NAB
article here
It’s no coincide that Pistol arrives during the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. That’s a celebration of the UK’s monarch being on the throne for 70 years and if you like that sort of thing then good for you, if not, then in the UK at least we get a couple days holiday.
In 1977, occasion of Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, The Sex
Pistol’s ‘God Save The Queen’ was released, singing “the fascist regime” to
shock the establishment.
The album from which it came ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ is a
bone fide classic, number 80 on Rolling Stones’ all time 500, even if that’s
the last thing the band’s members would have wanted.
Now director Danny Boyle has directed a mini-series about
the band which ended in notorious front man John Ritchie AKA Sid Vicious’ death
of an overdose after the possible murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen.
That the six-part series is made for Disney-owned FX may be
one reason Johnny Rotten, one of the band’s original members, has refused to
endorse the show; but that’s par for the course and Boyle says wouldn’t have it
any other way.
“I want Johnny Rotten to attack it!” Boyle told The Guardian “It’s so not the story that everybody wants to be told, but it is the story
that should be told.”
The Pistols’ story has already been made into the
feature Sid and Nancy starring Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb directed by
Alex Cox and The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle – orchestrated by the band’s
manager Malcolm McLaren to claim the whole thing was a contrivance to make
money. In 2000, the
band members released their own movie, The Filth and
the Fury, but
IndieWire claims Boyle’s is by far the most ambitious.
It is based on ‘Lonely Boy: Tales from Sex Pistol’ guitarist
Steve Jones’s autobiography and stars Toby Wallace as Jones, Anson Boon as John
Lyndon (Rotten), Louis Partridge as Sid Vicious, and Emma Appleton
as Spungen.
The Sex Pistols were the “philosophers and the dress code”
of the punk revolution, Boyle tells the New York Times, “I tried to make the series in a way that was chaotic and true to the Pistols’
manifesto.
That meant taking an experimental approach to filming: “We
would just run whole scenes, whole performances, without knowing if we had
captured the ‘right’ shot or not. It’s everything you’ve been taught not to
do.”
Before filming began, the actors playing the members of the Sex
Pistols spent two months in “band camp,” with a daily routine of music lessons,
vocal coaching and movement practice tutored by Karl Hyde and Rick Smith from
the British electronic music group Underworld.
To keep some of that raw DIY edge Boyle also decided not to
do any postproduction work on the music.
This was apparently a passion project for the director of Yesterday,
a Beatles-soundtracked romantic comedy.
“I am very music-driven, but I never imagined doing the
Pistols,” he said. “I had followed John Lydon’s career closely, and the
hostility he felt for the others wasn’t a secret.”
But after reading the script, Boyle immediately said yes.
“Which was ridiculous since I didn’t even know if we would
have the music, the most important thing.”
Lydon opposed both the use of the Sex Pistols’s music and
the series itself, but eventually lost his court case when a judge ruled that
the terms of a band agreement gave Cook and Jones a majority vote. Boyle said
he had attempted to contact Lydon during the dispute. He added that he hoped
the series would “reveal the genius and the humility” in the frontman.
Flattery got him nowhere with Lydon telling the Sunday
Times that Pistol was “the most disrespectful shit I’ve ever had to endure.”
(Though Lydon arguably sold out years ago if you look at his
appearance as a contestant on the reality show ‘Im A Celebrity Get Me Out Of
Here’ in 2004 and his subsequent promotion in commercials for a brand of British
Butter).
Boyle believes that one of the advantages of streaming as
opposed to telling the story as a 90min feature “is that it’s willing to take
on board that kind of complexity – and look for the attachment of the audience
not through quite such easy tropes: the lovable one, the hero moment where he’s
not quite as bad as you thought he was.” GGG]
He tells Esquire
https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/tv/a39839241/danny-boyle-pistol-interview/
9/20 in another interview that he the show got made; “If I’m being brutally
honest, I think it was more to do with my age and ability to get it made. I
wanted to do punk because it was the big formative experience for me, and it’s
overshadowed everything I’ve done.”
Arguably you could trace a lineage of punk in Boyle’s work
like heroin addiction in Trainspotting, to which be brought an energy
outside of mainstream filmmaking, and traced through Slumdog Millionaire,
about a rags to riches dream set in Bombay, though it’s a stretch to call the
Boyle of Steve Jobs, 28 Days Later and The Beach a punk filmmaker.
He also cemented establishment credentials by directing the
opening ceremony for the 2012 Lonon Olympics which featured Daniel Craig’s 007
on her majesty’s service to launch the Games.
Music aside (Boyle was 21 in 1977, so just the perfect age
for punk rebellion) it is the director’s working class, Northern England roots,
which are the strongest through line in his work from Shallow Grave to Pistol.
“[The Pistols] were a bunch of working class guys who broke
the order of things, more than the Beatles,” he tells NYT. “It was especially
resonant in the UK, where the way you were expected to behave was so
entrenched.”
The lyric from God Save the Queen: ‘There is no future in
England’s dreaming’ is arguably more political today post-Brexit than it was
then.
Perhaps Boyle’s most punk career moment was choosing to
stick by his guns and the creative vision of regular screen writing
collaborator Andrew Hodge when disagreements arose in the making of No Time
To Die. Boyle was fired and hints to Esquire that the issue had to do with
the way they used Bond’s child.
Perhaps getting caught up in the machine, as he did with
Bond, is a mode of working to which Boyle is not fundamentally suited.
“I’m much better under the radar a bit,” he told The New
York Times in 2007, “and actually figuring out how to make things work.”
No comments:
Post a Comment