers, with the egos and sensitivities of the living characters he was portraying, trying to keep both Ian's wife and his lover happy with their portrayals, dealing with the tricky, picky New Order as they wrote the soundtrack, running across all the grudges that still exist within the formal and informal families 27 years after the fact. 'When it is your first movie you are ignorant of the problems ahead, thank God. I quickly learnt about the amount of things that can go wrong with a movie and the way it can disappear in front of your eyes. I was prepared to lose my money. It is amazing that it didn't happen. If you want to take a photograph, you can just take it. Here, to make the movie I wanted to make, it looked as though I would have to sell my home.'

026

I visit Anton on set in Nottingham in August 2006. It's a hot sunny day. 'I thought it would be very cloudy and grey and, of course, it's been the sunniest summer for years. We got one great cloud, above the crematorium when we filmed there.

He's at his calmest despite the pressure and the fact there's still no one prepared to distribute the film. I watch him carefully piece together the chaos of Curtis's last days, on the road, in the studio, at home, homeless, in love, out of love, lonely, surrounded by, and increasingly separate from, friends and family, sure of the way he wants to tell the story, relieved that there was no one demanding more pace, more sensation, more madness.

In the studio, Bernard's little house where Curtis fled after being kicked out of home sat next to Wilson's front room just across from Hannett's recording studio. You can stroll in a few seconds from Macclesfield to Stockport to Salford.

A hushed, stunned Ian and Bernard discuss Ian's mounting personal problems and then, minutes later, sonic enthusiast Hannett organises the backing track for 'She's Lost Control'. A distant, disappearing Manchester, a fluid, contradictory set of memories, a brood of heroes and villains, Ian at the centre with, in this case, the other characters all supporting his story, symbolically fading behind his evaporating intensity - it was all being fed through Anton's decision to make the story both as real as possible and subtly disorientating.

A film Manchester is made up, approximately resembling a lost Manchester. It takes an outsider's eye to tell this very British, very lonely story. Corbijn was able to make it because, now a renowned photographer and video maker, he directed the film with an innocence that echoed the innocence with which he took that first photograph of Joy Division. It broke all the rules, but he didn't know those rules even existed, and even when he found out they did, he refused to follow them.

027

he film is shown to a standing ovation at Cannes in May. After the showing Sam visits the toilet and finds himself standing next to Peter Hook. Joe, who played him, was making a film in Hollywood. 'I said: "What do you think, Hooky?" He said: "Well, if you'd played me, you'd be in Hollywood now." No slap on the back, but a basic Manc gag. That's good enough for me.'

028

Anton calls me from Belgium at the end of August. He's in one of his more sentimental moods. 'It was 35 years ago yesterday that I took my first photograph - a local Dutch group called Solution.' He's just done the Belgian equivalent of Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, gamely selling this fatal love story to as wide an audience as possible. He's looking at the poster for the film. 'It's like a combination of Scarface and Godard.' He's sold the film in America - to notorious indie monster Harvey Weinstein, which is deeply Wilsonian. 'Harvey called me, said: "I loved your film, don't change a thing, and don't believe what you read about me. Classic stuff." We'll see ...'

I tell him Sam says he wants to work on whatever film he's going to do next. 'Sam and I were the virgins on this film and we depended on each other to get through it.' So there will now be another film? 'Oh yes. It will probably be a thriller. Not music. Something very different. Definitely in colour.'

JOY DIVISION: THE FAC(T)S

After previous incarnations as Stiff Kittens and Warsaw, Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Steven Morris played their debut gig as Joy Division on 25 January 1978. Debut album Unknown Pleasures, released on 15 June 1979, was hailed by rock writer Jon Savage as an 'opaque manifesto'. Ian Curtis committed suicide on 18 May 1980, two months before second album Closer was released. The three remaining members, along with Morris's girlfriend Gillian Gilbert, became New Order.

· Control is released on 5 October; Joy Division recently premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Factory is scheduled to be shown on 21 September on BBC4. 

Joy Division's three albums are reissued on 17 September