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Michael Winterbottom is the most prolific and the most audacious of British filmmakers in the last twenty years. His television career began in the cutting-rooms at Thames Television, and his first directing experience was on the Thames TV documentaries,
concentrate on the two superlative performances at the heart of the film, which ensure that it reworks the road movie genre to unusually passionate effect. 24 Hour Party People ‘We thought it would be fun to have a lot of music but to avoid people bursting into song’, said producer Andrew Eaton. Both he and Winterbottom wanted ‘to make a film with great music that wasn’t specifically a
filmmaking, in particular the New Waves of France and Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. It is important to acknowledge that all of his films employ realism across a variety of styles, genres and historical representations. In this chapter we will focus on Welcome to Sarajevo , Wonderland , In This World and The Road to Guantánamo , with a brief reference to 24 Hour Party People (discussed at greater length in chapter 5 ) as
2 Gina McKee as Nadia in the city at night, Wonderland (1999) 3 Steve Coogan as Mancunian mover and shaker, Tony Wilson, in 24 Hour Party People (2002
Winterbottom brought with him from the first Cracker episode editor Trevor Waite who was to edit the next nine Revolution productions including Family , Go Now , Butterfly Kiss , Wonderland (1999), The Claim and 24 Hour Party People . Waite was an experienced editor having worked on Rumpole of the Bailey (1978–92), Inspector Morse (1993) and Cracker (1993). On many of these films Waite was assisted by Peter Christelis
/Steve Coogan’s soundtrack attempt to ‘place’ the events that make up 24 Hour Party People , and the final long shot that reveals Mariane and her son walking in a Paris street, and lifts to lose them in the crowd, reminds one of the last moments of Jude and The Claim : in these and other ways, the Winterbottom signature is all over A Mighty Heart . In other ways, it is also a step forward, a change of
work, ‘His years in television engendered some of the most important collaborative relationships that came to dominate his working ethos’. 5 These include screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote Forget About Me and would later write Winterbottom’s first feature, Butterfly Kiss (1995), and several other ambitious films, including The Claim (2001) and 24 Hour Party People (2002); Trevor
many directors on this list, Winterbottom is dauntlessly prolific. Also, dauntingly versatile. He moves with consummate ease from literary adaptation ( Jude , 1996) to pop-culture follies ( 24 Hour Party People , 2002) and excoriating social drama ( In This World , 2002), and then back to the Eng Lit canon with his cunningly postmodern take on Tristram Shandy ( A Cock and Bull
in the inevitable spaces between bursts of filming, there is plenty of time for personnel to stand about chatting desultorily of other things – which, of course, is what Sterne’s characters spend most of their time doing. At one point there is a television interviewer (Tony Wilson) talking to his old friend Coogan (who played him in 24 Hour Party People ) about the filming, while the real cinematographer films the fictional
total of six playing in and out of competition, compared with last year’s none. Of the three vying for the Palme d’Or, one (Michael Winterbottom’s excellent 24 Hour Party People) has already been released in the UK, and the other two are new projects from that ever dynamic duo of socially conscious British filmmaking, Mike Leigh (All or Nothing) and Ken Loach (Sweet Sixteen).3 Like Marmite and Moulin Rouge, Mike Leigh has a tendency to divide people. To fans of his work … he’s a compassionate miserablist who finds comedy in the most painful of situations; in the eyes of