British auteur Michael Winterbottom has churned out 17 feature films in as many years (and is currently in pre-production on at least two more). His riveting The Road to Guantanamo (co-directed by Mat Whitecross) received the 2007 Spirit Award for Best Documentary; combined with the 2002 docudrama In This World — which followed two Pakistani refugees along their unpredictable and often torturous emigration to London —Winterbottom gained the technical expertise and political savvy to attract the attention of those who wished to bring Mariane Pearl’s memoir A Mighty Heart to the big screen.
Those individuals included Pearl herself, widow of Wall Street Journal writer Daniel Pearl, who in 2002 was kidnapped while on assignment in Pakistan investigating shoe bomber Richard Reid. The book focuses on the weeks spent by Mariane and a core group of supporters that worked around the clock to find Daniel before murder threats were carried out by his captors. As many of his previous films involved the process of scripting from a widely read book, Winterbottom had another level of expertise to apply to A Mighty Heart. Producers Brad Pitt and Dede Gardner agreed that Winterbottom was a perfect match and shooting was undertaken in Pakistan and India in 2006 with Angelina Jolie as Mariane and Dan Futterman as Daniel.
Winterbottom is a filmmaker in love with the medium; there’s no subject or situation that he won’t cover. His work spans erotica (9 Songs), pop history (24 Hour Party People), science fiction (Code 46), the trials of cinematically adapting 18th century English literature (Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story), two Thomas Hardy interpretations (Jude and The Claim), the Bosnian war (Welcome to Sarajevo), serial killers (Butterfly Kiss), and modern urban dramas set throughout the UK (Wonderland, With or Without You, Go Now). He’s mastered the portrayal of place and time, depicting circumstances and environment so specifically yet compellingly that his characters’ struggle becomes universal as we watch them react to a maelstrom around them—one that often demonstrates issues of global significance.
And with every project, Winterbottom brings an insistence on immediacy and reality, utilizing the most compact of equipment and crews so as to allow characters and settings to have as much space and movement as possible. The company he formed with producer Andrew Eaton, Revolution Films, exists purely for them to bring about the projects they want with as little fuss about financing as possible. Sometimes it works and sometimes it’s a huge struggle, but both sleep easy at night knowing they are making their work comes about without compromise in that quinessential indie way.
A Mighty Heart involved pretty weighty subject matter, not to mention big celebrity names like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. How were you able to balance those elements and any demands being made by them with the freedom you’ve always pursued as a filmmaker?
I don’t think it’s a question of compromises in general. What happened was that Brad [Pitt] and Dede Gardner from Plan B — who had the rights to the book — called me and Andrew [Eaton], the producer at Revolution Films, and said, “Do you want to make the film of the book?” What that meant was in a way we avoided the complications of raising finance. I met up with Mariane and then Mariane, Andrew, Dede, and I went down to meet with Brad and Angelina. We spend two or three days talking about the film and the way that we normally work and how we’d like to make the film if we did it. I think Angelina and Brad thought that sounded like the best way of doing it and then they asked us to make the film.
So in some ways it was easy because from the beginning it was clear that this was how we were going to work and Angelina really bought into the idea. Most of the film takes place inside a house — it’s a group of people inside a house — and the way we filmed it was exactly the way we would’ve filmed it on our projects. The story takes place over a period of about four weeks inside the house and we actually shot in our house for five weeks, so we were able to echo within our filmmaking the same time scale and experience that they had inside the house in the original story.
It didn’t feel that much of a compromise. Normally we originate our films, we have an idea that we want to make, and then we have to go out and get the money. And I think sometimes when you’re in that situation then you’re saying to financiers, “We really want to make this film,” then in a way you end up — if you’re not careful — having to make more compromises just to get them to give you the money. In this case, because we weren’t trying to raise the money since Plan B came to us and said, “Do you want to make it?” we could say fairly simply, “We would like to make it as long as we can make it this way.” So it was straightforward.
Do you think they had trust in you based on not only the talents and abilities you’ve already demonstrated as a director but also your ability to handle extraneous scenarios, not only the strenuousness of production but also the media and political circus around a subject like this one?
I think probably one of the reasons they picked me was that I’d worked in Pakistan before. We’d done filming on In This World in Pakistan, we’d done Road to Guantanamo in Pakistan, and so I knew Pakistan. That was important in this case because one of the things that Mariane does is give you a picture of Pakistan, which I think is very accurate because Mariane’s writings and point of view of an outsider is very similar to our experiences that we had as outsiders in Pakistan. From my point of view, that was always my reason for making the film — I knew that context and I think probably that was one of the reasons for using me, I’d been there before. I was there in Autumn 2001 for In This World and I was probably there when Danny was killed.
Did they specifically stress they wanted you to incorporate any particular techniques that you’d previously used, like including real news clips as you did with something like Welcome to Sarajevo?
Not in particular, but — and this is a bit of a guess — I think Dede knew because she had given me the book two years before and had probably been trying to push the idea that Andrew and I would be good people to look at the film. Then Brad and Angelina had seen Road to Guantanamo and I think that was the film that convinced them that I would be a good idea probably because Angelina knew Mariane and they both very much wanted the film to be as true as possible to Mariane’s experience. They wanted to try to make it as accurate as possible and as simple as possible, you know? Not to be a big Hollywood production but just an account of experiences just like the book is. So Road to Guantanamo is the reference point that they had - especially because Dede had shown them that film [laughs]. I think Dede had probably seen other films and thought in general that I would be a good fit.
Given the spontaneity in which you work and bring a lot of your projects to fruition, how do you keep that sensibility while working out elements like structure and rehearsals, especially when working on a piece about history when everybody knows what happened and when it’s so well documented?
Well, I think we did a really good job of telling the story. It’s a complicated story so Laurence Coriat, who I had worked with on Wonderland, and I went back to the book and did a very simple structure of the film, really just an account of Mariane’s experiences from the day Danny was kidnapped to the day she left Pakistan. So that was the basic shape and then I went on a trip to Pakistan to look at the places where the story happened and also to meet the people in the story, so I met all the characters who were in the house with her — Jameel Yusuf and Captain and Dost and so on and so forth. Also in America I met people like Randall Bennett, who was working for the embassy, the journalists from the Wall Street Journal — basically met all the people who were in Pakistan at the time with Mariane and got their accounts of events as well. Then once we cast the film we tried to get the actors to meet those people, so all the actors met the people that they were playing and spent some time with them and heard their accounts. So the actors felt they had a kind of reservoir, in a sense, of information about that person that isn’t in the script. And because we had the five-week filming in the house, we were able to do scenes and try things out; actors could improvise around the script. The script was a guideline and the actors were able to try and be the characters in the house. We shot chronologically, so at the beginning they didn’t know each other and by the end of the film they’d become close; hopefully that comes through in the film.
