Telling refugees’ story by living it

Toronto

Before Michael Winterbottom began filming “In This World,” the story of two Afghan refugees’ white-knuckle odyssey from the Pakastani city of Peshawar to London that opens here Friday, the 42-year-old British director decided the only way to understand the perils of such an arduous trip would be to make the journey himself.

It was barely two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In southern Pakistan, where Winterbottom and screenwriter Tony Grisoni went to visit refugee camps to figure out the mechanics of a story, Westerners were regarded with suspicion, if not hostility. One day Winterbottom and Grisoni were traveling in an open-back truck when they had a white-knuckle encounter themselves with an armed patrol of Pakistani soldiers.

“We couldn’t talk to them, nor they to us,” Winterbottom recalled here during the just-concluded film festival. “We had no idea if we were being arrested or detained or what.”

The soldiers went through the filmmakers’ bags, discovering all sorts of film equipment, which made them more suspicious. “I kept saying to Tony, give it to them, let them have anything they want. Eventually, they decided we were innocuous enough and let us go. But right there, we had a scene for the movie.”

As a filmmaker, Winterbottom is many things, but innocuous is not one of them. After learning his craft making TV films and documentaries, he has become one of the most prolific directors in the indie world, making 10 feature films since his debut in 1995. He had two films here at the festival, “In This World” and “Code 46,” a cerebral sci-fi drama co-starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton that is due out early next year.

If Winterbottom still has a low critical profile, it’s largely because all his films have been so strikingly different. He’s made witty pop confections (“24 Hour Party People”), serious literary adaptations (“Jude”), political journalism (“Welcome to Sarajevo”), family drama (“Wonderland”) and a lesbian serial-killer saga (“Butterfly Kiss”). What unites the films is a strong sense of place and the director’s restless curiosity. Winterbottom shoots all his films on location, using scripts as a rough blueprint, relying on ingenuity and improvisation.

To recreate a 19th century Old West mining town in “The Claim,” he shot for months at 8,000 feet in remote northern Alberta. “In This World,” which has the spare look of a documentary, was shot with an on-set crew of three -- a cinematographer, sound recordist and Winterbottom, assisted by Grisoni and a researcher, a runner and two coordinating producers.

“For me, a story exists in a very particular place or environment,” explains the director, who has the face of a choirboy but the quiet intensity of a mathematician working on a complex equation. “I hate designing a shot six months in advance. If you plan things out too far in advance, you lose the spontaneity. I like arriving at a place where we’re filming and not knowing what will happen or having something happen that you least expect.”

Although there were plenty of old masters at the festival this year, the young filmmakers I interviewed were more curious about Winterbottom. That’s not because he’s directed big hits (he hasn’t) but because he has what filmmakers admire most of all -- creative freedom.

Skipping studio economics

The key to Winterbottom’s success is Revolution Films (not to confused with Joe Roth’s L.A.-based Revolution Studios), which he formed with longtime producing partner Andrew Eaton in 1994 as a way of obtaining financing that wouldn’t be subject to the whims of studio economics. In its early years, the London-based Revolution had backing from PolyGram; currently it has a first-look deal with United Artists, who is distributing “Code 46” and recently signed a two-year extension of its Revolution pact.

Revolution gets additional money from the U.K. Film Council and the BBC, where both partners worked during their TV careers. Revolution also makes films Winterbottom doesn’t direct. The partners produced another film here at the festival: “Bright Young Things,” an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies,” directed by British actor and writer Stephen Frye.

On any number of films, Revolution has moved ahead with casting and hiring crew even though the money had yet to materialize. “We cut it about as close as you can get on ‘Code 46,’ where we had to start shooting in Shanghai on Jan. 6 and we still hadn’t closed the deal until Christmas,” recalls Eaton. “I went to my wife and said, ‘You do realize that if the money falls through on this, we may lose the house.’ Even when we started shooting, I was going to the cash machine taking out as much money as possible just to pay the crew.”

As a young filmmaker, Winterbottom made two documentaries about Ingmar Bergman, an obvious career model. “He didn’t have to chase financing,” the director says. “He made 50 films, kept his budgets low and always worked with the same people, so as he wrote each script, he knew who could play each part and how he could shoot them.”

Winterbottom has a similarly close-knit creative team that includes screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, who’s written five features for Winterbottom, as well as editor Peter Christelis and casting director Wendy Brazington, who’ve also worked on many of the director’s films.

Winterbottom decided to do “In This World” after being appalled by a nasty British election campaign where Labour and Conservative politicians alike pandered to voters’ hostility toward a wave of immigrants pouring into England and Europe. The British press was full of accounts of migrants risking their lives to improve their lives; in one especially horrific incident, 58 Chinese immigrants died while being smuggled into England in a container truck. Working with Grisoni, Winterbottom chose to tell the simplest story possible, following two young immigrants who leave behind their family and culture, in search of a better future.

In Pakistan, Winterbottom met with more than 100 refugees, eventually deciding on two leads, Jamal Udin Tourabi, who thought he was 14 -- he didn’t know exactly when he’d been born -- and Enayatullah Jumaudin, who was a little older and spoke no English, but had a captivating face. The film’s narrative was shaped by day-to-day experience. Initially, when the filmmakers were shooting in a Kurdish area of Turkey, the storyline had the two boys being stuck with a family there, forced to pay money to get away.

“But when we arrived,” Winterbottom explained, “the family was so unbelievably welcoming, with the mother insisting on giving them tea and food, that we changed our idea of how to tell that part of the story.”

Overcoming hurdles

Logistics were a nightmare. The filmmakers hired a “fixer” to help navigate each country’s tangle of bureaucracy. “In Turkey, it was impossible,” says Winterbottom. “We finally gave up and pretended we were tourists.”

It was also a challenge using actors who were actually illegal immigrants.

“We could never get a visa from the Pakistani government, so we smuggled Jamal and Enayatullah from Pakistan to Kabul and then back into Pakistan,” says Winterbottom. “When we got to the border of Pakistan and Iran, our fixer actually told the military intelligence that our visas were false. Basically at every border, the guards assumed our actors’ visas were false, because they were refugees and, in their eyes, refugees couldn’t possibly have real passports.”

On most films, insurance normally accounts for 2% of the budget; on “In This World,” it was closer to 10%. Because they were filming just after the Daniel Pearl kidnapping, Winterbottom and the crew needed both kidnapping and ransom insurance. The film company also had to deposit $10,000 in a London bank to pay for a private military force that was on call to helicopter them out of harm’s way. Favors were often called in. When the British consulate in Islamabad balked at giving visas to Jamal and Enayatullah, Eaton phoned director Alan Parker, the head of the British Film Council who’d recently been knighted.

“When the consul got a fax from Sir Alan Parker, he caved in,” Eaton recalled. “He could say no to us, but not to Sir Alan.”

Winterbottom’s travels gave him a look at the region that didn’t always fit Western stereotypes. “Iran had a lot more optimism about integrating into the West, despite Bush demonizing them as being part of the ‘axis of evil,’ ” he says. “Turkey was totally different from one place to another. In eastern Turkey, people were very hostile. But by the time we got to Istanbul, we were practically in Europe again. The difference between city and country was much bigger than country to country. You realize there’s very little sense of national borders.”

In some ways, not having actors and a big crew made the shoot easier than a traditional movie. One day Winterbottom filmed a scene where Jamal and Enayatullah are apprehended at a border checkpoint, a sequence not unlike one he’d shot in “Welcome to Sarajevo.”

The commander of the checkpoint gave his permission -- as long as he could play himself. “When we did that scene in ‘Sarajevo,’ it took us days because we had to deal with actors and their motivations and the logistics of deciding how to stage it,” says Winterbottom. “But this time, we did it in a couple of hours. The commander only needed one take, because he was just a soldier doing what he does every day.”

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.