Gorgeously bleak

>> Anton Corbijn’s Control recreates the
troubled life of brilliant Joy Division
singer Ian Curtis

by MARK SLUTSKY

It’s been almost 30 years now since Joy Division singer and lyricist Ian Curtis took his own life at the young age of 23. The band, which, absent of Curtis, would later become the massively popular New Order, left behind only two proper albums and a handful of recordings, but their influence seems stronger than ever today; few bands loom so large in the indie rock canon.

Curtis was first incarnated on screen in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, played by Sean Harris, who memorably conveyed something of the epileptic singer’s stormy but self-possessed energy. But the story of Joy Division was only one part of that film, whose real subject was Factory records founder Tony Wilson (who passed away earlier this year) and the world of music and ideas he inhabited

Now, five years later, Curtis lives on celluloid again, thanks to photographer and music video director Anton Corbijn. Control, his first feature, is a gorgeous, black-and-white evocation of the man’s short life, and the bleak Manchester surroundings that incubated the talent responsible for songs like “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Transmission” and “Atmosphere.”

Newcomer Sam Riley (and not, thankfully, Jude Law, as was rumoured when the project was in pre-production) plays Curtis, evoking his genius and his deep sadness with a fearless, touching performance: you see Curtis as writer, father, performer and sufferer, in a time when epilepsy was little understood and difficult to treat.

Samantha Morton plays Deborah Curtis, who wrote the book Touching From a Distance, on which the film is partially but not entirely based. Deborah Curtis, of course, didn’t spend too much time on Annik Honoré, the Belgian writer with whom Curtis had an affair, and who’s played in the film by Alexandra Maria Lara, best known here for her role as Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall. All three contribute to a solemn but remarkably compelling film that pays homage to Curtis’s legacy while still painting him as a vivid, believable human being.

MOVED BY MUSIC: Corbijn

Going back in time

“You know, Joy Division has a special meaning in my life,” Corbijn says, talking to the Mirror in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I moved from Holland to England because of them. I did some things with them, which I really loved. In a way, I was linked to them, even though, you know, we worked only twice.”

It gives Control a special resonance: as he says, in his early 20s, Corbijn moved from his native Netherlands to England, largely inspired by Joy Division’s music. Now, some three decades later, he found himself recreating that period, even to the point of re-staging iconic photographs he had himself taken. “I thought that was it, you know,” he says of his ’70s work with the band. “I’m not so good at revisiting these things.”

So when he was initially approached to make the film, he balked, though something seemed to call him back. “I went back, mentally, to the early days of my work, the early ‘80s, and through that I started to realize again how much Joy Division had meant to me, and that whole trip to England, and all these things. I came back to it later and said well, it’s such an important part of my life, and in a way I want to close off that whole part of my life, and this movie might be the vehicle to do that with. So this movie is a beginning of something, also the end of something.”

According to the actors, who clearly admire Corbijn, that connection was palpable on set. “He’s a very intelligent, a very calm and a very fascinating person, who has all this incredible background,” Lara says. “His whole relationship with musicians and music, and then the fact that he has been so personally involved with this story. It made it very, very special.”

Unknown pleasure

Naturally, finding the right Ian Curtis was Corbijn’s key concern as he prepared for the film. “It was a very big search and even then we were incredibly lucky to find Sam Riley,” he says.

Weirdly enough, Riley’s only previous film role of any note was as Fall singer Mark E. Smith in 24 Hour Party People, and even that was a very minor part, to say the least. “I was there for two hours one afternoon,” he says of that shoot. “Ironically, I watched them shoot the ‘Transmission’ scene while I was waiting to do mine. But I was crap in that. I didn’t really know Mark E. Smith’s voice. I was there for 20 minutes or so. And when I took my mates to the cinema, I’d been cut out! Some of them still don’t believe I was ever in it!” (Riley’s scene does appear as an extra in the U.K. DVD release of Party People—“I watched it once when I was drunk,” he says, “and never have dared to watch it again.”)

“The guy’s more than perfect,” Corbijn says. “He’s phenomenal, I think. But to find an unknown, you know, and of course to take a risk with an unknown, was difficult in the sense of persuading all the people that this was the right choice. But I was also a first-time director, and so Sam and me were relying on each other throughout the film.”

“Anton knew very much how he wanted the film to look and he could tell what was convincing and what wasn’t,” Riley says. “But with Samantha Morton and Alex and all the other guys, it made it easier for Anton and I, because everyone around us was so accomplished. The fact that me and him didn’t really know what we were doing sort of meshed there.”

Playing for keeps

Though the film uses the band’s actual recordings on the soundtrack, whenever Joy Division plays live in the film, what you’re hearing is the actors themselves playing their instruments. “Initially, we thought we’d ask the actors to learn the instruments so they would look convincing on the stage for playback,” Corbijn explains. “But they became enthusiastic about it and so determined to play it for real that, in the end, we ended up shooting them playing for real and recording it. Luckily enough, we weren’t trying to do very complex things, because Joy Division’s music was simple. Effective, but simple.”

“When I saw them, Sam and the other actors playing the band members,” Lara says, “when I saw them in rehearsal in Nottingham, this was the moment when I started loving the music of Joy Division.”

“The nice thing about it was that you’ve got a real dynamic between the guys going, even when they’re not playing in the film, just when they are sitting in the room,” Corbijn says. “A dynamic like a real rock band.”

Corbijn was clearly not interested in indulging in the cheap clichés of the rock biopic genre. “I’ve never seen a rock biopic that I liked,” he says. “I wanted to make this film about this boy who goes after his dreams and gets disappointed where he ends up. That is the story for me. It’s a sad love story as well. That’s how I look at it.

“The music in the film is great, but it’s not a music film. There are a lot of very quiet moments in the film. You don’t think of it as a music film. Yeah, I know that people will all probably call it a Joy Division biopic, but it really isn’t. Though, you know, I think if you are a Joy Division fan, you will not be disappointed going to this film, let’s put it that way.”

Control plays as part of the Festival du Nouveau
Cinéma on Thursday, Oct. 18, 1:15 p.m. at the impérial,
Friday, Oct. 19, 9:30 p.m. and Saturday, Oct. 20, 3:15 p.m.
at Ex-Centris. It opens in theatres Friday, Oct. 26

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