Ode to Joy

Sam Riley plays Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in Anton Corbijn's film Control. (Alliance Films)

This story originally ran during the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival.

Anton Corbijn is famous for his deceptively simple photographs of musicians like U2 and Elvis Costello, and his more cinematic videos for Depeche Mode and Nirvana. His first feature is Control, a film about Ian Curtis, the skinny, romantipunk lead singer of Joy Division, who became one of rock’s most famous suicides.

Regardless of his CV, Anton Corbijn is adamant that Anton Corbijn is not what you think he is.

“I didn’t make a rock film,” says Corbijn, with a little exasperation. Gangly in a black blazer and T-shirt, he seems far too large for the chair he occupies in a corner of a hotel lobby during the Toronto International Film Festival. “It’s not the story of Joy Division, it’s the story of this guy Ian Curtis.”

And while we’re on the subject: “It’s unfortunate that my pictures of U2 are much more well known than my pictures of Allan Ginsberg or Pavarotti. People think I’m a rock photographer and I’m not. My approach is always to tell the human story.” 

Control debuted at Cannes in May, and though Corbijn may protest the category, surely he’s happy that it’s one of the best-received rock movies (excuse me: a-movie-that-just-happens-to-be-about-a-rock-god) in recent times.

Control is a spare, black-and-white portrait of Curtis – a working-class Bowie-Iggy fan from Macclesfield, England, who danced like the epileptic that he was. It’s based on the book Touching From a Distance by his wife, Deborah Curtis. The two married as teenagers, and the film is relentlessly unromantic about Ian Curtis’s grim youth. Even as he inched toward stardom in the Manchester scene, he worked in an employment office and never made much money from his music.

“Joy Division were a tiny band then, and the only people who wrote about them worked for the kinds of magazines that couldn’t afford colour photography,” recalls Corbijn. “That’s why all the pictures that exist of them are in black and white, and it seems like this eerie, magical thing now. But because of that, and because their album cover was black and white, I felt the movie should be, too.”

Control is also a love story, as the starter marriage crumbled when Curtis fell for Belgian journalist Annik Honoré. (In a case of life imitating art, the actor who plays Curtis, Sam Riley, and the actress who plays Honoré, Alexandra Maria Lara, are a real-life couple. During TIFF, they have frequently been spotted engaged in light public displays of affection.)

Actor Sam Riley, left, and Control director Anton Corbijn. (Andrew Medichini/Associated Press)

In 1980, 23 years old, depressed and downing pounds of anti-epilepsy medicine, Curtis hanged himself. Joy Division went on to become New Order, with their most famous song, Love Will Tear Us Apart, the epitaph on Curtis’s gravestone.

No surprise, then, that Curtis has attained posthumous rock sainthood. “Once you’re dead, you can’t do anything wrong,” notes Corbijn wryly. “Joy Division has sold more records every year since Ian died.” 

Corbijn knows the siren call of the angst-ridden rock star: he was a young photographer living in the Netherlands when he first heard Joy Division’s music and read about them in New Musical Express. He moved to England, in part, to seek them out.

“Their music was very intuitive to me because my English wasn’t that good, so I couldn’t understand the lyrics,” says Corbijn. “It’s actually simple, straightforward music with melodic undercurrents, but there was a gravity to it. There was a weight. I was a very black-and-white guy in those days, and they seemed to sum this up.” 

Corbijn shot Curtis twice: once in a subway tunnel, with the band walking away while Curtis looks back; and once alone, with a cigarette.

“It’s weird; both pictures have become so symbolic. People thought it was a prophetic vision to have him looking back while the band walked away, but I had no idea,” says Corbijn. “The pictures suggest the relationship we had was very deep, but in fact, these things are made in a few minutes.”

Sam Riley, the lean, cigarette-diet-type who plays Curtis, is a former musician himself, in a short-lived band called 10,000 Things. Riley had been working in a factory in his home city of Leeds folding shirts before Control. (He called and quit the day he got the part.) He felt the pressure of playing “a bloody icon,” as he puts it, most fiercely during the gig scenes, when 150 Joy Division fans were recruited to play the audience.

“As soon as I got out of the makeup chair, I was wearing the green mac [jacket] that Ian wore, and I had the hairdo and it was obvious who I was supposed to be. No one had ever seen me in anything. This guy came up to me and said; ‘Are you Ian?’ which is a strange question, and I said: ‘I don’t know anymore.’ He said: ‘Well, I saw him many times, mate, so it better be f---ing good.’”

Another man in the front lifted his T-shirt and flashed Riley a huge tattoo of Curtis that covered one side of his chest. Riley’s drummer shouted: “Hey, you can get one of Sam on the other side!”

Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) falls in love with journalist Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara) in Control. (Alliance Films)

Spending a lot of time in front of mirrors in his home, Riley worked hard to nail Curtis’s distinctive, trance dance. Corbijn originally wanted the band to mime the music, but Riley convinced him he could channel Curtis’s flat bass himself, and it’s his voice singing in the film. But the off-camera Curtis was less imitable.

“The difference is that with a movie like The Doors, there’s interview footage of Jim Morrison. You can compare the actor to the real voice, see what’s right or wrong. Whereas with Ian, there’s no [interview] footage. That’s part of the enigma of him and it gave me a little leeway because no one really knows what he talked like, and there are only three tapes of them performing on TV,” says Riley. “It was frustrating for me because he’d be in the spotlight for one second, and then move away and you can’t see him. Come on, Ian! Stay in the light!” 

The final product has won the full-hearted approval of New Order, and – slightly less enthusiastically – Deborah Curtis (played on screen with great sympathy by Samantha Morton), and Honoré, both of whom have seen the film. “They’re so emotionally connected to it, it’s still an open wound. They’re just not going to jump in the air about a movie like this,” says Corbijn. “But they’re fine with it. You can use the word ‘fine.’” 

For Corbijn, the move from photographer to director was difficult. “I never had a harder period in my life,” he says, explaining that he had to mortgage his house. He wanted to take a year off to make the film, but he was financially forced to take on several photo gigs – he shot the posters for The Sopranos finale – and worked to near-exhaustion. But it was, in the end, the script he had been waiting for.

“I don’t think I would have done this film if I hadn’t known Ian,” says Corbijn. “I’m an inexperienced filmmaker. I’ve had manuscripts sent to me over the years, but I could never say yes because I missed the human connection. But I felt that immediately with this film.”

His next film, he adds, will have nothing to do with rock ‘n’ roll. 

Control opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on Oct. 26 and in the rest of Canada on Nov. 2.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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