ScreenWize

You may be old enough to recall the ritual of buying a new album and taking it home to read every word on the cover while the vinyl played endlessly on your record player. It was a tactile experience involving 12 square inches of graphic design: photos of the band, printed lyrics, and images by obscure artists. For Anton Corbijn it is a seminal memory from the 1970’s, and one that he uses in the opening scene of his new film Control, a story about Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division.

Corbijn was born in Holland but moved to London in 1979 in his early twenties, drawn by the power of the music scene there at the time. “I preferred the intensity of the musicians in England rather than what I saw around me in Holland” he says, “and Joy Division’s music was the catalyst for me leaving The Netherlands. At the back of my mind I had the idea that I was at the ceiling of what I could do in Holland, and when the album Unknown Pleasures came out, I felt that I should go to where that came from. I wanted to be part of that world.” The album - Joy Division’s first - was released the same month that Ian Curtis became a father. He had married Deborah Woodruff when he was nineteen, and it’s her book ‘Touching From A Distance’ that inspired Corbijn’s film.

Corbijn decided that he wanted to be a photographer early in life, and had been taking photographs of bands in Holland since he was a teenager, originally using a camera borrowed from his father. Once in England, he lost no time pursuing his desire to be part of the emerging post-punk music scene, and within twelve days of his arrival, he found himself at Joy Division’s concert at the Rainbow Theatre in London. At the end of the night he made contact with the band. Despite Corbijn’s poor English, a connection was made, and they let him take some photographs the next day, including one of the most famous photos of the band ever taken – an unfriendly and bleak shot of four young men in black with their backs to camera in a white tube station on the London underground. Yet it captured something of the mood of the times. “I sent the pictures to the band and they liked them, unlike anybody else,” says Corbijn. “Nobody liked the photographs, because they didn’t like to look at the back of people’s heads. Nobody published them. The band however used a picture on a single release.”

The band’s manager - Rob Gretton - then asked Corbijn to come and visit them in Manchester and take some photographs while the band were making a music video for their single ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’ Corbijn remembers the occasion: “I met them again, but I couldn’t strike up a conversation, because my English wasn’t that good. I was also incredibly shy, and because of my poor English, I didn’t know what Ian was singing. But I could feel there were weighty issues at the heart of it; because of the way he sang it, it felt like it mattered.”

Corbijn tried to capture this feeling on the screen. “In the film I aimed for an emotion that I myself was getting from the music. But this is not a music biopic – it’s just that the music inspired me initially, and I certainly didn’t want the film to be an extended music video.”

Although this is Corbijn’s first feature, he knows more than most about music videos and began making them in 1984. He went on to become one of the industry’s most celebrated directors, making clips for U2, Depeche Mode, Johnny Cash, and more recently Coldplay. What both interested and scared him about directing a feature film was working with actors. “Even though many of my music videos have a story in them, with Control I was telling a story through the actors. That was a very different ballgame for me, a real first.” Corbijn secured a strong cast to help him, with Samantha Morton playing Deborah, Ian Curtis’ wife. Morton has twice been nominated for an Academy Award, and has worked with the world’s best directors on both sides of the Atlantic, most famously appearing alongside Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report.

But it was the casting of Curtis that most concerned Corbijn. “That was a scary one. You always start with actors who are known. I approached a couple of well-known people, and we did a lot of castings in London and the North. When I looked at the tapes I saw one with Sam Riley. There was something in him that made me think of my time with Joy Division. When I came to England in the late 1970’s, there were these musician kids who had no money, who were underdressed, underfed, and they would stand there smoking cigarettes. And Sam Riley was exactly like that. He was skinny, had no money, and stood around smoking in the same way. Not only was he an actor who might be able to play the part, he felt like he was from those days in the 1970’s. I felt it was totally the right guy.”

Control is Riley’s first feature but he’s done some work in television and on stage, and is the lead singer for a band from northern England called 10,000 Things, which made it easier for him to assume the role of Curtis, and his bizarre on stage movements. Corbijn was delighted with the result. “Of course, I was quite nervous about the choice, because I thought he had no experience. But there’s a beautiful honesty and realism in somebody inexperienced. It is so believable what Sam did; he really worked really hard and gave everything to that role.”

The look of the film is unmistakably poetic, reflecting Curtis’ own tragic nature. Corbijn puts this down to a European sensibility. “Both Martin Ruhe – the cinematographer – and I are European, and although the film is set in England, the way that we have looked at the landscape is very European, from a photographer’s perspective.” At times the effect is bleak, yet this is how Corbijn recalls his first experiences in the north of England. “I remember leaving London for the north very soon after I arrived. I was a photographer for New Musical Express, and I tended to travel every week to some city like Sheffield or Liverpool. I found it incredibly bleak, and I hadn’t seen that kind of poverty in Holland ever.” It was this sense of desolation that inspired Corbijn to shoot the film in black and white. “This and the fact that the collective memory of Joy Division was a black and white one,” he says, remembering the album covers, the photography of the day and the drab greys and blacks that the band dressed in.

Given Corbijn initially turned the project down, for fear that he would be further pigeon-holed, I ask him how he now sees the finished film – one that picked up a number of awards at Cannes. “If you’re a fan of Joy Division, you’re definitely not going to be disappointed with it, but the themes are much more universal, and for me it’s a love story. It’s really about a boy, who follows a dream and ends up lost, and it’s also about how - in the most mundane circumstances - you can find beauty. If you think of it as a music film, you’ll find it pretty quiet.”

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon