MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM DIRECTS THE LOOK OF LOVE

Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan for The Look of Love, a biopic about London’s soft porn and property baron Paul Raymond.

Coogan, who starred in 24 Hour Party People, A Cock and Bull Story and The Trip for Winterbottom, plays Raymond, dubbed ‘The King of Soho’ who, at his death in 2008, was one of the richest men in Britain thanks to a publishing empire, including magazines Men Only and Escort, and a vast property portfolio.

Anna Friel (Rogue Trader, Limitless) plays Raymond’s wife, Jean, and Imogen Poots (Chatroom, A Late Quartet) is Raymond’s much-loved daughter and heir apparent, Debbie, who died tragically young from a drugs overdose in 1992.

The third important woman in Raymond’s life, glamour model Fiona Richmond, who posed for his magazine Men Only and became his lover and confidante, is played by Tamsin Egerton (St Trinian’s, Chalet Girl).

Winterbottom was born in Blackburn, Lancashire and studied English at Oxford before studying filmmaking at Bristol University. He is a prolific and highly praised director with more than 20 features films to his credit, including Welcome to Sarajevo, Wonderland, The Claim, 9 Songs, A Mighty Heart, The Killer Inside Me and Trishna.

TOM: After immersing yourself in this world and researching Paul Raymond’s life, what did you make of him?

A: It’s difficult because he’s dead, and so obviously we didn’t meet him and when we made films in the past, like 24 Hour Party People, which was about Tony Wilson, he was incredibly helpful and we had access to everything about him. And with Paul Raymond I didn’t really know that much about him apart from one or two obvious things like The Revuebar (Raymond’s club in Soho, London) so we bought the rights to a book called Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond (by Paul Willetts) which has a lot of factual information and there are a few documentaries about him, which we watched. We then watched all the interviews that he did for TV and read all the press interviews that he gave, so we saw the public face. And it strikes me that he was someone who did have a public face, what he said wasn’t necessarily what he believed, I think he would basically say things that he thought were good PR.

TOM: How did you find the man behind that image?

A: Paul Raymond was a brand and he sold the brand. In a way he was quite ahead of his time in that sense. And we talked to a range of people who knew him and one of the issues with that was that his life was a long life and our film covers the 50s to the 90s and a lot of people we talked to probably only knew him from the 80s. But we obviously talked to Fiona (Richmond) who knew him early and we pieced it all together. But what it felt to me was that he was one of those people who was completely different to different people. In fact, we had no coherent sense of who he was. Someone would say he was very quiet, someone else would say he was very sociable, someone would say he was very funny and someone else would say he was very clever and others that he was very lucky. It felt like someone, in a sense, who presented facets of himself to different people and everyone saw a different facet. It was interesting in that it gave you a fractured sense of how he behaved. And I felt like maybe all of it was true, and that he was all of those different things to different people and that when he was sitting in his apartment alone, it was almost like he didn’t exist. He was just the person who existed in public. That’s why we had a scene with Debbie (Raymond’s daughter) where Fiona (Richmond, his lover) has left him and he has collapsed in bed and she has to take him out and put him back into that world of Soho because that’s where he really existed. Other people said to us that when he’d been out on a big night and went back to his apartment you couldn’t really tell the difference between his apartment and a nightclub. So I guess that was our idea – that he was a construct, that he existed in all of these different versions.

TOM: Did you talk to Fiona Richmond?

A: Yes we did. We tried to talk to as many people as possible. We talked to Howard, his son, and he is quite close to Fiona. And Howard was like, ‘well I’m involved in another project so I can’t really talk to you..’ and then we spoke to Fiona and at first she said, ‘well, Howard’s involved in another film..’ But we finally persuaded her to talk to us properly before we started filming when we’d already written the script. And then she came on set and she met Tamsin so there was some engagement and we did get the chance to see what she is like.

TOM: One of the most intriguing things about the film is Raymond’s relationships with these three very strong women – his wife, his daughter and his lover. Why did you focus on those women?

A: I think those key relationships make him a more interesting character than you might otherwise think. For example, with Fiona when she leaves him he then sacks her. But Fiona remained friends with him and she still has a lot of good things to say about him. And again, it’s that ability to compartmentalise things that he had – ‘OK, I’ll sack her but I’ll be friends with her again.’ And it was the same with Jean (his wife, played by Anna Friel) who was obviously a strong,

vibrant character and quite full on. When they divorced it was obviously quite acrimonious and she said incredibly harsh things about him. But on the other hand, she later persuaded him to go back to their house where they lived together to be photographed naked for their magazine. So he had this weird ability to separate things. It was ‘this is what I’ll be like to you today’ and then tomorrow he could be totally different. And Steve is quite a good person to make sense of that.

TOM: Paul Raymond’s lifestyle as portrayed in the film – women and drugs – is almost like a ramped up version of the image that Steve Coogan has pushed upon him by certain sections of the tabloid media in the past. Was that one of the reasons why he was fascinated by Paul Raymond? The blurring of lines between a public persona and the real person?

A: I think so. I haven’t seen what Steve wants to say in interviews about this. With the other things I’ve done with Steve, we’ve gone to him and said, ‘we’ve got this idea, would you like to do it?’ In this case he came to us. It was a quick conversation where he said he thought Paul Raymond would be an interesting character for him to play and he did a quick impression of Paul Raymond (laughs). I think the first thing was that Steve saw him as quite an iconic figure, because of the magazines and the clubs, someone who had this very public life. But I don’t think Steve knew that much about his private life at the point that he said he was interested in playing him. But obviously they are both from the North of England, Catholic boys and, a bit like Tony Wilson, too, they share a childhood that’s not a million miles apart. In terms of the public stuff, I think there are echoes of it, but it’s much more extreme with Paul Raymond. It’s a world that Steve knows and it’s a public image of his private life but Steve is very different from his public image.

TOM: But you have played with that public image that he has before, in The Trip…

A: Yes, exactly and that seemed like it could be a productive area and in a way because I’m not sure anyone really knew Paul Raymond in a sense it’s a bit like projecting. If you take someone like Steve and use the facts of Paul Raymond’s life, it’s a bit of a projection of Steve on to Paul Raymond.

TOM: Did Steve ever meet Paul Raymond?

A: No, although the Comic Strip (a comedy review) was in one of the clubs owned by Paul Raymond so their paths may have crossed. But he didn’t know him.

TOM: It would be easy to make a very moralistic film about Paul Raymond’s life because the death of his daughter is tragic, but was it your aim to let the story speak for itself without making any kind of judgement?

A: Yes. I think the beginning is like the Life and Adventures of Paul Raymond, in a way, a kind of Moll Flanders kind of thing where you have the amoral hero and you just see all the ups and downs in their life. And in a way, it embodies the time and place, the world of Soho. But obviously you can’t get away from the fact that the one defining tragedy of his life, and therefore the film, is the death of his daughter. From the beginning I was always fascinated by the fact that, in a sense, it’s about inheritance. There’s the death of his daughter, which is the biggest and most obvious thing, but at that stage in particular he was very separate from his son Howard, so he had lost his son. I think they gradually became closer later but at that time Howard was kind of persona-non-grata and of course there was Derry, his other son that he didn’t even know. So he had three children all of which he lost at various stages. And that always seemed strange and interesting and in a way, you can’t get away from the moral of the story. I think Steve and I were both like, ‘that sounds a bit moralistic..’ If you were creating this story as fiction it would be too much but it’s true.

TOM: The relationship with his daughter Debbie, was clearly affectionate and they obviously did adore each other. But, in your film, the boundaries of a father and daughter relationship are completely shattered and they partied together and shared drugs. Was it that he just couldn’t say ‘no’ to her?

A: I think what we wanted to get across is that no matter who you are and no matter what you do, when a father loses a daughter that is the most terrible thing. But also, he spoilt her in a way that wasn’t good for her. He wanted to give her what she wanted and what she wanted was to be him and that was a strangely dangerous circle to keep going.

TOM: Did any of Paul Raymond’s family visit the set while you were making The Look of Love? And if so, what did they make of Steve Coogan as Paul Raymond?

A: Paul Raymond’s granddaughters, India and Fawn came on set a couple of times and John James, who is the (biological) father of India and effectively was a father to both of them, and he worked with Paul Raymond quite closely. And they all said Steve was incredibly close to how Paul Raymond was and John James said that Imogen was very close to Debbie. And you know, if someone is behaving in a self-destructive way, they are difficult, they do difficult things, but we didn’t want to just portray her as a nightmare. She wanted to be like her father but she never quite achieved what she wanted and we wanted to see that vulnerable side. And I think Imogen captured that beautifully.

TOM: Do you think that this film will change the change the perception of Tamsin Egerton as an actress?

A: Yes, she’s great. The film is structured in three parts when Paul is with his wife, then Fiona Richmond and then with the daughter, that’s the shape of the film. We talked to people who knew them and obviously we talked to Fiona. We wanted to show that their relationship was fun and they got on and it wasn’t just all about sex. I got the impression that Fiona took the whole thing about the magazines and the shows as something of a joke. She definitely was not a victim. And now she has an incredibly nice life and spends a lot of time in the Caribbean. I think for her, the magazines and shows were a bit silly and she didn’t mind playing that part. And I think that’s a really hard role to play and Tamsin has that nice, easy quality whereas Anna’s character, Jean, is full on and you would imagine would be a lot to handle.

TOM: You have several different periods in the film, from the 50s onwards, and you also shot in Soho, in the centre of London. Logistically, was that difficult?

A: Yes (laughs). We wanted to shoot in Soho rather than go somewhere else and try and recreate it and the good side was that we could film in Ronnie Scott’s (Jazz Club) and other places. But people in Soho are not very friendly when you are trying to film and we had days when we were trying to do 1958 and then 1972 and then 1992 and we would try and do that in one day and that was hard.

TOM: Are you working with Steve again? There’s talk of a sequel to The Trip?

A: Yes, we’re doing another one in May. It will be Steve and Rob (Brydon) again and this time they will be going to Italy.