Cultural Life: Anton Corbijn, director

Film

I see embarrassingly little because I'm constantly travelling, but I know what I'm looking forward to: There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, and anything with Philip Seymour Hoffman in it. I saw Eastern Promises. One of my all-time favourites is John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I also love the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski. Tarkovsky, Fellini, Jarmusch and early Scorsese definitely influenced my film-making, subconsciously. At the moment I'm watching movies by the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.

Music

I'm in between homes, so everything is in storage, and because I don't have a record player, I'm not buying stuff. I do have an iPod but I don't enjoy listening to music through headphones, so don't use it often. I have a friend, Pierre Wind, who is a chef and can translate songs into meals. I suggested "Everybody's Talkin'" by Harry Nilsson, and he made a meal out of it, using computer technology. We played the song again and again during the meal. I keep listening to the Control soundtrack in my car [the film Corbijn directed], partly because I'm too lazy to change it. I hadn't listened to Joy Division for a while before I made the movie, and I enjoyed listening to them again.

Exhibitions

I went to the opening of the Peter Doig show at Tate Britain, and it was one of the best shows I've ever seen – fantastic. I like him a lot anyway; he's in my top five painters. I also saw the Antony Gormley show at the Hayward. I prefer painting, though; it has more influence on me.

Books

I'm reading Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma. It's about Dutch society, leading up to and in the aftermath of the murder of the film-maker Theo van Gogh. But I tend to read scripts mainly.

Theatre/Opera

Last time I was in Salzburg, I heard the Czech mezzo Magdalena Kozena sing. In Berlin, I saw Robert Wilson's version of Georg Büchner's Leonce und Lena. I enjoy the theatre but you need to plan to go – and I don't plan much.

'Control' is out now on DVD

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Light and shadow also play an important role in Control, an emotional rollercoaster of a film that tells the story of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division. Curtis took his own life in 1980 at age 23, after months of grappling with epilepsy, a broken-down marriage and the demands of sudden stardom.

Like much of Corbijn's photography, the black and white film is stark and moody and draws upon music as its main inspiration. But the Dutch photographer, who first shot Joy Division after coming to England in 1979, states emphatically that Control is not a "music film". It is, he says, a love story.

Partly based on the book Touching from a Distance by Deborah Curtis, the singer's widow, the film has been stockpiling awards (including Best Film from the London Critics' Circle, top honours at the British Independent Film Awards and a Special Mention at Cannes) since its release last year. In town to promote the film ahead of its Thursday release here, Corbijn sat down with the Prague Daily Monitor to talk about the filming process, music and his future plans.

COURTESY

Anton Corbijn says filming Control was a life-changing experience.

You mentioned that you never had a proper conversation with Ian Curtis, but what impression did you have when you met him in 1979?
He seemed like a very decent, nice guy. A bit shyish. I didn't feel like he was the loudmouth of the band. So it was a bit of a surprise when you read Debbie's book and you think, oh, he was a bastard. He was just not very nice sometimes. And that was kind of confusing, so in the film you see he's not always that nice, but you still feel for him, what he goes through. I think a lot of that is due to the fact that Sam Riley managed to play him so well, kept feeling for him.

It seems that even audiences who know nothing about Joy Division will walk away moved, simply because of the story. How were you able to achieve that?
There is something in the film besides the music. There are many elements that connect to other people's lives. And the music is so beautiful and strong. The actors were great. I can't think of anybody I'd like to replace. Toby Kebbell, who plays [Joy Division manager] Rob Gretton, is fantastic. The whole band was spot on. Samantha Morton was amazing. In England you have this incredible acting talent that's very different than Dutch acting. [England is] a literary country, not a visual country. Dutch people want you to know how they really feel. The English – they act a bit when they tell something. The way they say things is maybe more important than that they let you know how they really feel.

Do you think your career would have been very different if it hadn't been for Joy Division?
It would have been very different if I hadn't moved to England, [and] I moved there because of them. It opened my work to a whole different audience. And now making a film so many years later – again, it's a life-changing experience. Because now I will make another film. Before I thought I would just make one film and then go back to photography. It really changed how I look at everything and also how I look at my photography. I now feel more distance from it. And it's very exciting to see something from a distance because you can judge it better. I will do photography again. I want to do exhibitions at the end of next year or 2010. But it's really beautiful to have this adventure suddenly. In photography I know what I'm doing. In film, not so well yet.

Why was now the right time to make the film? Was it that you were simply in that right moment in your life?
It's organic, I think. For many years I thought I wanted to make a film but until now didn't feel like I was the right guy to do it. Because I have no education in any of this. If you take a picture, you can get away with murder because you do it on your own, because it doesn't involve lots of money and lots of people. If you make a film, you better know what you're doing. So I was very nervous about all the scripts I read because I felt there must be lots of directors who could do a much better job. Whereas with this story, I felt that maybe I was the right guy because I had worked with Joy Division and I had emotions there because that had changed my life. So I felt any lack of filmmaking skills will be compensated [for] by these emotions.

To what extent did it help that you were a genuine Joy Division fan, and to what extent did that put extra pressure on you?
The fact that I met Ian Curtis generated my interest in making this film, but it also helped that I didn't know him too well. If you're too close to something it might be very hard to approach it as a film subject. I knew just enough to be able to make the film objectively. I'm always fighting these labels of rock photography or music film because it narrows the audience, but I'm not ashamed to say that music was the source of a lot of things I did.