Making Filth

A talk with Julien Temple

For those who know director Julien Temple's previous Sex Pistols film, 1980's The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, The Filth and the Fury will be a surprising retelling -- it even uses some of the footage from the earlier movie. Swindle was a patchwork parody, "narrated" by Malcolm McLaren as the tale of how he devised the band's success, and including the notorious clip of Sid Vicious's performance of "My Way." Filth is being presented as the band's side of the story, but Temple -- who also directed the David Bowie vehicle Absolute Beginners (1986), Earth Girls Are Easy (1989), and the recent Pandemonium for BBC television starring Robert Carlyle as poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- doesn't disavow the first effort. "That film was done at a different time, for a different purpose. We did it in the aftermath of the band, when kids were worshipping them the way they had the Bay City Rollers. So the purpose of The Great Rock and Roll Swindle was to debunk all that, to shock and play a Godardian joke, to puncture that aura of pop divinity. The Filth and the Fury is a complement to that."

Of Filth, which includes archival footage he shot during the band's heyday as well as his own collection of TV videotape, Temple says, "It's as much about the difference between that time and this as it is about the band," and that it's also about the "backbreaking lack of opportunities that defined the anger and raw desperation" of young people in mid-'70s England. When the band came to America, audiences responded with a different attitude. "It was a freak show," Temple explains. "The meaning of the Sex Pistols was lost for 10 years. In the States, it didn't come out until years later, and the result was grunge and Kurt Cobain. Now it's very real, and you can see it in films like American Beauty, where the subject of viciously alienated youth is being dealt with in a Hollywood film."

-- J.G.

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