 |
  
 
 |
|
Behind The Seen: Grant Gee
Posted by Rob Ortenzi on 01-Aug-08 @ 03:03 PM
Back in the late '90s, GRANT GEE traveled with Radiohead on their OK Computer tour, an experience that resulted in the 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy. Since then, the English writer/director has worked with the likes of Blur, Scott Walker and Nick Cave, among many others. This month, he'll bring his aptly titled Joy Division documentary to the big screen. Were you working on the Joy Division documentary at the same time that Control was being shot? As far as I know, just as we started shooting, Control was wrapping up. At one point, there was talk of us going on-set to shoot some stuff there, but once we actually put in our request, they wrapped. Was it at all discouraging that the two films would be released so close together? No, not at all--in fact, it was kind of the reason why ours happened. The idea of making a Joy Division documentary had been around for quite a long time, but I think it was given urgency by the fact that Control was gonna happen--and because Control was based on Deborah [Curtis]'s book. In the book, the band comes off as kind of two-dimensional. So for them to tell their side of it--what it was like being in the band, not just as witnesses to Ian [Curtis]'s love triangle--this was the time to do it. I'm assuming you asked Deborah Curtis to appear in the documentary. Why didn't she do it? She was gonna do it--she was actually the first person signed up after the three remaining band members. And then she became quite involved with Control, and I think that took its toll in a way--for her to have her life revealed in that way was a bit much. So when it came to the documentary, she kind of decided that she didn't wanna go through all that stuff again. Which I can quite understand; I wouldn't have wanted to go through it once. What kind of other difficulties did you encounter? Right from the start, the basic format of the film was kind of dispiriting. It's talking heads and archived clips--it's so easy to make the thing just crap. So you really have to concentrate on every bloody shot and every bit of archive footage has to be right, so the editing process becomes painfully anal. Every word has to be measured for tone. If you do that right, everything starts to have a kind of flow. But compared to doing a fly-on-the-wall thing, like Meeting People Is Easy, it's really, really difficult. Toward the end of the film, [Joy Division record sleeve designer] Peter Saville says Ian Curtis' story is one of the last true stories in rock. At the same time, doesn't any kind of rock documentary ultimately become mythmaking in the service of commerce? Absolutely. And there's various ways you can define a myth. There's a good myth in that it's a template for how we understand human tragedy. Then there's the kind of post-modern myth, which is a lie that's useful for the current mode of capitalist production. I think the Joy Division story is both of those things. It's obviously very useful for people who want to sell heritage rock--which is partly what we're doing--but at the same time, I think it's a proper fucking tragedy. --J. Bennett Joy Division will be released on DVD on June 10. |
