Under Control

Talking with director Anton Corbijn.

by Sam Adams

interview

Most people shorthand Control as "the Joy Division movie," but to Anton Corbijn, it's a movie about Ian Curtis, "a boy who gets lost following his dream." True, his movie focuses on Curtis' years as the lead singer of the famously tense and gloomy Manchester quartet, who were poised to make their breakthrough in the U.S. when Curtis took his own life. But it gives equal time to Curtis' increasingly unhappy relationship with his wife, Deborah, and his growing ardor for Belgian fanzine journalist Annik Honoré.

"If you don't come thinking it's a music film, I think you find that you're looking at the love story," Corbijn says. "And if you think it's a music film, you're going to be thinking it's a very quiet movie."

Although Control's soundtrack is filled with Joy Division songs, only two appear in their original versions. The rest — barring a closing-credits cover by the Killers, which Corbijn intends to demonstrate the band's lasting influence — are performed by the actors themselves, including Sam Riley as the charismatic, unsettling Curtis.

It was Joy Division's music that inspired Corbijn to leave his native Holland nearly 30 years ago, and he captured some of the most memorable images of Joy Division in their prime. Returning to the streets of Macclesfield, Curtis' hometown, Corbijn sought out real locations whenever possible. He's proudest of an unbroken shot where Riley walks from Curtis' corner house to the disability office where he worked, both for its accuracy and its foray into real time. The sequences set in the band's home base of Manchester, by contrast, were filmed entirely in Nottingham, since present-day Manchester lacks the proper industrial feel. "For me, it was more important to get Macclesfield right than Manchester, in a way," Corbin says.

Although Control credits Deborah Curtis' memoir Touching From a Distance as its source material, Corbijn also drew on conversations with several of the people in Curtis' life: the surviving members of the band (who went on to form New Order), the late Tony Wilson, Curtis' mother and sister, and most crucially, Annik Honoré, whose love affair with Curtis inspired "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

Although Curtis' bandmates rarely listened to his lyrics, and Corbijn lacked the English to understand them, he has since discovered that what sound like poetic abstractions are often concrete references to Curtis' life. "If you do all the research and talk to all the people, the music loses a little of the mystery it had initially," says Corbijn. "But I grew even more fond of it, and I think it's incredibly strong music, very modern-sounding. You can see why so many people name-check them these days."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)