Still boyish-looking as he approaches 40, the versatile English film-maker Michael Winter bottom has been remarkably prolific since he made his first feature-length television drama, Love Lies Bleeding, written by Ronan Bennett, in 1993. An Oxford graduate who worked as an assistant editor at Thames Television, Winterbottom turned director with two television documentaries on the great Swedish film-maker, Ingmar Bergman. His television work since Love Lies Bleeding has included the opening episode in Jimmy McGovern's riveting series, Cracker; the McGovern-scripted MS drama, Go Now, featuring Robert Carlyle; and the gritty and moving four-part Dublin-set series, Family, written by Roddy Doyle.
Winterbottom made his cinema debut in 1995 with the emotionally raw Butterfly Kiss, featuring Amanda Plummer and Saskia Reeves, and went on to direct an accomplished and at times heartbreaking treatment of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure in Jude, which featured vivid, thoughtful performances from Christopher Eccleston (in the title role), Kate Winslet (just 21 at the time) and the Irish actor, Liam Cunningham.
Next for Winterbottom was the edgy and topical drama of the Bosnian conflict in Welcome to Sarajevo, featuring Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson and Kerry Fox, followed by the bleak drama, I Want You, with Rachel Weisz and Allesandro Nivola. Since then he has completed the Belfast-set With or Without You and the multi-charactered London drama, Wonderland, and he is about to embark on his most ambitious production to date, the California Gold Rush epic, Kingdom Come.
Many more-established directors have not made more than one or two feature films in the seven years which saw Winterbottom produce such an output, but he does not believe he has been particularly prolific. "I don't know about that," he says. "I think it's actually quite normal. If you look back to the old studio system, or even to film-makers like Truffaut, they released at least one film a year. "I know Ingmar Bergman, he did an average of a film and a half a year and directed five plays in the same year. And he was writing as well, and running theatre companies. I think people have got slower and make fewer and fewer films because expectations are so high now due to the whole budget thing in America. But making a film is basically a seven- or eight-week shoot.
"We've been waiting four years to get the finance to make Kingdom Come. Because of its scale, it's more expensive. It's going to cost $20 million, although that's not huge by today's standards. It's a tedious process waiting for the money to come in. But there's no point in just sitting around and doing nothing while you're waiting to raise the money. So I just got on with making some of the other interesting scripts that were offered to me."
One such was Wonderland, which was launched in competition at Cannes last summer and opened in Dublin yesterday. An ensemble drama that's packed with incident and directed with an infectious energy, it weaves together the inter-connected experiences of 13 characters over four days in London, a city which registers just as strongly as a character within the narrative. Shot with a minimal crew and a hand-held camera, and without lights or extras, Wonderland deftly juggles its multiple characters as skilfully as Short Cuts and Happiness did.
French scriptwriter Laurence Coriat's succinct screenplay encompasses marital collapse, big city loneliness, professional dissatisfaction, random violence, communication breakdown and impending birth. All of the interlinked scenarios mesh beautifully on the fourth day and offer some surprising revelations in this small gem of a movie, accompanied by a gorgeous, swelling Michael Nyman score and featuring an admirable cast that includes Molly Parker, Kika Markham, John Simm, Gina McKee, Ian Hart, Shirley Henderson and Stuart Townsend.
Winterbottom agrees that in many respects the film is closer to Family than anything else in his work. "One difference is that it's about a family who are not living together," he says. "I think most films dealing with a family either have them living in the same house or some event like a death or a reunion brings them together. I liked the way Laurence was dealing with these separate people. "Another way it was close to Family was in the structure - in Family you had four separate films from the point of view of four different family members and in Wonder- land it happens over four separate days, each building towards the evening and then you come back to the next morning and you build again, and for the next day you do all that again."
One strand of the screenplay deals with parents dismayed that one of their grown-up children has cut off all communication with them. In discussing this theme, Winterbottom refers to Coriat.
"She's been living in London for a long time, about 17 years," he says. "It was weird, actually, when she came down to Cannes with us. Her mother lives in Cannes and she didn't see her while she was there. You would think she would at least be curious as to know whether her mother had realised she was there, because there was so much coverage of the film in the local papers. Also, in the earlier drafts of the script the character of the mother in the film was probably more hostile than in the finished version."
To achieve a natural feel to the film, Winterbottom opted for a no-frills shooting style on Wonderland which involved using no lights other than existing lighting, taking locations around London pretty much as the crew found them and filming real people in the background instead of extras. It is a style similar to that employed by the Danish directors who came up with the Dogme 95 aesthetic.
"We were in pre-production with Wonderland when I saw two of those films while I was on the jury at Cannes in 1998 - Festen and The Idiots," says Winterbottom. "I didn't like The Idiots as a film, but I think there was more of a connection between the filming style and the content in that case. I felt he wouldn't have been able to make a film like that in any other way. Whereas Festen was a more conventional film but because it was shot in that particular way it gave him a real edge and drew out great performances.
"In the case of Wonderland, as well as dealing with all the characters we were making a film about a city, and I really wanted to capture that. If we were shooting the film in a conventional way we would never have had access to all the places the camera goes in the film. There was so much we could film without the burden of lights - all the stuff on the streets, the cafes in Soho, the bar scenes. And this gave us such freedom and gave such energy to the film."
The key area in which Wonderland differs radically from the Dogme films is in its use of Michael Nyman's soaring, full-bodied orchestral score. "He's a great composer," says Winterbottom. "It was quite tempting not to have music at all, because it was that kind of film, but then we decided to go for something much richer and more emotional, and Nyman is brilliant at that."
Having been on the jury at Cannes in 1998, Winterbottom found himself in competition there last year with Wonderland which, like most of the best films in competition, was left empty-handed when the jury announced its baffling decisions. "I was a little bit apprehensive about entering it in Cannes," he says, "but the other side of it is that it's just 10 people sitting talking about films and choosing what they think is best, and no one can tell what different people will think. It's not like there's something absolute. You know that if it goes six-to-four one way or another, a film can win or lose. One person liking it or not can make all the difference."
So he didn't mind greatly not winning anything? "Not really, especially because of the way we made it. And we got a very good response to it. It was a small crew and most of them came down to Cannes for the screening and we all had a good time."
When Winterbottom served on the 1998 Cannes jury, of which Martin Scorsese was president, he says they found the decision-making process relatively easy. "On giving Eternity and a Day the Palme d'Or there really wasn't much debate or disagreement on it," he says. "Strangely enough, it was the last of the competition films we saw. I think at that point none of us on the jury felt very strongly that any of the films in competition should win the Palme d'Or. So maybe when we saw it there was a slight over-reaction in its favour. At last there was something that worked and was ambitious."
There was a good deal more division on Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, which received the jury's runner-up prize. "It was about half and half," he says. "But as soon it became clear that Eternity and a Day was going to win, the Benigni film went through for the next prize without any great amount of debate, because some people were so passionate about it. It was all a very amicable process, really. There were no really extreme views on any of the film."
Shortly before filming Wonderland, Winterbottom went to Belfast to make Old New Borrowed Blue, which has since been re-titled With or Without You after the U2 song it features on the soundtrack. Written by John Forte, it features Christopher Eccleston and Dervla Kirwan as a married couple who cannot have a baby and whose relationship is further complicated by the unexpected arrival of the wife's French penfriend, who is played by Yvan Attal.
"We changed the title because Old New Borrowed Blue made it sound like it's about a wedding, and it's not about that at all. It's set entirely in Belfast and we shot all the locations there and did the interiors in a studio in London. I really love those Antoine Doinel movies Truffaut did in the 1960s, all very easy and light domestic stories. It's not easy to achieve that kind of lightness but that's what I tried for. A Belfast version of that. Truffaut was a great director. I tried to make a documentary on him at one point, but unfortunately it never went ahead."
On an altogether different scale is Kingdom Come, the California Gold Rush epic which Winterbottom starts shooting next month. The screenplay is by his regular collaborator, Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote Butterfly Kiss and Welcome to Sarajevo, and Winterbottom has assembled an attractive international cast that includes Wes Bentley, the hot newcomer from American Beauty, with Sarah Polley, the fast-rising young Canadian actress from The Sweet Hereafter and Go, Charlize Theron from Devil's Advocate and The Cider House Rules, actor and director Peter Mullan, and Nastassja Kinski.
Wonderland is now showing at the Irish Film Centre, Dublin