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Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten Director Julien Temple
By Ryan Stewart
Nov 5, 2007
What would early punk be without its incestuous bickering? It was the initial refusal of Joe Strummer to allow a young Julien Temple into his inner circle in the mid-70s that first pushed the budding filmmaker towards the other great punk originators of the day, the Sex Pistols. That led to the creation of Temple's two seminal Pistols documentaries, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (which John Lydon loudly denounced for getting everything wrong) and The Filth and the Fury (made with his involvement and blessing). When a movie was to be made in the mid-80s about the doomed affair of Sid and Nancy, director Alex Cox chose Strummer to write the film's theme, much to the shock and chagrin of Lydon. Temple would then go on to record a commentary track for that film, in which he points out everything Cox gets wrong about the Pistols.
That said, who knows how many feathers will be ruffled by Temple's new film, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. Actually, truth be told, not many. There's no territory-marking in this one. The film is not an attempt to write new pages in the book of punk, but a considerate elegy to a friend. Strummer, of course, passed away in 2002 at the relatively young age of 50, leaving generations of Clash fans in mourning, not to mention countless friends and collaborators. This film is where they've all gathered to share their memories.
Ryan Stewart: What have you been working on lately?
Julien Temple: Back home, I'm editing a movie I shot in the summer. An opera film.
RS:
An opera or a movie about opera?
JT:
An opera. A film of an opera.
RS:
Got it.
JT:
It's a narrative, but they sing it in opera-ese. It's an opera in the streets of Sydney, actually -- that's where it was shot.
RS:
You gonna take it on the festival circuit?
JT:
Yeah, hopefully we'll go to some festivals.
RS:
I saw Joe Strummer the other day. Were you trying to intentionally irritate the audience by not captioning the interviewees when they're introduced?
JT:
Well, it's definitely a punk rock movie, hopefully, about a punk rock warlord, as he calls himself. So yeah, a little bit of annoyance is probably part of the reason, but more importantly, I like that sense of working out who people might be. You're not just delivering something where people don't have to think. If I'd captioned every person who appeared in this film it would be like reading a book rather than watching a movie. I was keen not to do that. I was also aware that Joe hated writing on the screen. Whenever a TV ad would come on with writing, text, he'd flip out. You should do it with moving images, you shouldn't have to write it, so all those things fed into it. I had proposed, which is probably what I should have done but we ran out of money, at the end to have the credits and a photograph of everybody who'd appeared. So at the end, having tried to work it out during the film who everyone might be, you'd actually be able to solve the puzzle if you wanted. If it's a school friend, you don't need to know that it's Johnny Perkins or whoever, you know? And if you don't know who Bono is, I don't know where you've been.
RS:
Did you maybe tell Martin Scorsese that he would be the only interviewee who showed up in a suit, compared to all those people hunkered down by the fire?
JT:
Well, I tried to get him to come to the fire in New York, but I guess he doesn't do bonfires.
RS:
He just said no, huh?
JT:
It was a "I think you must be joking" kind of thing.
RS:
You mentioned "punk rock warlord" right off the bat -- Joe also takes the trouble at one point in the film to describe himself as "warlord, one word, not two." That one went by me. What's he trying to say there?
JT:
Well, it's what Joe said and I wasn't there when he said it, but I think warlord is a word on its own and he probably was annoyed when he saw it written as two words. You know, because it is actually an English word. Initially one word. And by punk rock warlord, I think he was claiming some kind of permanent part in the punk ... you know, it implies a certain anarchy within the movement. There's no King of Pop, like Michael Jackson, in the punk world. There's just warlords. Does that help?
RS:
I guess. Did he aspire to leadership in the movement? Was it thrust upon him?
JT:
I think it was thrust upon him, really. I don't think the idea of a leader was much to do ... I mean John Lydon was really kind of the first figurehead of that movement. I think Joe emerged as a kind of different voice that continued on after punk, which is of course interesting about him.
RS:
Bono seems to feel that The Clash itself should have continued on, and that music lost something because they stopped when they did. Do you share that view?
JT:
I'm not sure. I think most bands do their best work, certainly in the first ten years of their existence, within this form of creativity. It often is the case that the work after that doesn't add that much to the original canon. I think all the members of The Clash are pretty -- although it was, I think, very traumatic when they did break up -- they seem to be reconciled to it probably as a good thing they didn't go on forever. They probably would have tarnished what they had achieved. I mean, obviously the ultimate one of that is the Pistols having only one album and still having a huge impact.
RS:
I didn't see Paul Simonon in this film -- why did he decline?
JT:
I can't really answer for Paul not being in it. At one point he said he would do the interview and then, in the end, we didn't get the interview. I don't know. It's his prerogative not to talk about his friend, I guess. You can't second guess why.
RS:
Do you feel satisfied that you got a pretty comprehensive group together to do the interviews?
JT:
I think it's pretty good, with the omission of Paul, which would have been great. But the movie still works for me, because it's a movie about Joe, not a movie about The Clash.
RS:
You spend a lot of time on Joe's love of community in the film, his love of meeting people and being part of a group dynamic, but you yourself experienced what a hard man he was to get to know on a persona l level. It's a huge contradiction.
JT:
I think he ran on contradictions. I think that's true, he was always looking for a group of people to have around him, and you can conjecture whether that was an absence of family when he was young, where his parents sent him to school on the other side of the world and in a particularly difficult kind of school system to survive. He was always creating families and The Clash, in a sense, became one in a succession of them, and he was always quite ruthless about being capable of slamming the door on that and moving on. Maybe, again, because that had happened to him as a child. He kept moving on as a child, and felt, I think, very divorced from his parents. So I think that's true. On the other hand, I think he was the most gregarious person you could come across. After a show, he would be the one who wanted to meet all the kids in the room that had hung behind and he wanted them all to come back to the hotel and all that kind of thing. So he was very, very open to people on one level and on another level I think it was quite hard to become a close friend of Joe's, because he demanded a lot of people.
RS:
A lot of attention? Respect?
JT:
A lot of ... I think the person had to be interesting to him, and that's the basis of most friendships. If you're not interested in the person, they're not going to be your friend, you know? Joe thought in quite deep ways about things and I think he liked people who were catalysts, who could catalyze that, you know? Bounce things off people, have a real argument or a real conversation. He did not like 'yes men' or lackeys.
RS:
The part of the film where you explore Joe's early years is heavily painted with an anti-fascist brush -- you cut in clips of the Animal Farm movie, and boarding school awfulness and so forth. Is that Joe or is that you trying to make a statement about punk and its anti-fascist credentials?
JT:
Well, I think as a filmmaker you are obviously putting your personal opinions in there. You can't escape that. But I was trying to make as honest a portrait as I could about Joe and having spent time with him, I think one of the core things about Joe is that he was a real believer in freedom of speech. I know that he absolutely hated the kind of Big Brother-ization of things. The thing that triggered me off, wanting to make this film about Joe was editing a sequence in Glastonbury -- I don't know if you've seen Glastonbury.
RS:
I've seen it.
JT:
You know the sequence where Joe comes back on stage after twenty years, and it's his first big crowd after twenty years and the BBC stick their cameras in front of him and he can't move to the left or right and he's very angry about that, but he manages to turn it into a speech about, you know, the freedom of the individual and "why should you be filmed everywhere?" The TV cameras, we have more of them in England than the whole rest of Europe put together and he was very aware of that and didn't like it.
RS:
Is it true there's a 12-hour cut of Glastonbury?
JT:
There was one, but whether you'll see it I don't know. You have to license it and that would be very expensive, but maybe somehow it could end up on YouTube, I suppose.
RS:
Between this film and Glastonbury, are you taking on as your big subject identifying the cross-roads between hippie culture and punk culture? Is that what interests you?
JT:
It has been of interest to me, yeah, partly because I was born in the same year as Joe and I kind of inhabited the cusp of those two movements when I was a kid. But that's only part of a much larger interest of understanding the changing culture of the time I've lived in. Glastonbury was 35 years of this event that I was looking at, it wasn't just the hippie-punk confluence. And with Joe, it's 50 years -- the man's life -- in a culture that's changing very, very rapidly. Very extreme changes from the England of the early 1950s to the England of the beginning of the 21st century. It's a hugely different place. Joe was shaped by a version of that place, that he ended up impacting and changing into a different place, or playing a part in the changes that have happened. An interesting subject for a film, for me, someone like that.
RS:
From a directing standpoint, I imagine the later chapters of Joe's life were easier to document, because there's just more footage available of everyone's life in recent years.
JT:
It's easier in a way, yeah, but whether it's better when you have more stuff ... I quite like the beginning of the film where we really didn't have much stuff, because you had to really invent ways of telling the story that maybe were more challenging and kind of cinematic. But yeah, I would say the beginning was more difficult because there was less stuff, and you tend to start at the beginning of a film thinking 'Jesus, this is gonna be hard,' so, you know.
RS:
You open with the old performance tape of White Riot -- was that because of the power of the song or just that visual of him performing it?
JT:
Well I'd had that in my attic for thirty years, that tape of him singing that song for the first time and recording it. That's the first time he ever recorded it, at the film school that I used to go to. We smuggled him in on a Sunday night in '76. Actually, very early in '77. I always knew it had a power, that image. I always liked that song because I had been in that riot. I saw him in the riot. Two days later, he had this amazing song about it, so it's always quite exciting when you've seen what created the song and then you hear the song. So I'd always loved that song and I felt like I'd seen its birth in different ways. But what made me really excited for that beginning was when I was sent, when the researcher found the footage of him as a child, effectively having a riot of his own in the backyard, it looked like. I got quite excited about putting those two things together. And in doing that, I learned even more about the song. I didn't understand until then that it's about his school life, that song.
RS:
Is there anything you know about Joe from your personal relationship that you chose not to put in the film? I'm specifically thinking about his infamous disappearance in 1982. What are you not telling us about that?
JT:
I'm not sure I'm not telling you ... I mean, I think it was a plan of the managers to hype up sales of tickets in England, and I think, typical Joe, he thought, "Well, if you want me to disappear I'm really going to disappear." I think the subtext of that is that he was getting more and more unsure about his position as a stadium-filling rock star, which the film then goes on to explore more towards the end of The Clash. I think it's probably the first indication that that band was going to break up soon, in a way. But I think the film says that. What other agenda do you think there is?
RS:
Well, I just can't imagine him being dodgy or elusive about his whereabouts in a personal conversation type of setting, which you two obviously shared, but I'm interested in the theatricality of it more than anything. If anti-fascism was one lynchpin of punk, then theatricality was obviously another, and I'd like to know more about how conscious he was of that.
JT:
Well, he liked noir, crime detective thrillers and what I got, genuinely, from that was a great sense of glee and fun and mischief. You know, responding to the manager saying 'you should hide low for a few weeks, Joe' and then ratcheting up that joke that the manager was perpetrating on the audience to include the manager. I can see that being very attractive to Joe. Hiding away in Paris while they're all looking for him and employing detectives and things. It's funny.
RS:
What's been the reaction of his closest friends to this film?
JT:
I've had a very good reaction. It was a difficult film for me to make because obviously I know the people involved quite closely and they've meant a lot to me. I made something that, on the one hand they would be happy with and it would really celebrate the man, and on the other hand it did show some dimensions of the man that were flawed and were contradictory. But that's who he was. He was human, like all of us. Flawed. I think he wouldn't have wanted anything else. I think he'd want a rounded kind of film about him, so it was trying to get that balance. Thankfully, from their response, they seem to think I got somewhere in the area.
RS:
Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. I had a lot of fun watching the film.
JT:
Good, I hope it made you think. And I hope people go and see it in the theaters rather than waiting for just the DVD. It's good to see it together.
Check out the official site www.joestrummerthemovie.com for more info
What would early punk be without its incestuous bickering? It was the initial refusal of Joe Strummer to allow a young Julien Temple into his inner circle in the mid-70s that first pushed the budding filmmaker towards the other great punk originators of the day, the Sex Pistols. That led to the creation of Temple's two seminal Pistols documentaries, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (which John Lydon loudly denounced for getting everything wrong) and The Filth and the Fury (made with his involvement and blessing). When a movie was to be made in the mid-80s about the doomed affair of Sid and Nancy, director Alex Cox chose Strummer to write the film's theme, much to the shock and chagrin of Lydon. Temple would then go on to record a commentary track for that film, in which he points out everything Cox gets wrong about the Pistols.
That said, who knows how many feathers will be ruffled by Temple's new film, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. Actually, truth be told, not many. There's no territory-marking in this one. The film is not an attempt to write new pages in the book of punk, but a considerate elegy to a friend. Strummer, of course, passed away in 2002 at the relatively young age of 50, leaving generations of Clash fans in mourning, not to mention countless friends and collaborators. This film is where they've all gathered to share their memories.
Ryan Stewart: What have you been working on lately?
Julien Temple: Back home, I'm editing a movie I shot in the summer. An opera film.
RS:
An opera or a movie about opera?
JT:
An opera. A film of an opera.
RS:
Got it.
JT:
It's a narrative, but they sing it in opera-ese. It's an opera in the streets of Sydney, actually -- that's where it was shot.
RS:
You gonna take it on the festival circuit?
JT:
Yeah, hopefully we'll go to some festivals.
RS:
I saw Joe Strummer the other day. Were you trying to intentionally irritate the audience by not captioning the interviewees when they're introduced?
JT:
Well, it's definitely a punk rock movie, hopefully, about a punk rock warlord, as he calls himself. So yeah, a little bit of annoyance is probably part of the reason, but more importantly, I like that sense of working out who people might be. You're not just delivering something where people don't have to think. If I'd captioned every person who appeared in this film it would be like reading a book rather than watching a movie. I was keen not to do that. I was also aware that Joe hated writing on the screen. Whenever a TV ad would come on with writing, text, he'd flip out. You should do it with moving images, you shouldn't have to write it, so all those things fed into it. I had proposed, which is probably what I should have done but we ran out of money, at the end to have the credits and a photograph of everybody who'd appeared. So at the end, having tried to work it out during the film who everyone might be, you'd actually be able to solve the puzzle if you wanted. If it's a school friend, you don't need to know that it's Johnny Perkins or whoever, you know? And if you don't know who Bono is, I don't know where you've been.
RS:
Did you maybe tell Martin Scorsese that he would be the only interviewee who showed up in a suit, compared to all those people hunkered down by the fire?
JT:
Well, I tried to get him to come to the fire in New York, but I guess he doesn't do bonfires.
RS:
He just said no, huh?
JT:
It was a "I think you must be joking" kind of thing.
RS:
You mentioned "punk rock warlord" right off the bat -- Joe also takes the trouble at one point in the film to describe himself as "warlord, one word, not two." That one went by me. What's he trying to say there?
JT:
Well, it's what Joe said and I wasn't there when he said it, but I think warlord is a word on its own and he probably was annoyed when he saw it written as two words. You know, because it is actually an English word. Initially one word. And by punk rock warlord, I think he was claiming some kind of permanent part in the punk ... you know, it implies a certain anarchy within the movement. There's no King of Pop, like Michael Jackson, in the punk world. There's just warlords. Does that help?
RS:
I guess. Did he aspire to leadership in the movement? Was it thrust upon him?
JT:
I think it was thrust upon him, really. I don't think the idea of a leader was much to do ... I mean John Lydon was really kind of the first figurehead of that movement. I think Joe emerged as a kind of different voice that continued on after punk, which is of course interesting about him.
RS:
Bono seems to feel that The Clash itself should have continued on, and that music lost something because they stopped when they did. Do you share that view?
JT:
I'm not sure. I think most bands do their best work, certainly in the first ten years of their existence, within this form of creativity. It often is the case that the work after that doesn't add that much to the original canon. I think all the members of The Clash are pretty -- although it was, I think, very traumatic when they did break up -- they seem to be reconciled to it probably as a good thing they didn't go on forever. They probably would have tarnished what they had achieved. I mean, obviously the ultimate one of that is the Pistols having only one album and still having a huge impact.
RS:
I didn't see Paul Simonon in this film -- why did he decline?
JT:
I can't really answer for Paul not being in it. At one point he said he would do the interview and then, in the end, we didn't get the interview. I don't know. It's his prerogative not to talk about his friend, I guess. You can't second guess why.
RS:
Do you feel satisfied that you got a pretty comprehensive group together to do the interviews?
JT:
I think it's pretty good, with the omission of Paul, which would have been great. But the movie still works for me, because it's a movie about Joe, not a movie about The Clash.
RS:
You spend a lot of time on Joe's love of community in the film, his love of meeting people and being part of a group dynamic, but you yourself experienced what a hard man he was to get to know on a persona l level. It's a huge contradiction.
JT:
I think he ran on contradictions. I think that's true, he was always looking for a group of people to have around him, and you can conjecture whether that was an absence of family when he was young, where his parents sent him to school on the other side of the world and in a particularly difficult kind of school system to survive. He was always creating families and The Clash, in a sense, became one in a succession of them, and he was always quite ruthless about being capable of slamming the door on that and moving on. Maybe, again, because that had happened to him as a child. He kept moving on as a child, and felt, I think, very divorced from his parents. So I think that's true. On the other hand, I think he was the most gregarious person you could come across. After a show, he would be the one who wanted to meet all the kids in the room that had hung behind and he wanted them all to come back to the hotel and all that kind of thing. So he was very, very open to people on one level and on another level I think it was quite hard to become a close friend of Joe's, because he demanded a lot of people.
RS:
A lot of attention? Respect?
JT:
A lot of ... I think the person had to be interesting to him, and that's the basis of most friendships. If you're not interested in the person, they're not going to be your friend, you know? Joe thought in quite deep ways about things and I think he liked people who were catalysts, who could catalyze that, you know? Bounce things off people, have a real argument or a real conversation. He did not like 'yes men' or lackeys.
RS:
The part of the film where you explore Joe's early years is heavily painted with an anti-fascist brush -- you cut in clips of the Animal Farm movie, and boarding school awfulness and so forth. Is that Joe or is that you trying to make a statement about punk and its anti-fascist credentials?
JT:
Well, I think as a filmmaker you are obviously putting your personal opinions in there. You can't escape that. But I was trying to make as honest a portrait as I could about Joe and having spent time with him, I think one of the core things about Joe is that he was a real believer in freedom of speech. I know that he absolutely hated the kind of Big Brother-ization of things. The thing that triggered me off, wanting to make this film about Joe was editing a sequence in Glastonbury -- I don't know if you've seen Glastonbury.
RS:
I've seen it.
JT:
You know the sequence where Joe comes back on stage after twenty years, and it's his first big crowd after twenty years and the BBC stick their cameras in front of him and he can't move to the left or right and he's very angry about that, but he manages to turn it into a speech about, you know, the freedom of the individual and "why should you be filmed everywhere?" The TV cameras, we have more of them in England than the whole rest of Europe put together and he was very aware of that and didn't like it.
RS:
Is it true there's a 12-hour cut of Glastonbury?
JT:
There was one, but whether you'll see it I don't know. You have to license it and that would be very expensive, but maybe somehow it could end up on YouTube, I suppose.
RS:
Between this film and Glastonbury, are you taking on as your big subject identifying the cross-roads between hippie culture and punk culture? Is that what interests you?
JT:
It has been of interest to me, yeah, partly because I was born in the same year as Joe and I kind of inhabited the cusp of those two movements when I was a kid. But that's only part of a much larger interest of understanding the changing culture of the time I've lived in. Glastonbury was 35 years of this event that I was looking at, it wasn't just the hippie-punk confluence. And with Joe, it's 50 years -- the man's life -- in a culture that's changing very, very rapidly. Very extreme changes from the England of the early 1950s to the England of the beginning of the 21st century. It's a hugely different place. Joe was shaped by a version of that place, that he ended up impacting and changing into a different place, or playing a part in the changes that have happened. An interesting subject for a film, for me, someone like that.
RS:
From a directing standpoint, I imagine the later chapters of Joe's life were easier to document, because there's just more footage available of everyone's life in recent years.
JT:
It's easier in a way, yeah, but whether it's better when you have more stuff ... I quite like the beginning of the film where we really didn't have much stuff, because you had to really invent ways of telling the story that maybe were more challenging and kind of cinematic. But yeah, I would say the beginning was more difficult because there was less stuff, and you tend to start at the beginning of a film thinking 'Jesus, this is gonna be hard,' so, you know.
RS:
You open with the old performance tape of White Riot -- was that because of the power of the song or just that visual of him performing it?
JT:
Well I'd had that in my attic for thirty years, that tape of him singing that song for the first time and recording it. That's the first time he ever recorded it, at the film school that I used to go to. We smuggled him in on a Sunday night in '76. Actually, very early in '77. I always knew it had a power, that image. I always liked that song because I had been in that riot. I saw him in the riot. Two days later, he had this amazing song about it, so it's always quite exciting when you've seen what created the song and then you hear the song. So I'd always loved that song and I felt like I'd seen its birth in different ways. But what made me really excited for that beginning was when I was sent, when the researcher found the footage of him as a child, effectively having a riot of his own in the backyard, it looked like. I got quite excited about putting those two things together. And in doing that, I learned even more about the song. I didn't understand until then that it's about his school life, that song.
RS:
Is there anything you know about Joe from your personal relationship that you chose not to put in the film? I'm specifically thinking about his infamous disappearance in 1982. What are you not telling us about that?
JT:
I'm not sure I'm not telling you ... I mean, I think it was a plan of the managers to hype up sales of tickets in England, and I think, typical Joe, he thought, "Well, if you want me to disappear I'm really going to disappear." I think the subtext of that is that he was getting more and more unsure about his position as a stadium-filling rock star, which the film then goes on to explore more towards the end of The Clash. I think it's probably the first indication that that band was going to break up soon, in a way. But I think the film says that. What other agenda do you think there is?
RS:
Well, I just can't imagine him being dodgy or elusive about his whereabouts in a personal conversation type of setting, which you two obviously shared, but I'm interested in the theatricality of it more than anything. If anti-fascism was one lynchpin of punk, then theatricality was obviously another, and I'd like to know more about how conscious he was of that.
JT:
Well, he liked noir, crime detective thrillers and what I got, genuinely, from that was a great sense of glee and fun and mischief. You know, responding to the manager saying 'you should hide low for a few weeks, Joe' and then ratcheting up that joke that the manager was perpetrating on the audience to include the manager. I can see that being very attractive to Joe. Hiding away in Paris while they're all looking for him and employing detectives and things. It's funny.
RS:
What's been the reaction of his closest friends to this film?
JT:
I've had a very good reaction. It was a difficult film for me to make because obviously I know the people involved quite closely and they've meant a lot to me. I made something that, on the one hand they would be happy with and it would really celebrate the man, and on the other hand it did show some dimensions of the man that were flawed and were contradictory. But that's who he was. He was human, like all of us. Flawed. I think he wouldn't have wanted anything else. I think he'd want a rounded kind of film about him, so it was trying to get that balance. Thankfully, from their response, they seem to think I got somewhere in the area.
RS:
Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. I had a lot of fun watching the film.
JT:
Good, I hope it made you think. And I hope people go and see it in the theaters rather than waiting for just the DVD. It's good to see it together.
Check out the official site www.joestrummerthemovie.com for more info
Check out the official site www.joestrummerthemovie.com for more info
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