During the morning discussion, the British director Julien Temple revealed that he had visited a late night viewing the previous night since a construction work had woken him up. The audience did not notice any fatigue though, as the director reminisced about his career as a film maker, especially in the British music scene.
Temple hardly watched films as a kid. He remembers how he saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Le mépris (1963) as an architecture student, but did not understand a thing. He had to watch the film six times before he felt that he had the hang of it. This experience led to his practice of watching a lot of films. During this period, he saw L’Atalante (1934) by Jean Vigo that blew Temple’s mind. Temple rented a 16 mm print copy of the movie, which he accidentally dropped into a river and had to dry out afterwards. “I studied every frame of it. The film must’ve been bigger when it left”, Temple said.
Temple was active in the counter-cultural scene in Britain, which led him to meet the Sex Pistols and The Clash before their breakthrough. Temple filmed the beginnings of both bands, before the competing managers of the rising punk bands made an ultimatum requiring him to choose between whom to affiliate himself with. Temple chose The Sex Pistols, which made The Clash bitter for years to come.
By the time Temple graduated from film school, the Sex Pistols had grown to be such a huge phenomenon that their manager Malcolm McLaren began to plan for a film about the band. Temple started out his career to film directing as a film director as an assistant to Russ Meyer. “He was not at all into the punk thing. When touring clubs, all he wanted to know was where the girls with big tits are”, Temple reminisced on the long-term exploitation movie director.
McLaren wanted a person representing the counter cultural movement to direct the film, but eventually Meyer, a Korean war veteran, had enough of the punk rockers’ mischief. The film The Great Rock ‘n Roll Swindle (1980) was eventually parsed together by Temple from the filmed material. “It was a mashup of media, which seemed to echo the punk aesthetic of grabbing things from wherever”, Temple told the audience.
This misleading and fact-mangling film was not his only point of contact to the subject, as Temple estimates that he has made 20 movies about the Sex Pistols, six of which are longer than a music video. The definite story of the band is the documentary The Filth and the Fury (2000).
Temple’s latter career did not depend only on his closeness to the Sex Pistols though. “In the beginning, Judas Priest was the only band asking me to make music videos for them. I thought they were a comedy band, so I shot comedic music videos”.
Slowly Temple started to net recognition, and he ended up directing videos to The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, The Kinks, and Neil Young. Young’s video made fun of corporations, so MTV ended up canceling it to appease their sponsors. “It still won MTV’s own Best video award, even though they wouldn’t show it”, Temple smiled.
His long career of working on music videos ended up with him developing a love-hate relationship towards the business, so he returned to England to direct to fictional films, which were based on his idols: Vigo (1998), based on film director, and Pandaemonium (2000), telling the story of the writer Samuel Colleridge. The latter had its premiere in September 2001. “Empty cinemas – the story of my life”, Temple sighed.
After returning to London, Temple patched his relations to the lead man of The Clash, Joe Strummer, after he appeared at a garden party Temple hosted. Strummer had a habit of lighting a fire after dark, with guests gathering around it to have discussions and jam. Strummer passed away in 2001.
For Temple, these gatherings represented Strummer’s final piece of art. “The film I made was like a wake around the fire. He was a magic person”, Temple said
For his ‘desert island film’, Temple chose Luis Bunuel’s satire The Exterminating Angel (1962), as it too is set in one place, from where there’s no escape. Still, “I would like to have the entire Criterion Collection [with me]”, Temple says.