The director who is putting passion back into British cinema discusses his latest film with Nick Roddick
The idea that passion in British cinema begins and ends with Celia Johnson's moment of crisis on the platform in Brief Encounter as the express roars past and the camera tilts is a theory that is pretty much sunk by the films of Michael Winterbottom.
Passionate through and through, as much in their stories as in the uncompromisingly focused way in which Winterbottom tells them, they testify to someone who cares deeply both about his subject matter and about the way that that gets translated into film.
And yet you wouldn't think it to talk to him. Undoubtedly intense, he is, however, physically slight - the bull-like presence of Oliver Stone seems to belong in a parallel universe - and rarely forceful.
In conversation, that is: it is hard to believe that, on set, some adrenalin-driven demon is not released. How else would actors be pushed towards the kind of intensely simple moments of truth that lift Welcome to Sarajevo onto a higher plain?
Moments like the one in which Michael Henderson (Stephen Dillane) calls home to his wife from a hotel room in Split, trying to find ways of explaining to her - also, perhaps, of explaining to himself - why he has decided to break all the laws and bring home with him a savvy but withdrawn nine-year-old Bosnian girl (Emira Nusevic)?
Or moments like the one in which the hardened, ego-driven American newsman (Woody Harrelson, fast emerging as the most interesting actor of his generation) shows a Sarajevo father the Polaroid he has been able to take of his vanished son, whom he has found emaciated and still alive in the Serbian concentration camp at Omarska?
Most impressive of all, though, is the fact that these two 'star' journalists are not the focus of the story in Welcome to Sarajevo. This is no Biko or Ghosts of Mississippi, where the experience of the oppressed has to be mediated for us through a familiar (white, middle-class) hero. Working with Sarajevo-based Saga Films, whose directors and cameramen filmed the war and the siege day to day, as it happened, Winterbottom has managed for the major part of his film to make the reporters come across as what they in fact were: witnesses, not players.
"If you do a story about a British journalist rescuing a child from Sarajevo," says Winterbottom with no great emphasis, as though the point were self-evident (which it is), "then Sarajevo just becomes an exotic location and the story's all about this mid-life crisis of this British journalist, or this act of heroism by this British journalist. And we didn't want it to be that.
"We wanted to try and use the journalist as a kind of focus to make a film that showed you little bits of Sarajevo and also maybe made you think a bit about the relationship between the people here [in Western Europe], who were watching the stuff on TV, like I was, as it happened, but not really thinking that much about it when the TV stopped."
True, Welcome to Sarajevo does have a central character: Henderson, the journalist, based loosely on Independent Television News correspondent Michael Nicholson, who did indeed abandon his neutrality, both to file stories that became increas-ingly critical of the way the West and the UN were (not) responding to the siege of Sarajevo, and to smuggle out a Bosnian child (whom he and his wife have since adopted). But what Nicholson/Henderson did is a function of what he saw. And, because we see it too, we respond not so much through him as with him.
"That structure's quite difficult," admits Winterbottom, "because you don't want the central character, Stephen's character, to swamp the film. We wanted to have a situation where you'd get involved in the other characters, the Sarajevans. Normally, those kind of characters feed into the emotional experience of the central character, whereas what we wanted on this film was for the central character's emotional experience to feed into the minor characters' importance, so you're actually involved briefly, but hopefully in a fairly direct way, with lots of characters for two or three minutes rather than with one character through the whole film."
Welcome to Sarajevo is at times almost painful to watch for the richness and intensity of emotions that are concentrated into those short passages focusing on minor characters like a little girl who has lost both her parents, or a woman wounded in the infamous bread-queue attack. But this was, says Winterbottom, very much a question of capturing something that pre-existed his work as a director.
"I think, from my point of view, it was a matter of trying to find a way, while we were making it, of getting the impact of reading the script into the film," he says, politely but firmly declining any attempt to hang round his neck the kind of auteurist label that will doubtless be fabricated, in the French press and elsewhere, over the next few days.
And what of trying to find something which links Winterbottom's three features to date: the lesbian/serial-killer road movie Butterfly Kiss; the literary adaptation Jude and Welcome to Sarajevo?
"In terms of making the movies," he says, "there are all sorts of connections between making them. But, as films, I don't know because, once I've made them, I don't watch them again."
Intensity of passion, I suggest hope-fully but somewhat lamely? Winterbottom looks especially doubtful.
"I guess the stories that interest me a lot involve deep emotions at some level, and if you're going to deal with something that has emotions, it might as well be intense emotions as not," he says, finally. "I think there are connections between I Want You (the new film he starts shooting later this month) and Butterfly Kiss and maybe even Jude in the nature of the love story. But I think Sarajevo is completely different."
Amen to that.
