Wrong goal right Code

IF things had gone to plan, director Michael Winterbottom would be in Newcastle shooting the first of the football film trilogy Goal! Instead, he's promoting his movie Code 46, while raising the finance to bring bawdy novel Tristram Shandy to the screen with comedian Steve Coogan in a starring role.

Signing up for Goal! always seemed an odd move for a British director who's carved a career over the past decade with low budget films that defy categorisation.

His films have cut across genres, just like Code 45 with its elements of sci-fi, gumshoe movie, film noir, Greek mythology and love story. It has an American star, Tim Robbins, and Oscar-nominated British actress, Samantha Morton, in leading roles but is very definitely not a Hollywood movie.

Winterbottom won't be going to Tinseltown, despite their entreaties. Unsurprisingly, he's not offered $100m action movies to direct, but literary adaptations. What they'd pay him would be enough to finance one of his movies.

Goal! would undoubtedly have raised his mainstream profile. The project reached the point where the producers wanted to rewrite the script, begin secondary filming on the Newcastle matches and then shoot the main film at the end of the season.

"I thought, 'Perfect, nice and quick'," he says. "We got to a stage where we had a script which we all thought needed more work, but had different ideas what that work was. They wanted to change the writer and I said they should get a new director as well."

All this was happening as another of his films, Nine Songs, was causing a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival with scenes of real sex in the love story of a young London couple. The director believes that the film will be able to be released with few, if any, cuts. "It's not a porn movie, it does have a lot of sex," he says. "The aim was to tell a story that starts with the physical side in the hope that if you show it honestly and intimately enough, you can see there's a connection between sexual intimacy and being in love, but it's not the same thing. That's an area cinema doesn't do. We get the impression they will give it a certificate. Whether they ask for any particular cuts, we don't know."

In the meantime audiences can see the latest addition to his cv, Code 46, in which Robbins's detective goes to Shanghai to investigate a crime and falls in love with Maria, the guilty party.

In the past decade, Winterbottom's output has defied being labelled, although always welcome at film festivals around the world as befits the European feel of much of his work. He recalled Manchester's 1970s and 1980s music scene in 24 Hour Party People; filmed Thomas Hardy's Jude with Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet; followed journalists reporting on the Bosnian conflict in Welcome To Sarajevo; and In This World told of Afghan refugees being smuggled into Britain.

Code 46 is yet another departure. "For people who love sci-fi, it's definitely sci-fi. And for people who don't like it, it's a love story," he says.

Shanghai and Dubai were chosen to conjure up the futuristic setting rather than building sets. "We though the best way would be to combine elements that already exist, but in different ways, rather than build a whole artificial environment," he explains.

Much was borrowed from In This World, which he shot in Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. He only knew Dubai from touching down briefly in the country on international flights. The result on screen is a city of skyscrapers surrounded by desert.

"We decided we could take a bit of Shanghai, put around it the desert in Dubai, and mix in a bit of India. By mixing those elements of time and culture, you get an interesting world that feels very familiar but, like in a dream world, not working on exactly the same rules.

"The choice is partly visual, and partly where you think it's going to be enjoyable and practical to work. In the case of Shanghai, it's amazing because of the physical, political, social and cultural change that's happened.

"These people have lived through these rapid changes and a lot of lives been affected by the change. It would be very hard to shoot the whole thing in London and imagine it's 50 years in the future."

Having two very different types of actors in the leading roles helped the story where their characters are opposites who fall in love. "Tim is very thoughtful, very methodical. He likes to discuss the story, the implications, see how one scene fits with the rest of the script. That's kind of a classic way of working," says Winterbottom.

"Sam's way is the opposite. She likes to be spontaneous, to try things out, be truthful to that particular moment.

So it was quite complicated trying to combine those two things because they have opposite approaches to acting. In some ways that was positive as they were supposed to be opposite characters coming together."

Winterbottom's way of working leans towards Morton's method. "I like to shoot the whole scene in one take, with a handheld camera and no lights. You can try things out in a different way," he says.

"That was probably easier for Sam. We were trying to negotiate a way everyone could work in their own way. Both ways of working are legitimate. It's trying to find a compromise between the two."

* Code 46 (15) opens in cinemas on Friday.

COMPETITION

7DAYS has copies of the Code 46 soundtrack by The Free Association for five winners in our competition. To enter: tell us who directed Tim Robbins in Mystic River?

Send your answer, together with your name and address, on a postcard to Code 46 competition, 7Days, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington, DL1 1NF. Closing date for entries is Tuesday.

Published: 16/09/2004