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The personality cult based on Curtis is distinct from most live-fast, die-young rock stories. An intense, charismatic figure assailed by depression and epilepsy, he retains a huge global following almost three decades after his death. Curtis committed suicide on the eve of Joy Division’s first American tour in May 1980. He was 23.He scored his largest commercial success shortly after his death with the evergreen despair anthem Love Will Tear Us Apart, and the small canon of Joy Division songs he left behind defined the jagged, brutal, modernist aesthetic of postpunk. He informed many of the biggest rock bands of the 1980s and 1990s, and helped to inspire everyone from U2 to Nirvana, Moby to the Killers. When Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994 and Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers ominously disappeared a year later, fans were quick to invoke Curtis as their dark forefather.Control, filmed in monochrome, is based on Touching From a Distance, the 1997 memoir by the singer’s widow, Deborah Curtis. Ironically, this flagship for British talent at Cannes is directed by a Dutchman, Anton Corbijn, and produced by an American, Orian Williams.It stars the virtually unknown Sam Riley as Curtis and Samantha Morton as Debbie, and was partly shot in the singer’s native Macclesfield. But Joy Division’s central Manchester rehearsal room, immortalised in the Love Will Tear Us Apart video, was recreated in a Nottingham warehouse. I was there last summer when Corbijn shot a key scene in which the band learn that they have been booked on the fateful American tour that apparently plunged Curtis into his final depression.The London-based Corbijn, making his debut as a feature director, spent most of the 1980s as a photographer at the New Musical Express, where his instantly recognisable signature style of grainy textures and deep shadows earned him the nickname “the Dutch Master”. He then moved on to shooting videos, conceiving album sleeves and designing stage shows for numerous superstar bands.Although best known today as image-maker in chief to U2 and Depeche Mode, Corbijn’s connection to Joy Division is an obsession spanning 30 years. It was the cult Manchester quartet who caused him to move to England permanently in the late 1970s.“My theory is that music really mattered here in people’s lives,” Corbijn says. “People are so poor that it was a way out, a matter of living or dying almost, whereas in Holland it always seemed like a subsidised hobby. When Joy Division came out it was so fantastic. I just had to go to England, to be where that music comes from.”Within weeks of arriving, he persuaded Joy Division to grant him a photo shoot, producing some iconic monochrome shots that would later immortalise the band’s stark and gloomy image. But it was only after the singer’s suicide that these early portraits were hailed for their eerie, prophetic intensity.“Nobody would publish it,” Corbijn recalls, “but the band liked it. When Ian died, NME suddenly wanted to put the picture on the front. It was like a premonition.”Both Deborah Curtis and her daughter Natalie, who was just 1 when her father committed suicide, visited the set and gave their blessing to Control. Even so, the film-makers had to tread carefully in covering the singer’s darker side, notably his adulterous affair with Annik Honoré, a Belgian fan, that spanned the eight tormented months leading to his suicide.“The one thing we told Debbie early on is we want to tell the truth, as best as we can,” says Williams. “We want to tell Ian’s story, not Debbie’s specific story. Even though it starts from the book we want the band’s input, we want Annik’s input. Debbie and her never met, and probably never will.”Williams and the screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh met Honoré while researching the film. Curtis was still strong in her memory. “Ian wrote letters to her constantly,” Williams says. “I’ve seen those letters and they were sad, beautiful, lonely. It was a huge deal. He loved Annik and I know she loved him.”Reborn as New Order after Curtis hanged himself, the surviving members of Joy Division have approved the script and supplied sound-track music. However, the bass player Peter Hook lambasted Corbijn for his hands-on methods last year. “We don’t tell him how to direct, why is he telling us how to make music?” Hook protested. “The band are supportive of Anton, period,” Williams insists. “We met with New Order several times. They read the script, they’re aware of the story we are telling. They know Debbie’s book.”Control was shot on a tight budget of less than £3 million. Williams initially showed the idea to some Hollywood studio executives, but the box-office appeal of a black-and-white film about a long-dead cult singer eluded them.“Various people said, ‘Get an Alist actor! Make it big!’” Williams laughs. “ ‘Black and white? No one sees black and white . . . Anton who?’ A couple of them even said, ‘What if you told it from the perspective of if he were still alive, looking back on his life . . .?’ So stupid.”The Joy Division story has already been told on screen before, as one subplot of Michael Winterbottom’s irreverent Factory Records postmortem 24 Hour Party People. The Factory founder Tony Wilson has a producer credit on both films, although the two are very different in tone and focus.As part of his research for playing Curtis, Riley visited the Epilepsy Society in London to study the effects of the seizures that, he feels, contributed to the singer’s suicidal depression. “The side-effects of the medication could be pretty soul-destroying,” Riley says. “Being in love with two women, the fear that comes along with epilepsy, the future and the unknown . . . I think it was just a massive combination. It was all too much for him.”
Die Schauspielerin Alexandra Maria Lara hat sich den Hauptdarsteller ihres neuen Films geangelt. Die 28-Jährige ist bereits seit Monaten mit ihrem englischen Kollegen Sam Riley zusammen, wie die Onlineausgabe der «Bunten» am Freitag berichtete. «Ich bin so glücklich wie nie zuvor», sagte Lara («Der Untergang») der Illustrierten auf dem Filmfestival von Cannes, wo sie mit ihrem Freund den gemeinsamen Film «Control» vorstellte. Riley ist dem Bericht zufolge bereits von Leeds nach Berlin gezogen und lernt fleißig Deutsch.Offenbar war es für die Kollegen Liebe auf den ersten Blick. Bei den Dreharbeiten im vergangenen Sommer habe es bereits am ersten Tag zwischen ihn gefunkt, sagte das Paar. Riley verkörpert in «Control» den Joy-Division-Sänger Ian Curtis, der sich mit 23 Jahren erhängt hatte. Lara galt seit ihrer Trennung von ihrer Jugendliebe, dem Marketingmanager Florian Unger, im Frühjahr 2006 als Single.
Oh man... Wo soll das noch hinführen? Barney (GermanOrder)
... und da soll noch einer sagen, nur Frauen waeren an solchem Klatsch interessiert ...
