The movie Michael Winterbottom couldn’t bear to finish: “I walked out of that big time”
Some people couldn’t comprehend the notion of walking out of a movie before it’s even finished, but Michael Winterbottom showed that he wasn’t one of them when he admitted to storming away from an awards-laden favourite.
With over two dozen features to his name and a penchant for hopping between genres dependent entirely on what’s currently taking his fancy, it does admittedly make a lot of sense the filmmaker wouldn’t bother hanging around until the credits start rolling on a feature that failed to capture his imagination.
From the improv-heavy comedies of 24 Hour Party People and The Trip series with Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan to the minimalistic sci-fi of Code 46, the harrowing Welcome to Sarajevo, the psychological thrills of The Face of an Angel and his documentary work that includes The Road to Guantanamo and The Emperor’s New Clothes, he’s always been a deliberately difficult filmmaker to pin down.
He’s made several period pieces throughout his career, but evidently, a line has to be drawn somewhere. For Winterbottom, that breaking point was reached in an opulent romantic war epic that comfortably sailed past $200million at the box office and became a fixture of the awards season race.
Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of The English Patient won nine Academy Awards from 12 nominations, including ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Supporting Actress’ as part of a bulging trophy cabinet that also found room for six Baftas, a pair of Golden Globes, and a Grammy.
The love affair between Ralph Fiennes Laszlo de Almasy and Juliette Binocche’s Hana in an Italian monastery during the tail-end of World War II captivated audiences all over the globe, but not Winterbottom. In fact, he’d had enough when the last moments of The English Patient‘s 162-minute running time were only a distant speck on the horizon.
When quizzed by the BBC on the last film he’d walked out of, Winterbottom named Minghella’s Oscar-hoovering picture as a prime offender. “The last movie I walked out of? Probably The English Patient,” he admitted. “I’ve walked out of lots since, but that’s the last one I can remember. I walked out of that big time.”
The fact he didn’t just walk out, but “walked out of that big time” paints a fairly vivid picture of how little Winterbottom cared for The English Patient, even if it’s been written into the history books that paying customers and awards bodies were of the completely opposite mindset.
Not that everyone is obligated to fall head over heels for precision-engineered awards bait, with the three hours it would have taken the filmmaker to grin and bear it a sacrifice he wasn’t willing to make when the much easier and infinitely more palatable option of getting up and fucking off was right there on the table.
