THE FILTH AND THE FURY: PRODUCTION STORY

1) BACKGROUND: THE GREAT ROCK AND ROLL SWINDLE

Director Julien Temple was at film school in Beaconsfield, Hertfordshire when he first came across The Sex Pistols in 1975. The band were rehearsing in a Rotherhithe warehouse and Temple happened to be wandering round the docks when he overheard a Small Faces song coming from a window. "Instead of 'I want you to know I love you' they were singing 'I hate you', which made me laugh. It was the sort of song I wanted for a student film I was doing, so I went in. I got up to the top of these rickety stairs and as my head came through the open floor I saw this band which was unlike any group on earth at the time. I was intrigued so I found out where they were going to be playing and I went to see them."

Temple was so taken with The Pistols he abandoned his student film and decided to document the band instead. He had a key cut for the NFTS camera room so he could "borrow" the school's cameras at night to film their gigs. "Gradually I was allowed by the NFTS to bring the camera out in the open," he explains. "I followed the band around for two or three years and eventually was paid to do it; very little money but probably more than the band were getting per week."

Much of the footage was used in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle which Temple directed in 1980. The film became a self-promotion vehicle for the band's original manager Malcolm McLaren, who had long harbored a desire for a Sex Pistols movie. "When the band fell apart Malcolm decided to do the film like a spoof with all the footage that Julien had taken," explains The Filth and The Fury's producer Amanda Temple. "But it didn't have John Lydon's (Johnny Rotten) approval; he really wasn't involved in it. Julien always knew that it wasn't the whole story: It was a vehicle for Malcolm to strut around and feel important in."

Says Julien Temple: "At the time of Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, The Pistols had become in the minds of a lot of fans the same thing as Rod Stewart. They were being hero-worshipped. And we wanted to take the piss out of that. That film was actually meant to be a provocative comic puncturing of the sense that The Pistols were just another great pop-star act."

Eric Gardner - Lydon's manager and The Filth's executive producer - takes up the story: "The Great Rock And Roll Swindle was completely Malcolm McLaren's slanted egocentric vision. None of the band members had anything to do with it from a creative viewpoint. They felt that both it and the Sid and Nancy movie - a commercial attempt to exploit the sensationalism around them - had left the public with a very distorted impression of what the Pistols were all about.

In 1987 Lydon sued McLaren at the London High Court because, as Gardner explains, "he thought Malcolm had not acted honorably during his tenure as the band's manager". The former Pistols' front-man won ownership of all the band's master recordings; all the copyrights to the music publishing of the songs; and ownership of all film footage and the name Sex Pistols. "He contacted the other band members and the estate of Sid Vicious -executed by Sid's mum at the time - and said 'Let's all own this together'. So ever since then the band has owned all their own material. This made The Filth and The Fury possible.">

2) THE FILTH AND THE FURY. GENESIS

It was Anita Camarata - manager of Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock and Sid Vicious' estate - who got the ball rolling on a new film that would set the record straight. Says Camarata: "I was in England on business when we discovered there was a storage facility in The Sex Pistols' name. No one knew what was in it. So I went down there to look, and found over 20 hours of Sex Pistols footage: all the old interviews and performances, from their inception to the end. Making sure the group was documented on film was one great thing that Malcolm McLaren did. That was when we decided to make the movie. It was great to have historical footage of their career and a great opportunity to tell their story, instead of Malcolm's story."

Camarata and the band asked Julien and Amanda Temple to put together a ten minute presentation tape from the footage. "We wanted to take it around to different film companies to see who would be interested in financing- a feature-length documentary about the band," she explains. Through Camarata's association with Jersey Films, she asked Jonathan Weisgal, President of Jersey Shore, the company's lower-budget arm to help find the financing.

In early 1999, Camarata went to New York and met FilmFour chief executive Paul Webster. "One of the first things Paul brought in to put on his office wall when he got the job at FilmFour was his ‘God Save The Queen Poster’," explains Amanda Temple. "Anita told him that Julien had always wanted to make this documentary film about the band and he said 'Go and do it'."

Gardner continues: "Julien cut together a brilliant sampler and Paul Webster, being the most intelligent and visionary of the people we showed it to, happily said that FilmFour would finance the production of the film in its entirety in exchange for worldwide all-media distribution rights."

Says Julien Temple: "We'd looked at one side of The Sex Pistols' story in Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and I was certainly aware that it was not the whole story. In a way what I needed then was the energy to tell the other side of the story and it was really Paul Webster's interest that made it spark for me again."

After The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle all Temple's footage had been filed back in the band's vault in the London suburb of Perivale. Ninety percent had never been seen before by the public. "The vault stores movies from time gone by and everything is properly archived and labeled," explains Amanda Temple. "When you tell them you're there to look at The Sex Pistols stuff they take you round the back down all these tiny corridors and you come round a corner and there's this pile of rusty cans with films falling out and it is an absolute mess!"

3) WHAT STORY?

Julien and the film's editor Niven Howie set to work on the cans, selecting the footage they wanted to use for the definitive feature film of The Pistols. "It was a case of getting into the vault and going through everything," explains Amanda. "A lot of the film had deteriorated and it was a real adventure to find out what was there. They had no script, and no way to map the story. That took several months, to map out what angle they were going to come from."

The team eventually decided to set material on the band against an anarchic collage of newsreel footage, adverts, weather reports and game-show clips taken from Julien Temple's own archive of 1970s home video tapes. "I was one of the early owners of the video machine when it was fifteen quid for a two-hour tape," explains the director. "I used to tape around the clock which that meant I had a lot of weird bits of footage that we could use. Part of the joy was finding very mundane things and putting them in a context that made them funny and become alive. The idea of using it grew out of being stuck. We did it with a couple of sequences and it generated a style that I thought was in the spirit of the band. There was an irreverence about getting any old piece of shit, sticking it in and creating a spark that appealed to me."

Temple likens the process to beach-combing: "It was a lot of fun creating the film out of editing and found objects. We improvised a lot: you didn't know where you were going; you would have one sequence that worked and then you'd have to get the next one and try to tell the story."

The decision to put the two archives together obviously dictated the final direction Temple took with the project. Convinced from the outset that The Filth should be a movie rather than simply a performance-based video, Temple was determined that the process of "breathing life into dead bits of molding celluloid" meant he didn't have to make "a ghastly rock-u-mentary with old rock-stars in make-up and armchairs".

"The Sex Pistols stuff was molding away in cans destined never to see the light of day and a lot of the footage was mute," explains the director. "We had to sync it up and play around with it to be able to use it. I wanted to try and say something not just about what The Pistols meant at the time but the difference between that time and now, and how in some ways they were responsible for changing things."

One of the primary goals was to have the audience come out of cinemas feeling as if they'd just been totally immersed in mid-70s England. Says Gardner: "The majority of the people who will see it were not part of the punk movement. They will be going to see what all the fuss was about. The idea behind making the film this way is to transport people back to the time, so they can relate to what the band are talking about."

"That's why we shot the interviews with the band in silhouette," explains Amanda Temple. "We didn't want the audience to be taken away from the extraordinary energy and purity the Pistols had. A lot of what this band was about was being young: and being angry about their prospects for the future."

Another challenge was to show that punk music was born out of horribly oppressive economic, social and cultural conditions in England in the early 70s. "The Pistols made headlines around the world, but the rest of the world was not experiencing the same things that England was experiencing," says Gardner. "So when punk came to America and American bands began copying the Sex Pistols the anger was manufactured. One of the important things about the film is that it helps people to understand that the creation of the Pistols was as much to do with politics and economics as it was music.

4) THE INTERVIEWS

By September 1998, Temple and Howie had emptied the vault and telecined its contents onto video. Two months later, they had a very loose four-hour cut from the vault footage and Temple's home-video archive. The next step was to shoot the material for the film's backbone: the interviews with the original band members. "Steve Jones and John Lydon don't really talk to each other," explains Amanda Temple, who went with Julien to Los Angeles, where the band members now live, to do the interviews, "so it was very much a case of interviewing everybody separately and overlapping the stories later."

The intimacy of one-to-one interviews meant that the band members were freed up to tell their particular side of the story. "It's why in a way the band has been so supportive of the film," continues the producer." Steve has said things that he's never said to John's face, and John has said things that Steve has never heard him say. I think it's been quite a healing process for them, a real catharsis."

Back in London, the interviews - including eight hours with Lydon - were transcribed and choice cuts selected. A vital part of the puzzle was giving Sid Vicious, who died in 1979, a voice. Among the vault footage was an interview Julien had done with Sid in Hyde Park the year before his death. " Julien wanted each of the band members to have an identity," explains Amanda. "When we saw the interview with Sid we knew he would have a voice, which was very important. What's wonderful about that footage is that Sid is so surprisingly articulate and reflective, and so funny. Everybody just thinks that he was a schmuck but he had a razor-sharp wit."

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