- Title: Filth and the Fury - Sex Pistols
- Date: 30th June 2001
- Description:FILMFOUR PRESENTS IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE SEX PISTOLS A JERSEY SHORE/NITRATE FILM PRODUCTION A JULIEN TEMPLE FILM THE FILTH AND THE FURY SEX PISTOLS: PAUL COOK STEVE JONES GLEN MATLOCK JOHNNY ROTTEN SID VICIOUS Directed by JULIEN TEMPLE Produced by ANITA CAMARATA AND AMANDA TEMPLE RELEASED BY FILMFOUR DISTRIBUTORS Running Time: 105mins Certificate: tbc Publicity information: Phil Symes/David Freed Cowan & Symes Tel: 0171 323 1200 Fax: 0171 323 1070 e-mail: cowansymes@msn.com 'The Filth and The Fury' will open in London and Selected Cinemas Across on 7 April 2000 "There is no future in England's dreaming / Don't be told what you want / Don't be told what you need#" God Save The Queen, 1977 (Cook/Jones/ Matlock/ Rotten) "I think the Sex Pistols are the antithesis of humankind. The whole world will be better for their non-existence." Bernard Brook Partridge, London Councillor, 1977. DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT When The Sex Pistols were playing, I was probably the person most in between the Malcolm McLaren side of things and the band. So it was a great thing for me to be able to finally show the other side. The band are very, very honest in this film and I think their honesty is what will connect with people. Musically, the Pistols were vastly influential. They encouraged people to believe that they didn't have to do 20-minute drum solos to say something worth listening to. But far more important, I believe, than the music was their fierce protection of the right to individuality and their questioning attitude. I think a film of The Sex Pistols is relevant today because it's very important that people - young people especially - know their own history and should challenge what they are told and not simply accept things at face value, something I believe is happening more and more often. In terms of post-war British culture, nothing has been more defiant than The Sex Pistols' voice; no one has gone beyond them. No one has had the guts. The Pistols had a code of defiance and independence which they invented themselves. And we are in danger of losing that. After The Pistols, the whole punk thing was horrible: depressing, conformist and ridiculous. There has probably been more theoretical intellectualising about punk than any other part of popular culture. It's great to hear the band's version of how they came to be part of that. I've always known that they can't be touched by any other rock band in terms of intensity, but I think it's only now that the real emotions that were involved at the end - and what happened to Sid in particular - can be talked about by the people involved, particularly John. People have watched the film and been almost in tears at the end, which is the last thing that you would expect from a Sex Pistols movie. But it is great because there was never anything about the Pistols that you expected, that was part of their power. JULIEN TEMPLE DIRECTOR LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1999 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN LYDON (JOHNNY ROTTEN) Q: What does The Filth And The Fury mean to you? A: The only reason I agreed to do the documentary was because FilmFour gave us the freedom to tell The Sex Pistols' story as it really was. It's the band's chance to set the record straight. We don't praise ourselves or wax lyrical about our influence. We just tell the truth. For the last twenty years people have exaggerated and blown up The Sex Pistols into something they never were. I think the truth is far more shocking and far more interesting. Over the years, Steve [Jones, the band's guitarist] and I've both been asked a lot by journalists about The Sex Pistols, but answers that are in any way contradictory to public opinion are not printed. It's bizarre to constantly be told that "It couldn't be like that because I've read the John Savage book". [LAUGHS]. Well who the fuck's he? He wasn't there. His book is an assumption based on the fact that he was a friend of the manager [Malcolm McLaren]. This film is laying down a gauntlet of sorts: that no matter how you try and cheat and lie and corrupt a thing, ultimately the truth will come through. Q: What lies were told about the Pistols? A: People claimed they wrote the songs; that they orchestrated the whole thing; that the band were really not much to do with it. And that's not the truth at all. We weren't a middle-class conspiracy. Everything we did was instinctively working class. And to this day still is. It was not an intellectual movement orchestrated by Malcolm McLaren. It's also not the truth that we deliberately planned to be some kind of social revolution. If we had an aim it was to force our own, working-class opinions into the mainstream, which was unheard of in pop music at the time. The fact is we were being ourselves. And any revolution which followed that should have played closer attention to what we were saying instead of running off and waving flags. Q: One of the things that comes through from the film is the light-hearted side of the band# A: One of the major things that was stolen from The Sex Pistols was our sense of humour. People didn't want to focus on the fact that we were young people basically out to have fun. They didn't understand that's what young people do; the world was - and is - a horrible place, but you'll never change it by being miserable. Q: Why is it important to tell the real story now? A: I don't know if it's important now, this day, this minute but for the last twenty years it has been gnawing at me that I have had to constantly read lies regurgitated in the media and they've ignored outright anything that the band had to say. Q: In a lot of ways it's a sad story. Do you regret anything? A: There are no 'Oh I wish I could have done differently's. You work with the tools you've got and we did very well by completely not giving a toss. In an odd way our ignorance of the musical establishment was our major bonus point. I think I've got smarter over the years, but if I was as smart then as I think I am now it wouldn't have worked. I'd have been too aware of all the negatives. Q: The different personalities in the band come through in the film. Especially your love-hate relationship with Steve Jones# A: We are all very different people, the band, and that made it an awkward road in a way. But you can't expect everyone to have the same opinions. And the diversity of what was The Sex Pistols is what makes The Sex Pistols. There are no easy answers. A person like me, if there's a problem, I'll go out and attack and yell and scream and try and do something about it. I never run away from it. But I do need someone holding me back sometimes, otherwise it's too unrestrained. [LAUGHS]. There is an energy between Steve and me. It's used well by us because we're not fearful of it; and in a sly way it's good fun to have jabs at each other. We've always enjoyed that. Q: It feels like a very anti-drugs film# A: It is a very anti-drugs film. It's a shame that the Pistols became associated with drugs because of Sid's indulgence. Sid got it wrong and he got it wrong big time. And unfortunately that image became pervasive. The Pistols wasn't about destroying ourselves, it was about destroying a situation that was destroying us. It was done with a sense of hope. [LAUGHS]. Q: What is the Pistols' legacy? A: There should not be hero-worship or anything like that. You can respect what we've done and that's fine but the trouble is has been the nonsense about iconography. We've been turned into gods. And it's rubbish. It's all made up, we're human beings. Look at the documentary: warts and all. We just come over as people. There is no posturing or posing. And back then we were confused. We had a manager who was "All print is good print". I disagree, I don't think that all print is good. I think reality is good. It was absurd some of the insults that were thrown at us that were so wrong. And what the fuck? This film puts it in its place. Very neatly and nicely. SHORT SYNOPSIS The Sex Pistols were in existence for only 26 months and recorded only one album, yet they changed the face of music forever. The Filth And The Fury, a film by Julien Temple, is an irreverent, intimate and shocking portrait of arguably the most influential and certainly the most notorious rock group of all time. It documents the story of The Sex Pistols, charting their rise from the litter-stacked back-streets of Seventies London through their crucifixion by the British tabloids, canonisation by hundreds of thousands of fans around the world and ultimate implosion on tour in America. Along the way myths are debunked, scores are settled and the words of the band are heard for the first time as they step once and for all away from the shadow of their egomaniacal one-time manager Malcolm McLaren. Painted against the political, economic and cultural backdrop of London in the mid-70s, the film depicts what was to become a key transitional moment in English social history. Culled primarily from the band's own 20-hour-plus archive of never-before-seen footage (including live performances, rehearsals, recording sessions, promotional events and candid moments which Temple interweaves with newly filmed interviews with the four original band members), The Filth And The Fury captures the very essence of the punk movement. The Pistols are unlike any other period film characters. And The Filth And The Fury is a culturally immersive experience unlike any other period film. LONG SYNOPSIS In the Nineties Liam Gallagher is considered 'rock n roll' because he gives journalists the V-sign and Jarvis Cocker makes the front pages when he waggles his bottom at Michael Jackson. But there was a time when music briefly stopped being merely a mouthpiece for corporations, when rock rebellion shocked the nation to its core. Just under twenty-five years ago on the back-streets of London, Punk was born. Its midwives? An unlikely band of working class teenagers who called themselves The Sex Pistols. Who cares about the Pistols today? The band's story is not just graffitied across a vital and volatile period of recent history. It's relevant to people who, at the time, were wearing safety pins in their nappies, rather than their noses. Now, more than ever before, the Pistols' irreverent and incendiary take on society has resonance for the politically lobotomised children of Thatcher's Britain. The Filth And The Fury is an astounding film, not least because the story of the Sex Pistols is the story of an era. In the film's TV news footage, England looks like something out of a futuristic thriller. The corrupt government is trying to brush record youth unemployment under the carpet and there is no imaginable future for thousands of working class teenagers save the dole queue, disillusionment and draining poverty. Squalid squats are the norm. Dustbin-men strikes leave mountains of stinking rubbish on streets across the capital. IRA bombs rip through the city on a regular basis. Into it all came four boys who wanted to make real music. Who wanted to make a point. And who wanted, probably most of all, to have fun. The Sex Pistols are one of the most influential bands of the 20th century. They were one of the first people to say the word 'fuck' on British television (the film gives the real story behind the notorious episode of Thames Television's Today Programme). Johnny Rotten spat on stage on account of his chronic sinus problems and spitting became de rigeur, and bassist Sid Vicious started the punk 'dance' the pogo all on his own. Dismissed as godless nihilists or worse by their detractors, heralded as messiahs by everyone else, together, the band started a movement that inspired and energised the world rock scene. The Sex Pistols were not the first punk band, but they were the punk band, the blast of youthful protest that signalled an end to bloated, boring rock. Shane McGowan sang their songs in the toilet when he was pissed and unknown. Siouxie Sioux, David Bowie and Elvis Costello went to their gigs. In 1976, The Clash, The Damned and The Buzzcocks all opened for them. Director Julien Temple first documented The Sex Pistols in the 1980s The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, a film constructed from the point of view of the band's manager Malcolm McLaren, who had long cultivated a desire to explain to the world that he was solely responsible for everything The Sex Pistols were or did. The Filth And The Fury sets the record straight about how the band worked (and crucially, how it didn't work) as well as revealing what really happened behind the hysterical headlines. The whole band speaks. From John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) (vocals), Steve Jones (guitar), Paul Cook (drums), original member Glen Matlock and his successor Sid Vicious (bass), who Temple interviewed at length in a Hyde Park deckchair in 1978 before his death of a heroin overdose, everyone has a voice for the first time. The film is the seminal punk band's true story. THE SEX PISTOLS STORY "We're the flowers in the dustbin" (God Save The Queen, 1977) 1972 Shepherds Bush buddies Steve Jones and Paul Cook form a band with school pal Warwick Nightingale. The original line-up play on instruments and equipment stolen by Jones, who'd had a spell in reform school as a lad and was taught to steal by his mum and stepfather. Jones spends his weekends at the Let It Rock shop on the Kings Road run by fashion gurus Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, vendors of bondage gear and pornographic T-shirts. Jones badgers McLaren into finding his group somewhere to rehearse. McLaren finally comes up with Covent Garden Community Centre and ropes in his Saturday lad Glen Matlock to be the band's bass player. A major priority, as McLaren sees it, is to find a vocalist. Cook and Jones each try their hand but the desire for new blood leads to Nightingale's departure. McLaren changes the name of the shop to Sex. 1975 John Lydon had moved into a squat in Kings Cross with John Ritchie (Sid Vicious) at sixteen and is busking on the Kings Road in green hair and a T-shirt that says I HATE PINK FLOYD when one of McLaren's lackeys spots him. Lydon auditions for the band by accompanying Alice Cooper on the shop's jukebox. As a result of Jones' continual comments about the state of Lydon's teeth, he gets nicknamed Johnny Rotten. McLaren borrows a slogan from one of his T-shirts and re-christens the band The Sex Pistols. Initially the Pistols work on '60s covers by the likes of the Small Faces. They also begin to write their own material. Their first venture is as support to Bazooka Joe (complete with Adam Ant) in November 1975 at St Martin's College in London's Charing Cross Road. It's hardly a success: the plug is pulled after a short set. A memorable debut, for the wrong reasons. 1976 The band slowly gain a following, sparked in part by exuberant fan Simon Barker who forms the Bromley contingent, an ardent group of Pistols followers. Violence at London nightspot Dingwalls brings an expulsion from that venue and because of their growing reputation, the Pistols are barred from playing the Mont De Marson Punk Festival in France. They begin instead to appear at London's 100 Club on Tuesday nights. Following a brief UK tour which includes a performance at Chelmsford Prison, the Pistols headline the 100 Club's Punk Rock Festival in September. Other bands at the event are The Damned, The Clash, The Vibrators and Siouxie and The Banshees with future Pistols bassist Sid Vicious on drums. On October 8th the Pistols sign with EMI, recording their debut single 'Anarchy in the UK' shortly afterwards. On November 19th 'Anarchy In the UK' is released. A fateful late replacement guest slot on Thames TV's Today Programme follows. Life would never be the same again. The band arrive five minutes before going on air and are interviewed live by a smug and drunk Bill Grundy who sets about provoking them to "say something outrageous". The expletives that follow stun the early evening audience and the next day the front pages of every daily newspaper carry a picture of the band. Reports circulate of honest working men who've kicked in their TV sets and old ladies who've keeled over from strokes. The papers haven't had so much fun since John Lennon said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus and the Rolling Stones were caught pissing up against a wall. The Daily Mail launches a witch-hunt against the perpetrators of "some of the dirtiest language ever heard on television". Bill Grundy is suspended. The Mirror's headline is THE FILTH AND THE FURY. The Pistols think it's funny. EMI Chairman Sir John Read responds to the outcry by issuing a statement "We shall do everything we can to restrain their public behaviour." London becomes virtually a closed city for the Pistols as far as live gigs are concerned. Insurance companies refuse to cover the concerts and anxious promoters cancel all but three of the shows booked for December's Anarchy national tour. 1977 Staff at EMI's pressing plant are not placated by their chairman's PR bid. They threaten to strike if the label don't drop the band. In the first week of the new year, EMI cave in and oblige its workers by paying the band to leave the label. In February Glen Matlock leaves the group. His replacement is Lydon's old friend Sid Vicious, who's never played bass before. In March McLaren and the Pistols sign a new recording deal with A&M Records, signing the contracts outside Buckingham Palace. Just days later after a Sid-induced fracas, A&M kick the band off the label, prompting plenty of hype about another large pay-off. Two months later, the Pistols sign their third and final record deal, this time with Richard Branson's Virgin label. The Virgin Records Press Release calls the Pistols "Youth disenchanted with society and mainstream rock# Four working-class teenagers who reacted against the elitist pretensions of their one-time heroes. Since nobody else was playing the music they wanted to hear, they'd play it themselves. They sing anti-love songs, cynical songs about suburbia and repression, hate and aggression." It is the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee and England takes to the streets to celebrate. Bunting, trestle tables, union jacks, jingoistic songs, self-congratulation and a new Tube line mark the festivities. People are yet to get pissed off with The Royal Family sponging from the state; slagging off the Windsors is still Jerry-loving treason. The Sex Pistols don't buy it. They write a song called 'God Save The Queen', a battle-cry against national complacency and very funny to boot. The country don't get it. The BBC ban it, saying the song is "in gross bad taste". DJ Tony Blackburn tells the newspapers it's "disgraceful" and makes him "ashamed". Despite a media blackout, 'God Save The Queen' gets to number one in the charts. Jamie Reid's sleeve design shows Elizabeth II's face with a safety pin through her nose. The Pistols mark Jubilee day by staging a performance on a riverboat on the Thames and are arrested and charged by police who buzz them with police boats, pull the plug on the party, and charge all four with offences from obstructing the police to using insulting words and being drunk and disorderly. Two more singles - 'Pretty Vacant' and 'Holidays in the Sun' - follow, preceding the Pistols' only official album 'Never Mind The Bollocks - Here's The Sex Pistols' which goes straight to the top of the charts on its November release, despite many outlets refusing to stock it and shops being fined for displaying promo material. The press turn the screws. When the band don't oblige them with scandal and fracas, the papers just make it up. When The Pistols leave Heathrow for a five-day tour of Holland, the journalists report them as having "spat, vomited and swore" in the terminal building, when in fact the four bypass the place altogether because they were running late for their plane. After a secret tour to avoid bans, the Sex Pistols' final UK performance takes place at Ivanhoes Club in Huddersfield on Christmas Day 1977. The show is for the children of local firemen, laid-off workers and single-parents and goes off well, with invitees coifing 1000 bottles of pop and a huge cake supplied by Virgin. 1978 The eight-show American tour has municipalities panicking and fans astounded/bemused. In Texas, Sid played covered in his and his fans' blood after a beer can is thrown at him on the stage. At the final date - The Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco - Rotten asks the audience "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" and leaves the band the next day. It's over. Seven days later, Cook and Jones go to Rio with McLaren to record with Ronnie Biggs, the exiled Great Train Robber. Smacked up and depressed, Sid records a version of Frank Sinatra's My Way and performs his farewell UK gig at Camden's Electric Ballroom under the guise of The Vicious White Kids with ex-Pistol Glen Matlock on bass. Nine months after the end of the band, in October 1978, Sid's hooker-junkie girlfriend Nancy Spungen is found dead under the bathroom sink in the couple's Chelsea Hotel room in New York with stab wounds to the belly. Sid is charged with her murder and released on $50,000 bail, which McLaren pays. Sid dies from a heroin overdose on February 2nd 1979 while awaiting trial. THE FILTH AND THE FURY: PRODUCTION STORY 1) BACKGROUND: THE GREAT ROCK AND ROLL SWINDLE Director Julien Temple was at film school in Beaconsfield, Hertfordshire when he first came across The Sex Pistols in 1975. The band were rehearsing in a Rotherhithe warehouse and Temple happened to be wandering round the docks when he overheard a Small Faces song coming from a window. "Instead of 'I want you to know I love you' they were singing 'I hate you', which made me laugh. It was the sort of song I wanted for a student film I was doing, so I went in. I got up to the top of these rickety stairs and as my head came through the open floor I saw this band which was unlike any group on earth at the time. I was intrigued so I found out where they were going to be playing and I went to see them." Temple was so taken with The Pistols he abandoned his student film and decided to document the band instead. He had a key cut for the NFTS camera room so he could "borrow" the school's cameras at night to film their gigs. "Gradually I was allowed by the NFTS to bring the camera out in the open," he explains. "I followed the band around for two or three years and eventually was paid to do it; very little money but probably more than the band were getting per week." Much of the footage was used in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle which Temple directed in 1980. The film became a self-promotion vehicle for the band's original manager Malcolm McLaren, who had long harboured a desire for a Sex Pistols movie. "When the band fell apart Malcolm decided to do the film like a spoof with all the footage that Julien had taken," explains The Filth and The Fury's producer Amanda Temple. "But it didn't have John Lydon's (Johnny Rotten) approval; he really wasn't involved in it. Julien always knew that it wasn't the whole story: It was a vehicle for Malcolm to strut around and feel important in." Says Julien Temple: "At the time of Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, The Pistols had become in the minds of a lot of fans the same thing as Rod Stewart. They were being hero-worshipped. And we wanted to take the piss out of that. That film was actually meant to be a provocative comic puncturing of the sense that The Pistols were just another great pop-star act." Eric Gardner - Lydon's manager and The Filth's executive producer - takes up the story: "The Great Rock And Roll Swindle was completely Malcolm McLaren's slanted egocentric vision. None of the band members had anything to do with it from a creative viewpoint. They felt that both it and the Sid and Nancy movie - a commercial attempt to exploit the sensationalism around them - had left the public with a very distorted impression of what the Pistols were all about. In 1987 Lydon sued McLaren at the London High Court because, as Gardner explains, "he thought Malcolm had not acted honourably during his tenure as the band's manager". The former Pistols' front-man won ownership of all the band's master recordings; all the copyrights to the music publishing of the songs; and ownership of all film footage and the name Sex Pistols. "He contacted the other band members and the estate of Sid Vicious - executed by Sid's mum at the time - and said 'Let's all own this together'. So ever since then the band has owned all their own material. Which made The Filth and The Fury possible." 2) THE FILTH AND THE FURY: GENESIS It was Anita Camarata - manager of Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock and Sid Vicious' estate - who got the ball rolling on a new film that would set the record straight. Says Camarata: "I was in England on business when we discovered there was a storage facility in The Sex Pistols' name. No one knew what was in it. So I went down there to look, and found over twenty hours of Sex Pistols footage: all the old interviews and performances, from their inception to the end. Making sure the group was documented on film was one great thing that Malcolm McLaren did. That was when we decided to make the movie. It was great to have historical footage of their career and a great opportunity to tell their story, instead of Malcolm's story." Camarata and the band asked Julien and Amanda Temple to put together a ten-minute presentation tape from the footage. "We wanted to take it around to different film companies to see who would be interested in financing a feature-length documentary about the band," she explains. Through Camarata's association with Jersey Films, she asked Jonathan Weisgal, President of Jersey Shore, the company's lower-budget arm to help find the financing. In early 1999, Camarata went to New York and met FilmFour chief executive Paul Webster. "One of the first things Paul brought in to put on his office wall when he got the job at FilmFour was his God Save The Queen Poster," explains Amanda Temple. "Anita told him that Julien had always wanted to make this documentary film about the band and he said 'Go and do it'." Gardner continues: "Julien cut together a brilliant sampler and Paul Webster, being the most intelligent and visionary of the people we showed it to, happily said that FilmFour would finance the production of the film in its entirety in exchange for world-wide all-media distribution rights." Says Julien Temple: "We'd looked at one side of The Sex Pistols' story in Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and I was certainly aware that it was not the whole story. In a way what I needed then was the energy to tell the other side of the story and it was really Paul Webster's interest that made it spark for me again." After The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle all Temple's footage had been filed back in the band's vault in the London suburb of Perivale. Ninety percent had never been seen before by the public. "The vault stores movies from time gone by and everything is properly archived and labelled," explains Amanda Temple. "When you tell them you're there to look at The Sex Pistols stuff they take you round the back down all these tiny corridors and you come round a corner and there's this pile of rusty cans with films falling out and it is an absolute mess!" 3) WHAT STORY? Julien and the film's editor Niven Howie set to work on the cans, selecting the footage they wanted to use for the definitive feature film of The Pistols. "It was a case of getting into the vault and going through everything," explains Amanda. "A lot of the film had deteriorated and it was a real adventure to find out what was there. They had no script, and no way to map the story. That took several months, to map out what angle they were going to come from." The team eventually decided to set material on the band against an anarchic collage of newsreel footage, adverts, weather reports and game-show clips taken from Julien Temple's own archive of 1970s home video tapes. "I was one of the early owners of the video machine when it was fifteen quid for a two-hour tape," explains the director. "I used to tape around the clock which that meant I had a lot of weird bits of footage that we could use. Part of the joy was finding very mundane things and putting them in a context that made them funny and become alive. The idea of using it grew out of being stuck. We did it with a couple of sequences and it generated a style that I thought was in the spirit of the band. There was an irreverence about getting any old piece of shit, sticking it in and creating a spark that appealed to me." Temple likens the process to beach-combing: "It was a lot of fun creating the film out of editing and found objects. We improvised a lot: you didn't know where you were going; you would have one sequence that worked and then you'd have to get the next one and try to tell the story." The decision to put the two archives together obviously dictated the final direction Temple took with the project. Convinced from the outset that The Filth should be a movie rather than simply a performance-based video, Temple was determined that the process of "breathing life into dead bits of moulding celluloid" meant he didn't have to make "a ghastly rock-u-mentary with old rock-stars in make-up and armchairs". "The Sex Pistols stuff was mouldering away in cans destined never to see the light of day and a lot of the footage was mute," explains the director. "We had to sync it up and play around with it to be able to use it. I wanted to try and say something not just about what The Pistols meant at the time but the difference between that time and now, and how in some ways they were responsible for changing things." One of the primary goals was to have the audience come out of cinemas feeling as if they'd just been totally immersed in mid-'70s England. Says Gardner: "The majority of the people who will see it were not part of the punk movement. They will be going to see what all the fuss was about. The idea behind making the film this way is to transport people back to the time, so they can relate to what the band are talking about." "That's why we shot the interviews with the band in silhouette," explains Amanda Temple. "We didn't want the audience to be taken away from the extraordinary energy and purity the Pistols had. A lot of what this band was about was being young: and being angry about their prospects for the future." Another challenge was to show that punk music was born out of horribly oppressive economic, social and cultural conditions in England in the early '70s. "The Pistols made headlines around the world, but the rest of the world was not experiencing the same things that England was experiencing," says Gardner. "So when punk came to America and American bands began copying the Sex Pistols the anger was manufactured. One of the important things about the film is that it helps people to understand that the creation of the Pistols was as much to do with politics and economics as it was music." 4) THE INTERVIEWS By September 1998, Temple and Howie had emptied the vault and telecined its contents onto video. Two months later, they had a very loose four-hour cut from the vault footage and Temple's home-video archive. The next step was to shoot the material for the film's backbone: the interviews with the original band members. "Steve Jones and John Lydon don't really talk to each other," explains Amanda Temple, who went with Julien to Los Angeles, where the band members now live, to do the interviews, "so it was very much a case of interviewing everybody separately and overlapping the stories later." The intimacy of one-to-one interviews meant that the band members were freed up to tell their particular side of the story. "It's why in a way the band has been so supportive of the film," continues the producer. "Steve has said things that he's never said to John's face, and John has said things that Steve has never heard him say. I think it's been quite a healing process for them, a real catharsis." Back in London, the interviews - including eight hours with Lydon - were transcribed and choice cuts selected.
- Broadcaster:Channel 4
- Collection: Channel 4
- Producer:Nirate Films LTD
- Transmission Date:30/06/2001
- Decade: 2000s