Fast and loose

IT’S easy to see why Michael Winterbottom is considered one of Britain’s most independent filmmakers. He passed on such high-profile Hollywood projects as “The Cider House Rules” and “Good Will Hunting” because the scripts didn’t excite him. He even does interviews his way.

Rather than talk in the quiet of his offices at Revolution Films, the director headed down the street to what was surely the noisiest restaurant in town. He seemed to be energized by all the activity around him, frequently framing answers before the questions were even finished.

Though he’ll be 45 next month, Winterbottom, who was dressed casually in jeans and a sweatshirt, has a boyish enthusiasm, whether he’s discussing his favorite rock bands or latest project. The only way you could pick up more than a fraction of what he said over the lunchtime roar was by reading lips, and it didn’t help that he talks as fast as Quentin Tarantino.

Winterbottom, a native of Blackburn, near Manchester, did speak loudly enough at one point for me to learn that he got addicted to film through a library club when he was in his teens and that Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut and Martin Scorsese (especially in his “Mean Streets” era) are among his favorite directors.

I also picked up something about his attending Oxford and getting started in film after making documentaries and doing a few TV shows but missed most of the titles of the postwar European films that intrigued him.

Finally, after much pleading, Winterbottom agreed to push his soup aside and head for a quieter setting. He picked some chairs outside a corner coffee shop, which was fine except that the chairs were next to a bus stop and the periodic roar was as loud as the chatter in the restaurant.

It seems Winterbottom will go to great lengths to avoid the easy or routine -- as he shows in his new comedy, “Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story.”

He’d been haunted since school days by the idea of making a movie out of what everyone else agreed was an unfilmable book.

Written in the 18th century by Laurence Sterne, “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” is a sprawling, celebrated and difficult book that has been described as a forerunner of the modern stream-of-consciousness novel.

As the “Oxford Companion to English Literature” notes, “Sterne’s wayward typography, which includes rows of asterisks, dashes, diagrams, blank pages, various typefaces and other devices, paradoxically emphasizes his cheerful view of the unreality of the ‘novel’ form which he is himself using.”

The wonder of Winterbottom’s “Shandy” is that it proves every bit as witty and accessible as his earlier “24 Hour Party People,” a madcap look at the absurdities of the Manchester rock scene.

He actually started his active work on “Shandy” during the making of “24 Hour Party People,” seeing in the screen persona of that film’s star, British comedian Steve Coogan, much of the vanity and self-absorption of Sterne’s characters.

Predictably, turning the book into a script proved difficult for Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who has written for many Winterbottom films. The credits list Martin Hardy as the writer, but that’s just another bit of fun. The name is actually a close anagram of Tristram Shandy.

“We just couldn’t get anywhere with the script when we were thinking about only filming the book,” Winterbottom said during a moment of quiet on the street. “The more we looked at the book it seemed that Sterne was playing around with the reader a lot, and the only way to deal with that was play around with the viewer by showing the problems of making a film.

“So we came up with the idea of Steve kind of juggling his girlfriend, the baby, the script, his obsession with the height of his shoe heels, the agent, his costars, even a tabloid reporter. It was a version of real life. You try to focus on important things, but all this other stuff is always going on too.”

In the film, then, Coogan not only plays two characters from the Sterne novel but also himself. All three are so pompous that they always think they have the best of everyone, when in fact everyone sees through them.

In one of the film’s highlights, Coogan is interviewed on the set for the DVD edition of the film. Full of self-importance as usual, he boasts that the Sterne novel “was a postmodern classic before there was any modern to be post about.” He also notes proudly that it was just “listed No. 8 in the Observer’s Top 100 Books of All Time.”

“But,” the interviewer notes gently, “that list was chronological.”

“Right, well....” Coogan says, barely fazed.

Despite the way “Shandy” has fun with the vanities of the film world, Winterbottom rejects the notion that it is a satire in the tradition of, say, Robert Altman’s “The Player.”

“A lot of the things Steve goes through in the movie -- the rivalry, the obsession with detail -- could be applied to any situation,” he yelled as another bus passed. “It’s a movie about people, not just movie people.”

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Many directions

IF you saw only “Shandy” and “24 Hour Party People,” you’d think Winterbottom was a warm and witty filmmaker, someone who, like Alexander Payne of “Sideways,” captures human subtleties so well that you can watch his works over and over and still be charmed.

Yet other Winterbottom films move in very different directions -- from “Welcome to Sarajevo,” a sobering indictment of the West’s slowness to combat the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, to “In This World,” the story of two young Afghan refugees’ harrowing journey to London.

He’s also moved from “9 Songs,” an icy look at sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll whose main action is graphic bedroom sex, to “The Claim,” a retelling of Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge” that is set in Gold Rush territory.

This striking range of subjects and styles -- from near documentary approaches to wildly playful -- makes sense to Winterbottom, though it’s hard to get him to define his philosophy of filmmaking. In fact, some critics have complained that Winterbottom shifts directions because he has no true film vision. And indeed, it’s only when he talks about a film he greatly admired this year, “Capote,” that he offers a clue to his approach.

“I like the way ‘Capote’ dealt with the ambivalence of the situation,” he said. “I have no idea how accurate the character was, but the film left it up to you to make up your own mind. It didn’t tell you whether Capote was a good guy or a bad guy. Things aren’t usually black and white.”

Winterbottom too seems to fixate on people who are on journeys, either literal, as in “In This World,” or the ones that come with exploring options in life. “For me, it all begins by going, ‘This seems interesting,’ and then following the idea and hope you get ideas on the set, things that surprise you,” he said. “I like that better than simply trying to capture some ideal that is in your head.”

In an interview with the British film journal Sight & Sound, Coogan also stressed the journey aspect of Winterbottom’s approach. The screenplay was only three-fourths finished when filming began, he said. “It’s almost like working in the dark -- you’re not quite sure what’s going on -- but I don’t mind because I trust him creatively and on a personal level.”

Winterbottom works fast -- a remarkable pace of 14 films in 11 years. He shot “Shandy” in less than six weeks and usually has three or four projects in mind at any one time. His next is “The Road to Guantanamo,” which is light years away from “Shandy.” It’s the true story of three young Muslims taken into custody in England and imprisoned at the U.S. detention camp in Cuba for two years before being freed without ever having charges brought against them. The film, mostly funded by Channel 4 in England, airs on British TV in March. No theatrical release date is set.

The director prefers to work with small budgets because he worries about the outside interference that increases when more money is involved, and he tends to avoid big-name actors. Though the budget for “The Claim” topped $15 million, most of his budgets have been far smaller. “Shandy,” released in the U.S. by Picturehouse, cost about $5 million.

Though only a few of Winterbottom’s films were released by a top-level U.S. studio (Miramax), he said he’s not anti-Hollywood, just not easily satisfied. After “Sarajevo,” Miramax tried to get him to direct John Irving’s “The Cider House Rules.” Winterbottom said he liked the book but didn’t care for Irving’s script. Even after working with Irving on the script for months, he still wasn’t excited -- so he bowed out of the project, he said.

Just before heading back to his office, Winterbottom returned to the question of his wide range of subject matter.

“I think there are areas you tend to go back to because it’s your natural interest,” he said. “At the same time, I like variety. I don’t want people to think they know what to expect when I make a film. Also, if you start thinking about what your films all should do or be, you are going to end up pretentious whether you want to be or not.

“Besides, once you have done one thing, it’s not likely to be that interesting to you a second time. I get bored too easily to want to repeat myself.”