Past Episodes.
S1E5.
“That’s not even a music video.”
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Peter Care: projecting rebellion.
Published: Jan 1, 2025.
“I had ideas rattling around in my head of what else to do with projection, and I ended up working with REM. The “Radio Song” music video was a showcase for a lot of the ideas that I couldn’t get into previously. It’s just a thing that follows through in my career. My fascination with projecting images and playing around with them, doing things that aren’t just showing a film on a TV screen.”
INTRODUCTION: The social unrest in England during the early 1970s was a complex convergence of unemployment and societal decline. The working classes were belittled for their perceived indecency and lack of education while the rising middle classes were mocked for their shallow aspirations.
In true English spirit, a few satirical auteurs such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh emerged to reflect this conflict and the brewing national identity crisis. And like a starting pistol at the decade’s outset, Nic Roeg’s film “Performance” burst onto the screen in a storm of outrage and praise, flaunting sexual identity.
It was a tortured time, yet these cinematic pioneers laid down a radical path for a new wave of aspiring filmmakers to pick up a camera and capture whatever they could.
In episode 5, we meet a man who defied the mainstream mediocrity he saw around him. Channeling the energy of the burgeoning industrial music scene with its pre-punk assault on the status quo, he created pioneering films for bands like Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA, and the Human League.
His visionary approach questioned the legitimacy of traditional filmmaking, enabling him to pursue a revolutionary path that eventually brought him to the forefront of American culture at the dawn of MTV.
RICHARD SMITH: In the world of music videos, the 1980s were pioneering times. My guest today was one of those early pioneers. He started his career making experimental films for industrial music icons, Cabaret Voltaire. Since then, he’s worked with New Order, Depeche Mode, and REM. He made a film with Jodie Foster and directed commercials for Levi’s, Verizon, and Coca-Cola.
He was born in Penzance in Southwest England, and now lives in Los Angeles. Please welcome to the show, Mr. Peter Care. Peter, thank you for making time to be here today.
PETER CARE: Richard, good to hear from you.
RS: You’re originally from Penzance and studied fine art. Maybe go back to that … being influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Kenneth Anger and so on.
PC: So, this is going back to ’71. I wanted to go to art college. And I thought I’d be drawing and painting, but the college had a wonderful system for letting you try out anything you wanted. I was looking around one of the storage rooms in the college, and I found this clockwork camera, and it fascinated me, and I took it to my teacher and said, “What the hell is this? And what do you do with it?” He said, “Well, I don’t know, but I know someone who can help you.”
And I had this guy called Richard Williams, who is not very well remembered now but was massively important in British animation. And amazingly, he came down and he worked with me. I was on my own. It was just him and me with a clockwork camera, and he taught me how to animate with live people, which in those days was called “pixelation,” and that was eye-opening for me.
RS: What’s a clockwork camera?
PC: It’s the Bolex. It was invented in the 30s by the Germans. It was a way of making home movies affordable. When you wind it up, you get about 30 seconds of shooting. You usually get two or three different lenses that slip around on a turret. It’s got the capability of shooting animation as well as live-action. The camera became well-known in the Second World War. Everybody was shooting with it: The Germans, the Americans, and the English were using these little cameras. But it was a good way to start because you must learn the discipline of being able to get a shot or performance within 30 seconds, you can’t just let the camera flow like a video camera and edit it later.
You must plan, choose your framing, and choose everything. It becomes a good course in concentration, and using your mind when you’re filming. I fell in love with the idea of filming, and I saw that Sheffield Polytechnic had a film department and a lot of film equipment. So, I moved up to Sheffield to go to that art college.
Again, I was very lucky. There were just three film students and there were three teachers. Those three teachers were filming documentaries at the weekend. I’d always volunteered to carry the tripod or be a second camera operator or help with the editing, and again, I learned a lot through just doing it.
Running around with a little handheld clockwork camera for someone else’s documentary is a great way to learn.
RS: This was about the same time the film “Performance” came out, is that right?
PC: I think “Performance” was a little earlier, like ’68, or ’69, but that was already in my bone marrow. That was just an amazing film. I think the film launched hundreds, probably thousands of music video careers. I was watching probably about 11 feature films or documentaries a week and shooting stuff for my teachers at the weekend, and just messing around with film as a film student. I just absorbed this culture.
It was just good for me. It was like great food. That brings us up to ’75. Then in ’76, I started a little nonprofit production company with some friends who also graduated from the same film department, and that felt wonderful because we had a grant from Channel 4, BFI, and Yorkshire Arts Association. The idea behind it was to become a resource for anyone to come in and make a film if they have the funding, but we would rent out our equipment for free.
RS: I read that was hugely successful.
PC: Yes, it was. It grew from about five or six members to 80 odd at one point after I left. What happened was I had this romance that working-class people in Sheffield would be able to come in and get a grant from somewhere, and then we would help them make a film. We had this romance that it would be helpful to the working-class people.
We even had some people from Chile. These refugees came in and they needed to use our equipment to do some anti-fascist propaganda film or something. We never saw it. It was just, we thought, wow, this is amazing.
But it grew into something a little bit more typical where I was working in administration more than making my films. So, I got a little impatient, meantime, I was seeing things happening in Sheffield on the music scene, like Cabaret Voltaire, who, even then back in ’75, ’76, were saying, “Oh, we’re not musicians.”
“Back then, people wanted to move away from the norm, and I was figuring that’s what I was trying to do in my way with my films, the idea of not putting up with conventions and the deadening mediocrity that seemed to be happening with a lot of the film and TV you were seeing at home on the TV screen.”
PC: They did this gig in the gallery at Salter Lane, it blew me away, and I thought, “Wow, I want to work with these people.” It didn’t feel like there were a lot of punks in Sheffield. I think the industrial music thing happened very quickly after the initial explosion and excitement of punk, and I was 23 in ’76, I was too old to be a punk. I was a bit of a usurper in the clubs, listening to the music. But I was just thinking this morning about how people wanted to move away from the norm back then, and I was figuring that’s what I was trying to do in my way with my music videos. I’ll call it film, but the idea of not putting up with conventions and the deadening mediocrity that seemed to be happening with a lot of the film and TV you were seeing at home on the TV screen.
So, in my smaller way, I was a bit of a rebel there.
RS: I think you were definitely a rebel. Looking at your early work particularly and even your later work.
PC: I must say the idea that a lot of the industrial bands or the alternate bands, whatever you want to call them, they were more interested in having film projected on stage with them or making little music videos as part of their self-expression.
And with punk, I always felt, well, it’s fucking great, it’s marvelous music, it’s reaching all through these ideas of rebellion for the young people, the frustration, the politics, fashion, and graphics. All of this was happening, but film wasn’t part of that movement.
“With ‘Johnny Yesno,’ I didn’t want it to be another naturalistic, realistic British film that I love. Ken Loach is my movie God, but I wanted to go back to the idea of the theatricality of some film language, like Film Noir, in particular British Film Noir, and shoot it in color, and have American cars, and a woman in a glamorous dress, and so on, it completely flew in the face of the conventional culture back then.”
PC: When I did a bit of part-time teaching in the film department where I studied. One of my students was Adrian Wright, who then moved into the Human League, but because of that connection, the Human League was the first group to employ me to shoot a little film. It was like four or five minutes, driving down a motorway, the camera pointing forward. It’s just a classic, ordinary shot but they wanted it projected behind them for one of their gigs.
I thought this would be a nice way to work, and when I was running the Independent Film Company, I fought to get a grant from the Yorkshire Art Association to make a short film. That’s how I got my “Johnny Yesno” film made. I remember distinctly, still very clearly a gig at the Lead Mill in Sheffield. It was a big warehouse space. It was a charity gig. Cabaret Voltaire played first, and it was incredible. Then after that, the Human League came on, and the two bands together in one night like that was just incredible. But I was thinking, “Oh man, I’d really like to get Cabaret Voltaire to do the soundtrack for the film that I’m working on right now.”
I kind of always felt that their music and their attitude was a lot more, if you like, cinematic, it was just more open to so many other influences, whereas the Human League I thought was amazing, but it was very contained music. They didn’t really need projections.
They didn’t need that. So, I wanted to establish some kind of relationship with Cabaret Voltaire, and once I made the film, as I was editing, I was using their “Voice of America” album as a click track or a scratch track, just to give people an idea of the atmosphere I wanted to build up in the film.
I found that the music tracks, the images and the editing all lined up really well without hardly any input from me or my editor, it was quite extraordinary.
RS: I watched that the other day and I was struck by how so much of the imagery and the music in “Johnny Yesno” – there’s this ethereal, atmospheric feeling in the music and it comes through in the film. What was the reaction like?
PC: Oh, it was flying in the face of convention. Back then the feminist movement was quite strong and there was this feeling that women should be able to make films without men. I was talking with a friend of mine, and I said, “What if you did a film about how men treated women, but you made it attractive to men, it would probably change things quicker than just preaching to the converted,” as it were. That sounds a little rude, but the idea was to do something that was about a guy who’s confused about women.
At the same time, on a formalistic level, I didn’t want it to be another naturalistic, realistic British film that I love. Ken Loach is my movie God, but I wanted to go back to the idea of the theatricality of some film language, like film noir, in particular British film noir, and shoot it in color, and have American cars, and a woman in a glamorous dress, and so on, it completely flew in the face of the conventional culture back then.
RS: It has this David Lynch feel about it, and now that you’re talking about film noir, I can see that seems like a more relevant starting point. The duality of the woman for instance. It’s almost dreamlike. I don’t know if that was intentional or not.
PC: It was like the male fantasy versus the reality of this woman who was a victim because she ended up being shot. It’s intentionally very simplistic. The film evolved a little bit away from that political stance to just a pure film for me.
My favorite part of the film is the hallucination sequence, where the guy has been drugged and he’s just going through this kind of horrible, hallucinatory trip and then coming out of it sort of cold turkey and I was very pleased with that sequence.
RS: The thing I liked about the film particularly was that it was almost narrated. Which creates this interesting distance between what you’re seeing and what he’s saying, or what’s being said rather, which I found very powerful.
PC: Well, it was. I thought it was great. For me, purely on a personal level, that fact it was also done with very little communication with the band. It was all done with faith and instinct or something. The two things just came together. We never really sat around and discussed indepth the meaning of anything. It was just, “This is great, let’s just keep doing it.” That was a really refreshing way to work.
RS: It’s interesting because, the output, is so unique. I don’t know much about film but it seems unique in its approach.
I’m going to go back a little bit to where all that was coming from for you in terms of your inspiration, your influences, even your background.
“The other thing that was a big influence on me was when I was doing projection films for Cabaret Voltaire. The song was maybe four or five minutes long, and they would give me a roll of film. That would be the budget. So I went back to the ideas, the attitudes, of the French New Wave. Directors who were using repetition. Goddard and Alain Resnais, who were interested in repeating shots and hacking away at the film in an exciting way. Then I thought, okay, I’ll just do that then. I just repeated some camera moves and all the time my intention was always to make the editing match the music in some way, percussion and rhythm being the main points.”
PC: So having watched a fair number of films, both conventional films, Hollywood, Japanese, European feature films, and experimental films, the avant-garde, whatever you want to call it.
I always felt that the experimental, the avant-garde-leaning films lent themselves to the idea of working with music, having music as the dominant part of the soundtrack and almost the energy of the piece. I was looking at the Surrealists, such as Duchamp and Bunuel in particular. It was just strange.
There’s one film I remember of a male dancer. He’s got a suit on, and he’s standing on a glass platform and the camera’s underneath looking up, but he also has a dress on and he’s doing a kind of whirling dervish dance. That was it. That was the film, I think for about a minute, but it was quite startling, and that was in the twenties.
Then you move through to the sixties in California. People like Kenneth Anger, who again, his films are dominated by the soundtrack. There’s one called “Kustom Kar Kommandos,” and all it is is a very handsome young man with a pink fluffy rag and he’s getting the dust off a pink roadster car. That’s all it is. That’s all I remember. But I saw this in 1973 or something and things still stick in my mind. His work was very provocative. Intentionally very gay orientated and very edgy and mysterious, but with also this pop sensibility of using doo-wop and early Soul music.
Then “Performance” came out and I think that was another film that blew people away. That was just a huge revelation for me that you can do a film that looks like the editor had a fight with a lawnmower or something. The editing is completely nuts.
I made a note because this guy, deserves a lot of praise. He’s called Frank Mazzola. He was just a journeyman editor working out here in LA, and Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg were really struggling with the editing of the film. It wasn’t coming together in any conventional, narrative, linear way.
So, they gave it to this guy in Studio City or somewhere, and he started to mess around chopping the film up and putting in freeze frames, anything really to give it something. It worked incredibly well, and I haven’t seen the film for a few years, but I’ve seen it five or six times now, it’s just an immensely powerful use of film editing, and the imagery is amazing too.
I think it gave me, gave people, confidence that you could do something in film and people would watch it. Something that isn’t a comedy or a narrative film. The other huge revelation was seeing the music video for Strawberry Fields. When I was a kid, I loved that period of the Beatles.
RS: It’s like some of your work.
PC: Yes. The other thing I was thinking is, one of the great things that came out of punk was the idea that you could put out a record for like ten quid or something – my favorite films or videos like Strawberry Fields, come out of a low budget.
I mean, what do you do when you don’t have a budget except for some film, and the lab costs? I think that created in my work, that attitude of, how do people make films when they have no money. Normally it would be a documentary. Documentaries had a huge influence on me, and the idea of running around with a clockwork camera, just filming what’s happening in front of you with absolutely no ability to design the set or the location, it became in a way the camera that was getting a documentary-like recording of what was going on, and the editing became the production value for me.
Back in the day, I had these rules. I had a big ego, so I’d say, “Editing music videos should be a form of percussion.” It struck me that in a lot of conventional music videos back then the editing’s very arbitrary. If you look back, you might like the imagery, but the editing is really boring and unexciting and uses film language in a really lazy way.
The other thing that was a big influence on me was when I was doing projection films for Cabaret Voltaire. The song was maybe four or five minutes long. Maybe even six minutes long, and they would give me a roll of film. That would be the budget. “Here’s a roll, you’ve got four minutes of film, and this is a six-minute song, so, Peter, go at it.”
So, I went back to the ideas, the attitudes, of the French New Wave. Directors who were using repetition. Goddard and Alain Resnais, who were interested in repeating shots and hacking away at the film in an exciting way. Then I thought, okay, I’ll just do that then. I just repeated some camera moves and all the time my intention was always to make the editing match the music in some way, percussion and rhythm being the main points.
RS: It reminds me of the Burroughs cut-up technique, his approach to writing, in terms of a reference for what the Cabs were doing and then visually what you were doing. At least that’s my interpretation. Something that strikes me about you and your approaches is that it’s very ingenious.
“A lot of stuff I was doing back then was technically tough on people because the equipment was heavy. There was one revelation I had with ‘Johnny Yesno.’ We built a rig so that the camera would be strapped to the actor, and a friend of mine who invented the up-and-over machine, Tony Hill, he created this frame to put a 16-mil camera on. The frame itself was very heavy and then you’ve got a 16-mil camera on the end of that. The weight was quite immense.”
RS: As you were talking, you reminded me of the Depeche Mode video you did for Stripped where they’re carrying what look like televisions. It looks like it’s nighttime and it starts with a car engine exhaust. Then there’s a lot of moments where somebody’s holding what looks like something in front of the camera and there’s a projection going on to what’s being held.
PC: They were just sheets or thin hardboard painted white to act as screens for the projections.
RS: It’s a brilliant feeling that it creates, it made me wonder how you did that.
PC: When I was working for the Cabs and still doing bits and pieces for the independent film company, I was also getting a bit of money as a projectionist. So, I learned a lot about projection. Then touring with Cabaret Voltaire and projecting their films for them, a projector was just like another type of camera for me. You just pick it up and point it somewhere. Projection was again, just in my bone marrow as something to do and try out.
With Depeche Mode, it was a matter of budget and money. We had enough money to shoot some film, have it edited, and have it put onto the projector, and have the projectors moving around in Berlin at night.
To jump way ahead for a second, I always had ideas rattling around in my head of what else to do with projection, and I ended up working with REM. The “Radio Song” music video was a showcase really for a lot of the ideas that I couldn’t get into previously with Depeche Mode or with Cabaret Voltaire even. It’s just a thing that follows through in my career a bit, my fascination with projecting images and playing around and doing things that aren’t just showing a film on a TV screen.
Going back to the idea that you don’t have money for an art department and to create a fantasy world. You’re shooting pretty much in the real world, and I always felt it would be nice to do something with the camera. That’s different. Why does the camera have to be upright? Can it be upside down or on its side? Can you throw it off a building?
A lot of stuff I was doing back then was technically tough on people because the equipment was heavy. There was one revelation I had with “Johnny Yesno.” We built a rig so that the camera would be strapped to the actor, and a friend of mine, the guy who invented the up-and-over machine that everyone likes in the “Sensoria” music video, Tony Hill.
He created this frame to put a 16-mil camera on. The frame itself was very heavy and then you’ve got a 16-mil camera on the end of that. The weight was quite immense. I was really happy with the actor who did it. It was quite dangerous. He was upside down on a 60-degree slope in a quarry with probably about, 50 pounds, 60 pounds worth of equipment strapped to his body.
It wasn’t like a Steadicam. A Steadicam is designed to create smooth movement. This is the opposite. It’s a great way to show someone’s disorientation in a horror film or something. Of course, now with lightweight cameras, it’s a lot easier for the performer or the actor to wear it.
RS: Do you think the idea or the freedom of not having a budget inspired you? Did it seem the opposite when the budgets came along when you were shooting something, say for Verizon or a company like that?
PC: Yes, it did. You’re using an entirely different part of your brain. The idea of a camera as part of your neural system, I think that’s what a lot of photographers and camera operators feel. You’re very much linked to that magic machine. When you have a budget for a commercial, other responsibilities come in terms of your organization. It’s immensely expensive to have a union crew going into overtime, it would kill your profit.
On a micro level, it’s a bit like when you see those films of how they create nature documentaries. You have a tabletop and a guy’s filming a beetle and there are five spotlights and he’s got this weird camera thing with a snorkel that can track through a pretend piece of grass to see the little beetle. Commercials feel like that on a bigger scale.
RS: I love that analogy. That’s fantastic.
PC: Other commercial directors would probably disagree. I think a good example would be when I was working with REM. for instance. I was able to get support from them, their manager, and the record company to be given a decent amount of budget so I could try these things and still work within the practical world of a union crew and the record company needs and restraints and deadlines and so on.
So that was great in a way, having spent a fair amount of time with Cabaret Voltaire, where the budget was the price of some super eight film, then to be able to say, “Well, now I can shoot in the desert, or we can rent this warehouse for three days instead of three hours and so on.
“It was ‘Sensoria’ that turned things around for me. It was a music video that never got played on English TV, except for one show, which was Max Headroom. Meanwhile, I’d been hearing about this new thing in America called MTV, and back then, this is ’85, they had a chart table of most requests for music videos, and the ‘Sensoria’ video was there in the top 20 for seven months. I thought, God, I got to get over there.”
RS: Going back a little, you saw the Cabs perform at the Salter Lane School of Art and that was inspiring. You then worked with the Human League around a similar time. Between that moment, which was like the mid-seventies and then the early eighties when you started to work with bands like Depeche Mode and so forth, what happened in between? Were you working with other musicians?
PC: I was. I stopped working at the independent film company. I just got frustrated, but the thing that turned things around was when I did “Sensoria” and I realized, a lot of musicians and bands in England are thirsty for something like that.
I was in Sheffield; I was doing my thing. I was picking up bits and pieces of money, whatever would bring in a little bit of money, and then I kept getting these calls from people, bands in London. I remember getting a call from Shriekback and Scritti Politti, so I was building up a bit of a reputation as someone who was doing more interesting work than the conventional, and it was only a matter of time before I moved to London and was able to start a career.
So, it was really “Sensoria” that turned things around for me. It was a music video that never got played on English TV, except for one show, which was Max Headroom. Meanwhile, I’d been hearing about this new thing in America called MTV, and back then, this is ’85, they had a chart table of most requests for music videos, and the “Sensoria” video was there in the top 20 for seven months. I thought, God, I got to get over there.
What was also interesting was that The Museum of Modern Art in New York decided to recognize music videos as a form of art, and their first three videos that they procured to put into their collection was, “Sensoria,” the other one was “Sex Dwarf” by Soft Cell. Then the other one was called “Close to the Edit” by the Art of Noise and a great director, Zbigniew Rybczynski. He was a very interesting director of music videos.
I think those are the first three, and I just thought, wow, okay. I felt like I needed to get to America as soon as I could.
RS: Capitalize on that success, as it were.
PC: It was nice to have your work welcomed.
“I was working with a production company I wasn’t happy with, and I was doing very boring work. I picked up the phone to a woman at Warner Bros who I’d known, who was working in the video department, and I said, ‘I can’t do any more of this commercial stuff. Is there a band around?’ I said, ‘I’ll work for free even, just let me do a music video for somebody, send over some music.’ She said, ‘Have you heard of REM? Because they’re looking for someone.’”
RS: All of that brought you to the eighties and America and doing a lot of video work. What was that experience like?
PC: One of the great things about America, especially in the film industry, and music industry, they welcome new talent coming into the country. It was a little bit of a struggle at the very beginning for me to educate, if you like, the production company that it was cooler to film a band in a warehouse or in front of an oil rig rather than in front of a Beverly Hills swimming pool.
They got it very quickly, and the commercial industry cottoned on too. Again, they just felt this was a fresh way of reinventing the norm. So, I was welcomed with open arms by everyone, and I liked the fact that there was a meritocracy as well in American society. Where if you came in, you proved to people that you had interesting ideas, you had a plan, you could respect people, you could get things done, you’d excite people.
It didn’t matter where you were from or what your accent was, and I thought that was just marvelous. So, I felt very much at home straight away, and I found that a lot of the crews who are coming in off big movies and working with amazing directors would have respect for me too. So, it just worked incredibly well.
RS: But it was a short window. You then stopped making videos. Why was that?
PC: I hit a bit of a brick wall creatively. I remember doing a music video for a black American R&B artist. I shot two different films. We had the conventional 35-mil neg, which smooths everything out. It’s glamorous, and most music videos are shot on that. I also had a little Super 8 camera shooting the guy as well, and when the film came out, it was just awesome. He had very black skin, like Miles Davis, really dark an amazing color to work with, the Super 8 film made him look just magnificent.
Sorry if that sounds a little overblown, but it was just fantastic. Yet the management, the guy, and the record company, just hated it. So this is a time with MTV where it was difficult for black artists to come out and be accepted, and everyone was saying, “God, why are you making him look so black?” And I’m thinking, “God, this is so messed up.”
RS: It’s almost like an absurd version of “Anchorman” or something.
PC: Exactly. It was absurd. If they could have hung on for another six months, MTV completely shifted into showing rap and hip-hop music. I just thought, I’ll move away from here for a little bit. This is messing with my head. At the same time, I could see a commercial career was viable. So, I moved into commercials for a while. Then again, my career hasn’t been a linear growth, a little graph, a 45-degree arrow. It’s all been meandering, and I’ve made mistakes and so on, then I ended up hitting a wall in commercials as well.
I was working with a company I wasn’t happy with, and I was doing very boring work. I picked up the phone to a woman at Warner Bros who I’d known, who was working in the video department, and I said, “I can’t do any more of this commercial stuff. Is there a band around?” I said, “I’ll work for free even, just let me do a music video for somebody, send over some music.”
She said, “Have you heard of REM? Because they’re looking for someone.” So that was a nice thing, and I was able to establish working with REM and that got my juices flowing again.
RS: So that got you back, at least for a moment, got you interested in doing music videos for a little bit longer.
PC: Yes, exactly. Very much.
“I couldn’t figure out how you deal with weird casting choices. You have a meeting about the main character a 15-year-old, student girl who wants to become a tennis champion and people are saying, ‘Well, you know, we can get Venus Williams,’ who at the time was about 35.”
RS: Tell me about the film you made, “The Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys.” Tell me how that came about.
PC: Well, when I was still living in Sheffield and I was reading about the new directors coming onto the scene in America, I’m talking about Scorsese, Coppola, Brian de Palma, people like that. They started their careers working with Roger Corman.
It was typical to come out of film school, go and clean out Roger’s garage, and then start working on something and eventually get to direct a movie. I thought that was just marvelous. So, I had a romance about that. But by the time I got to LA, he was closing shop and I was so busy doing music videos I didn’t have the time to go over and meet him. But there was always that burning desire to do a film one day.
It was just a matter of happenstance. After working on a few scripts and getting nowhere, someone who had been on one of my commercials, one of the crew members, said, “Do you want to work on ‘Dangerous Lives of Altered Boys’ together?”
But it was a rocky road. I don’t want to bore people. I found it a little too chaotic, the whole process. It was a very puzzling way of working. Immensely wasteful. So anyway, the film was made. It was a very difficult shoot. I put 90 percent of my energy into helping the kids and of course, the highlight back then was filming with Kieran Culkin, who was amazing.
Again, it was like the stories you hear about filmmaking that would never happen in a commercial or music video. For instance, two weeks before we were shooting, Kieran decided to hop over a fence, and he broke his arm. He was like, “I’m fine.” Some of it worked out really well. Like we had him as a goalkeeper.
It’s so funny, but things you don’t think about. I don’t know what the metaphor would be. It’s a bit like having a mile-long freight train trundling through the prairie. It’s just going to go, and you do your best and you put all your most important elements, whether it’s a scene or a line or a reaction, you make sure you get them and you let other things go a bit.
You can’t do that with a music video or a commercial. People’s minds are on the impact of the visuals and being absorbed by the music and it’s over in four and a half minutes or 30 seconds. It was a revelation for me how amazing a feature film is, it’s like an artifact.
RS: You got a Spirit Award, right?
PC: Yes, that’s right. I forgot about that. But I also realized I didn’t know how to play the game with the studio system. I didn’t know how to use that machine. I couldn’t figure out how you deal with weird casting choices. You have a meeting about the main character a 15-year-old, student girl who wants to become a tennis champion and people are saying, “Well, you know, we can get Venus Williams,” who at the time was about 35.
Things like that would blow my mind, and I just couldn’t figure it out. I do admire directors who I’ve known and hung out with who knew how to play that game. They knew how to work the industry and I just couldn’t figure it out. It just wasted a lot of time, a lot of people’s time, and my own time and I lost some family time, so, I decided to stop.
RS: Something I wanted to get to was you seem like someone who’s very compassionate, I mentioned this to you before: there’s an interesting through line for me from the Sheffield Independent Film Company up to today.
Where you’re making short films for the Santa Monica City Council and some others. There is this idea of you wanting to give back to the community. You talked in the beginning about wanting to set up something for working-class people in Sheffield to be able to make films. Is that true? This idea of you wanting to give back to the community?
PC: Yes, thank you for that. Yes. Having spent a long time doing commercials and making a fair amount of money over the years. My feeling, along with my wife, who’s producing with me, was let’s give back, we don’t have to work to keep the house. We can volunteer to do these films wherever we’re needed. So, we would reach out to people, that’s a part of me and it is something that I had ignored for a long time.
As a director, you also have to be very selfish to keep a career going. There’s a lot of stress management involved as well. It was important, I felt, that we took the time to make some films that had a real purpose. That would help people.
RS: Not to put words in your mouth, but films with a message, right? A message that you’re trying to tell people. It’s very much that documentary mentality in a way: bring a story to people’s attention that perhaps they’re not familiar with.
PC: We’re very proud of the little pieces of work we did.
“There was a charity set up by the Bloomberg Foundation. He felt that cities and city mayors were the only political people changing society in America. The idea was to encourage these cities to bid for a grant. So, we did this little film and they ended up getting this substantial grant to start doing the research.”
RS: The films you made for Santa Monica and the Yo San University, what were they about, elaborate on some of those films you’ve made.
PC: At the time, Santa Monica, they were attempting to be quite left-leaning, and it reminded me very much of the Sheffield Council when I was there, who were also good at lateral thinking and solving issues. With the Santa Monica City Council, my wife was acquainted with a woman working for the council, who pioneered this idea of well-being, which became quite a global movement for a long time. The idea was that you could measure people’s well-being, not happiness, but their well-being where you have your health, your pride, your job opportunity, and your fresh air.
Your good food, all of that, a sense of community, all of that mixed up and, enmeshed into almost a puzzle, almost like a difficult puzzle to see how all these different things influence people. I wanted to do a study to see how you could interpret this mess of non-data.
Just how could you find out how to analyze all this? and then create a city that supported solutions for it. So, the first thing we did was we did a little film. We did it for free. The budget was just for editing really because I can’t edit at all. So, we needed money for an editor.
But there was a charity set up by the Bloomberg Foundation. He wanted to create a symposium in America. He felt that cities and city mayors were the only political people changing society in America. So, the idea was to encourage these cities to bid for a grant. He was interested in well-being too.
So, we did this little film and it worked out well and they ended up getting this substantial grant to start doing the research. Then they came back to us to make a film about how it was going along.
RS: There’s a loop there between when you left Sheffield Polytechnic and today.
“I remember hearing somewhere, the very first single that had a drum machine on it and it was ‘Electricity by OMD, and I remember buying that and thinking, ‘Wow, this is really interesting.’”
RS: I wanted to go back to one more thing you touched on, this notion of being drawn to the unconventional. There seems to be this desire in you to push the boundaries. Is that true?
PC: Yes, I think so, and film happened to be where I just felt I was adept at doing it. I couldn’t have written a play or a novel about it. On a political level, I was always pretty much a lefty and hated people who just became conventional, whether you’re looking at a conservative MP in England or a TV show or a local policeman or a bunch of skinheads who are having fun shoving an old woman off the pavement.
They’re following some rules and making their lives easy in a way for themselves. I never wanted to be that. That feeling, I think, became squeezed into a filmmaking career.
RS: Were you a rebel as a young kid?
PC: No, not at all. No, totally boring. I had a very quiet upbringing.
RS: You’re a quiet troublemaker, maybe?
PC: Very much an unconventional troublemaker. Very much.
RS: That’s beautiful. I love that. I love that picture. Even then in that statement, you said, “You didn’t want to follow the convention of people who were trying to be unconventional.”
PC: Yes, that was part of it too. I remember hearing somewhere, the very first single that had a drum machine on it and it was “Electricity” by OMD, and I remember buying that and thinking, “Wow, this is really interesting.” I also was hanging out with the Human League at that point and I said to them, “Hey, you gotta come over to my flat and listen to this record. It’s a bit like what you guys are doing, but it’s a record.”
Can you imagine? There’s the three of them in my little two-room flat listening to an OMD single, nodding sagely.
RS: I wish there was a camera on the wall to capture that.
PC: Oh my god, that would have been so good.
RS: That’s such a poetic image. I love it. So brilliant.
Peter, we’ve been chatting for a while, and I could talk to you for a long time. It’s fascinating hearing you talk about all this stuff. It’s insightful and I appreciate you taking the time.
PC: It’s been great. We’ve covered a lot of things I haven’t thought about for a long time, and that’s been a joy.
RS: Peter, thank you. Your perspective is inspiring. I appreciate you chatting.
PC: All right, Richard. It’s been a real pleasure and I hope that was plain to see and speak to you soon . . . take care.