Remembering Ian Curtis

[Krysta Ludeking]

[Krysta Ludeking]

Q: Can you talk about how you got such a great performance from first-time actor Sam Riley?
AC: Sam was a real find. He’s a singer and acted a little bit in his teenage years. He was working folding shirts at a laundry matt when we found him.  He really worked hard for us because I think he felt like it was a ticket out of that life. Of course he looked a lot like Ian Curtis, but he really went above and beyond in terms of researching, going to epilepsy seminars and watching everything that existed on Ian and Joy Division. I felt for him because it was a first film for both of us so we depended on each other.  Every single day he never complained and knew what was expected of him.  It must have been daunting working with one of the best actors today, Samantha Morton, but he held his ground. I think he’ll do some impressive things in the future.

Q:  Do you think it’s a filmmaker’s responsibility to portray everything exactly as it occurred?
AC: Well, were not making a television series or a six-hour film so of course, you have to limit what you show or be economical in your portrayal, so long as it doesn’t effect how the person is seen. When Ian visits his parents at the end of the film, his parents in real life had moved to a different house. But we couldn’t take the time out to explain something like that.  Also how the band wound up getting signed was more complicated then depicted in the film.  In my eyes, these are trivialities that don’t effect the overall portrayal of the Ian or Joy Division. I’m very open about the choices I made, as I feel they don’t take anything away from what actually happened.

[Krysta Ludeking]

Q:  How did making this film change your approach to filmmaking?
AC: The one thing I really got out of this is working with actors. The storytelling concept I really covered in my photographs and videos so that wasn’t really new. Sure it’s a different medium, but here’s where I really got to see what actors could bring to a story and how they interpret things. I can’t wait to make another film because this was a great experience. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, probably because I also produced it, but wonderful. For all the black holes a film can fall into, to come out of this and have the film get shown at festivals is a great experience.

Q: How much of the music in the film is Joy Division vs. newly recorded tracks?
AC: The only Joy Division tracks are Atmosphere and Love will Tear us Apart.  Anytime you see the band playing it’s the actors and not audio overlay.  It’s quite phenomenal to have the actors learning these songs. It’s far better for performance reasons and if you want to hear the original songs just play them at home. There will be a soundtrack: there’s bits of dialogue, the New Order score, as well as tracks from Velvet Underground, Killers and Throbbing Gristle. There are Joy Division tracks preformed both by Joy Division and the actors.

[Krysta Ludeking]

Q: This film has a melancholy air about it, what will your next film be like?
AC: I think I’m going to do a thriller, in color. A very different film, I can’t talk about it yet though.

Q: Can you explain some of your aesthetic choices on this film?
AC:  This film takes place in the seventies, a time when we moved at a slower pace.   Rapid-fire editing has changed the way we look at film and decreased out attention spans.  I like looking at people walk into a room, move their bodies and hands without relying on close-ups.  I like looking at a picture, not being guided by an editor. I don’t think the film is slow, but they’re moments of reflection.
Part of the 45th New York Film Festival, Anton Corbijn's Control opens October 11th via The Weinstein Company. 

http://www.ioncinema.com/news/id/2214/nyff_interview_anton_corbijn

[Krysta Ludeking]

'Suddenly the reality hit me'

How does it feel to watch the life and death of your father being re-enacted on film? Natalie Curtis, daughter of Joy Division singer, Ian Curtis, went on set, camera in hand, to find out

<sub>Natalie Curtis

The Guardian, Saturday 22 September 2007</sub>

_{Best man ... Was Control your top film of 2007?}

I was about three when my mum first told me that my father, Ian Curtis - who died when I was one - was a singer, but it just seemed normal, like having an uncle who was a tradesman or whatever. I remember hearing Love Will Tear Us Apart on the radio and realising he was known in some way, but I never thought of him as famous. When I was growing up, neither myself nor my mother were in the public eye, and Joy Division were more cult than mainstream. The first time I heard their album Closer, I thought it was out of this world. I assumed all music was done with that level of style and intelligence. As I grew older, it was a shock to discover not everything was that amazing.

[Krysta Ludeking]

Initially I was dead against visiting the set of Control, the film about my father's life directed by photographer Anton Corbijn. Although it took my mother's memoir, Touching From A Distance, as a starting point, books are read in private, whereas a film is something much more public, an experience shared with an audience. When filming began in Macclesfield, I declined the opportunity to go. Macclesfield was somewhere I'd always associated with lush, green, rolling hills and I didn't want to associate it with a film about my father's suicide. Gradually my curiosity got the better of me, though; after all, I did study photography and am interested in film. Also, I felt that seeing the process would make it easier to watch the finished thing.

[Krysta Ludeking]

In July 2006 I went to Nottingham, where most of the film was being shot. I was on edge. It felt too weird. A bungalow had been given a 70s makeover to recreate my parents' engagement party. Of course, I've no idea how realistic it was, because I wasn't born. I first met Sam Riley, who plays my father, outside the bungalow. Sam looked really sweet with his 70s Ian haircut; as it was the pre-band Ian he was playing, he wasn't the Ian Curtis we all imagine. He felt a bit awkward at first, I think. But I had a sneaky cigarette with him, so when I saw that scene where Ian says, "You can't be in my gang if you don't smoke!" I couldn't help but giggle.

In between scenes, I was introduced to Samantha Morton, who plays my mother. Later that night we got a call to come along to a restaurant in some dark, trendy club, and afterwards we went to the flat where Samantha was staying with her fiancé. She held my hand as we crossed the road, just like my mum used to do when I was younger - I think the cast saw me as the baby of the set, because I am the baby in the film. Samantha didn't have on the Debbie wig when we met, but we talked until dawn about her role and I saw her notes - thoughts and reflections on how to play the character. She'd made them from my mum's book, but also from her own experiences as a mother. She had her daughter at a similar age to my mother when she had me. She also had a "Debbie playlist" - songs my mother would have listened to in 1980, such as Bowie and Durutti Column's Sketch For Summer, one of my own favourites. Every day before filming, Samantha would listen to the music to psych herself into character. Spending time with her had reassured me; I knew that whatever happened she'd do a damned good job, even if she didn't seem quite like my mother. Both she and Sam are in their late 20s playing my parents in their teens and early 20s, so they seem older. I think the film has made Mum slightly dowdier, too - I certainly don't remember her wearing such awful clothes.

[Krysta Ludeking]

It felt odder when they started filming the band scenes in a Nottingham pub that was supposed to be Rafters in Manchester, where Joy Division played. I've grown up with black-and-white photos of the band - probably what attracted me to become a photographer - but suddenly they were there in front of me in colour, in 3-D and uncannily accurate. Harry Treadaway - who plays drummer Steve Morris - had previously played guitar, but none of the others had played instruments before. They obviously worked hard at getting everything spot-on. Harry took me to lunch and told me he'd perfected his Macc accent by recording local lads in a bicycle shop. The "pretend Joy Division" even had banter and in-jokes like a real group, and called each other by their characters' names: Barney, Steve, Ian and Hooky.

[Krysta Ludeking]

We talked a lot about their roles; they were particularly interested in some research I'd done for the writer, Matt Greenhalgh. My father was diagnosed with epilepsy in January 1979, and looking into this for Matt gave me a real understanding of what he was going through at the time. There was more of a stigma attached to being epileptic then and people were a lot less well informed. My father also suffered from mood swings and depression. You read about mental health services being cut now, but God knows what it must have been like in the late 70s. There were loads of side-effects to his medication. It's likely that the epilepsy and the medication would have exacerbated the depression, although there was no provision for dealing with this.

[Krysta Ludeking]

People constantly ask, "Why did he kill himself?" To me it seems obvious - because he was really depressed. Bernard [Sumner, Joy Division guitarist] told me that my father used to drink before performing, which may explain his on-stage fits, because alcohol is a seizure trigger. Seizures can also be triggered by flashing lights, lack of sleep and stress. Ian's lifestyle and the tension caused by the disintegration of his marriage would not have helped. He did the best he could; he was just very ill.

I've never really felt angry at my father for committing suicide, nor was I emotional about it all being brought up in the film because it's been there every day for me, although I've not had a tortured life.

[Krysta Ludeking]

We had a lot of laughs on set, in the same way as Mum told me how there was always mischief around the band. One of my favourite moments was being an extra at the Bury riot gig scene of 1980. It felt strange shouting, "**** off!" at a pretend Alan Hempsall, the Crispy Ambulance singer who stood in for my father when he was too ill to go on stage, because I'd interviewed the real one in my research. I got caught up in the skinheads' fight and had a bruise on my foot for a month. The Strawberry Studios scene was special for me because I helped Harry discover how they made the famous drum sound in She's Lost Control. He explained that that "crrch crrch" sound was a combination of a syn drum and the sound of tape head cleaner being sprayed. It was a strange afternoon. Everyone was happy when it was all over, but I cried. Joy Division is not something that will ever go away for me.

At the wrap party it was interesting to watch the actors, who had felt like a real band to me, suddenly shaking off their characters. We were shown some rushes and the reality behind it suddenly hit me. There was a baby scene I found especially upsetting; everyone cheered and said, "That's you." I drank more than I normally would that night.

[Krysta Ludeking]

It was hard to watch the finished film, but it is just a film, after all. Toby Kebbell - who plays Joy Division manager Rob Gretton - is one of my favourites, but he's not how Rob was. Rob was always around, but in the last year of his life I worked in a nearby office and got to know him much better; he was so gentle and wise. I never heard Rob swear like he does in the film and there's a bit where he's mean to Alan Hempsall. Rob would never have been like that. I don't think the film captures how lovable Tony Wilson - the Factory Records boss who used his life savings to fund Joy Division's debut - was either. However, my mother and I agree with what Tony once said: if it is a choice between the truth and the legend, take the legend every time.

I miss Tony terribly and remember him arriving on set with his mad Weimaraner William bounding on to a scene and someone yelling, "Cut!!!" Four days after I saw the finished film, Tony died of cancer. So, a year after hanging out on set with a pretend Steve and a pretend Hooky, I caught up with the real ones, not at a glitzy film premiere but at a funeral.

[Krysta Ludeking]

I have mixed feelings about the film - I feel so excited for the band and the music, but repulsed by the idea of people watching a film about my family. It's probably the same for all those left behind. The band must have been very excited when the film got an ovation at Cannes, but it can't be comfortable watching people be very happy about sad things in your life. I felt sad reading recently that they said they feel guilty; but if anyone let Ian Curtis down, it was the NHS, not musicians too young to help.

Tony never got to see the film, but for me it is for him. It feels like Joy Division are finally going from being an enormous cult to a household name - just as Tony always believed they should.
Additional reporting by Dave Simpson

· Control is released on October 5.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/sep/22/periodandhistorical

[Krysta Ludeking]

[Krysta Ludeking]