What Was The Athmosphere Like?
Oct 4th, 2007 by Donagh
I’m not much into interviews with actors. They always seem to be the same no matter what the film is. They usually contain a patter similar to the following:
Interviewer (with chummy familiarity): “What was it like working with X actor/actress?”
Actor: “Oh X actor/actress is great. Really supportive in the role/we had a blast. She/He’s a very strong person, with tons of experience and I learned alot.”
Interviewer (with even more egregious smarm): “there was a great chemistry on screen, how did you go about achieving it?”
Actor (doubling over with laughter - probably for the tenth time that day when asked the same question): “Oh we just put the script aside and kind of just went for it, to see what stuck. It was a blast. I’ve never laughed so much in my life.”
Interviewer (chuckling, though slightly confused): “But the film is about a rock musician battling against mental illness who writes harrowing songs about isolation and inner pain and eventually commits suicide.”
Actor (chuckling to himself): “Yea, yea, it was great. A total blast.”
Then both Interviewer and actor try to out do each other with compliments for the director before talking about the other five films in which the actor is about to appear.
As a result of this guff there is very little real substance about the film itself.
This Observer Film Weekly Podcast, which features interviews with Sam Morton and Sam Reily who star in Control, the biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis is not much different. The presenter, Jason Solomons is unbelievably peppy, a bit like a BBC Radio 1 DJ and seems to think that just because what he’s saying is on radio, or a podcast in this case, that he has to SPIKE, every, SECOND, word to avoid his listeners falling asleep half way through one his feisty sentences.
However, it does feature a good sound clip from the film which I liked:
Ian (talking to himself – I think): Still taking the medication – for what its worth.
Cheer up. It could be worse. You could be lead singer in The Fall.
The movie looks cracking though.
Update: This is actually said by someone else while Curtis is lying on the dressing room floor, half unconscious, after having an epileptic fit on stage.
UPDATE
Peter Bradshaw has a great review in the Guardian today. Gives it five stars.
It is the best film of the year: a tender, bleakly funny and superbly acted biopic of Curtis, the legendary lead singer of new wave band Joy Division, who in 1980 committed suicide on the eve of his first US tour: suffering from epilepsy and depression, agonised by a failing marriage, stunned by the ambiguous waves of violence and nihilism his music had unleashed and terrified by the accelerating bandwagon of celebrity. And all this in an impossibly distant age when no one seemed to have the smallest clue how to manage either chronic illness or pop music careers. It’s a film that says goodbye to the English 1970s as fiercely as Withnail bade farewell to the 60s.