Interview: Roger Michell

We often hear how filmmakers looked up at the cinema screen as kids and dreamed of a life of movies – were you the same?

Not really, I was in theatre long before film. I started doing little plays when I was 8, and in school I got into acting but wasn’t very good at it or quite as interested as in directing. After school I went to Cambridge to do English, which is a very well-trodden path for theatre directors. Later I became an assistant director at the Royal Court, working with wonderful people like Samuel Beckett, and then slowly carved out a career. And years after that I did a BBC course, now defunct, for people wanting to get into film.

When you were at university did you have your career carefully mapped out in front of you?

Oh no, it never felt like anything was mapped out at all. It felt like a struggle. Still does!

Did you try to balance youthful vitality and vision with learning from more experienced adults?

Well I was very impressed by the people I was working with but you have to cut your own furrow. You really learn from making your own mistakes.

There must have been a few setbacks.

All the time!  Always I try to learn from the mistakes. Every time you turn to a new project, it’s like learning to make something from scratch. You’re much less aware of skills accrued than what you don’t know.

How do you begin a project?

Well film projects start off in many ways. It can be a script that flops through the letterbox but more likely to be a project that’s been developing for many years. Le Week-End, my latest film, was in development for six or seven years before filming. On nearly all my films I like to get the script to a good stage, get it budgeted, attach  cast, and only then try and finance. If you take a half-baked script to a financier, with no cast, they’ll obviously ask for Brad Pitt or Judy Dench to be attached. Or both.

Your films span several genres and styles. What elements do you think are consistent?

I realised recently that my films are all love stories of one sort or another.

Many are about common human problems. Are they autobiographical?

All art is autobiographical, I can’t think of any art which I admire which noticeably avoids an element of autobiography. Although I often don’t realise that a film is autobiographical until much later, sometimes years later.

In our uncertain economic waters, do you think that the Government has a responsibility to help national cinema?

As in any society I think we have a responsibility to support culture. It is after all what glues us together and allows us to understand ourselves a little better. In the UK we’ve almost ceased being a manufacturing country, but we make films supremely well, and I think governments have started to understand the importance of the industry. Pragmatically, a  healthy film industry is also a huge cash cow.

With digital, 3-D, the internet etc., is the industry at a crossroads?

Yes, everything is up in the air. The music industry has shown us that a tsunami is around the corner, and we should learn from this. Netflix commissioned House of Cards, for example. Last year I shot a film on a smartphone, which was thrilling and liberating.

Is that a change like when sound was introduced, or does it signal the end of filmmaking?

It won’t be the end, but it’s offering new ways of making films. It’s easier than when I was young, and there is much more choice. But people want to come back to see a story being told, whatever the technology – it’s about actors and a story.

If you could work with any actor from history, who would it be?

I’m actually planning a film about two nineteenth-century Shakespearean actors, Edwin Forrest and William Charles Macready, one an American swashbuckler and the other a static, Romantic European. I wouldn’t mind working with them.

What is the best aspect of working in the world of film?

The opportunity for limitless and intense cultural and emotional tourism – you get to live in different worlds.

So do you see cinema as simply another means of self-expression, or is it a unique art?

It stands out because it’s collaborative. It’s not like a painting or a novel.

Finally, could you offer any advice for students aspiring to enter the world of film?

Make films. Get out your phone, shoot some stuff and try and cut it together … and then you start learning that it’s more difficult than it looks.