Steve interviews Julien Temple - Part 2

Helen Wallington Lloyd gets busy with the letter G. The title sequences of the "G" reat rock 'n' roll Swindle were superb!

Heelloo...Tina here for ChrisWas. Just feeling my way around here, don't know if I'm doing this posting thing right, we'll see, won't we? As promised earlier, here is a second snippet from Steve's interview with Julien Temple.

Wot, was you expecting yesterday's delightful number, "Mr. Bulldozer"? It was got very complicated, that. How to express in letters the sound that Steve was making to represent the sound of Mr. Bulldozer's engine? "Urrrrnnn! Urrnnn!"?? Over. and. over.

Mr. Shovel thoughtfully sampled Steve's 'sound effects' and then 'live' Steve began a duet with himself as he was pretending to be a construction tractor. Didn't think that would translate well into written form. Unless you are really hankering for it...

Sooooo, we'll pick up where we left off last time, yes? Good.

Julien Temple Part 2

Steve:…I wasn’t in too great a shape when I was doing it. I might have acted like I was together, but I was uh, that’s when I started doing that nasty drug.

Julien: I didn’t realize you’d began that early. I know…

Steve: I remember one day, we were filming. It was, I think it was up the West End somewhere. It was the shot – I’ll tell exactly…you know the shot where I’m looking through the glass at the bird on the piano?

Julien: Yeah, yeah.

Steve: We did it in some shop up West End, right.

Julien: Right. We faked it, yeah.

Steve: I remember coming there and I’d been doing dope for about a year, like, just snorting it and didn’t realize that I had a habit because I never stopped…until that day. I went to do…

Julien: (?), wasn’t it?

Steve: Yeah and uh, I started feeling like rubbish and I remember I had to, I just had to just fly home, ‘cause I was feeling horrible and I remember getting in me house and doing it and thinking, “Oh, no…”

Julien: It’s ‘got’ you.

Steve: Yeah, “I’ve got a problem here.” And that was the day I remember doing the other side of the glass, I was pulling the faces, you know?

Julien: Yeah, yeah.

Steve: And that was up the West End and then the rest…who’s that bird’s house?

Julien: Oh, um, Lindsay…

Steve: Lindsay DePaul.

Julien: DePaul, yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

Julien: That was a great line, something about Lindsay DePaul and overlooking Karl Marx’s grave and the bedroom of Lindsay DePaul. You did it…

Steve: Oh, that was…yeah.

Julien: Well yeah, the saddest moment I ever saw you is standing, must have been soon after that, must’ve been on the corner of Old Compton Street, with all these you know, freebie Virgin Records…

Steve: Trying to flog ‘em?

Julien: Trying to flog ‘em, swaying around…

Steve: Awww…sad.

Julien: That was bad.

Steve: But look at me now.

Julien: Who would’ve known.

Steve: Look at me now…wow, yeah it was a mad time. It was very uh, very weird back then. What was that, ’79 was it, or ’80?

Julien: ’78, ’79. It came out in ’80. Strangest thing about that film, in a way was nobody…you know a censor looks at a film and tells you to take things out. I think this was the only time a censor, you know, sits down and writes something that you have to put in.

Steve: Right.

Julien: At the end, we had to do that whole thing to make it like, a moral tale, “Don’t do this” because Sid ended up like this and we had all these…it’s weird being told what you gotta do by the censors.

Steve: Yeah. Would you have, would you have done it differently if McLaren wasn’t involved? Would you have done anything different, you know, different scenes or whatever…different take on it? ‘cause he, was he, he was putting his two cents in right, McLaren?

Julien: Oh yeah, he had, well…we spent about six months you know, working out the…madness of the thing and uh, he was obviously a big part of it. But he wasn’t around that much when we shot it so, you know, it was, you know, left up to my own devices there and I’d brought things in like the cartoon stuff that my mates did at film school and so on. So we were doing things and then when, when things split up with Malcolm, he tried to fire me. We brought in a thing where we had a perspective on Malcolm as well. You know, “Where did the money come from?” “Did The Swindle include Malcolm?” which it obviously did in the end, you know.

Steve: He wanted that though, right?

Julien: I think so…to an extent, but…

Steve: ‘cause it comes across like, it’s like, this is Malcolm’s idea, to make him shine. But is that not true?

Julien: Well, it was…I mean, the idea was to make him look preposterous, ‘cause you know, he liked to shine in a negative way, didn’t he?

Steve: Yeah.

Julien: You know…I think we were doing a lot of things that were, where we took things that actually happened and tried to make it seem untrue and then we took stuff that was completely made up and tried to make it seem true. I mean, to the extent that…do you remember that there was a press conference in Rio, where we had the Bormann character lined up with you.

Steve: I don’t remember.

Julien: It was Ronnie Biggs, you Steve…Paul…

Steve: Did you film it?

Julien: Yeah, we filmed it, but the Brazilians thought he was Bormann, joining the band.

Steve: Martin Bormann.

Julien: They actually bought into that. It was amazing.

Steve: You mean, he wasn’t? I thought he was, too. (both laugh)

Julien: But it was that whole thing…

Steve: He was a “B” actor, I found out later, that guy.

Julien: Yeah, he was a Hollywood nazi, basically, you know, a character nazi.

Steve: Is that what he played? He always played nazis?

Julien: Yeah, he always played nazis. He was suitably over-the-top. But uh, you know, in a, in a way, I did the film later that I wanted to make about the Sex Pistols, The Filth And The Fury to me showed where you guys come, came from and how you know, what your lives growing up, fed into the music that you made, that it wasn’t just some mad puppet meister, molding you out, Claymation-style.

Great stuff - Tina and no it was perfectly posted no formatting problems which aye bug me pure excellence. Steppin' up...hmmm???