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Interview with Jerry Rothwell

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by Jamie Heatly
Jerry Rothwell, director of the trilling Deep Water (2006), has most recently turned his attention to Heavy Load, a chaotic British punk band half-comprised of members with learning disabilities. Heavy Load: The Movie, out on general release from 3rd October, documents two years in the life of a truly unique band, with a truly unique sound. As hilarious as it is touching, this film candidly investigates the psychological and emotional issues associated with disability with a rare and effective subtlety: never gloomily dwelling on social issues or on the conditions afflicting three of the band members.

By approaching Heavy Load with a restrained sentimentality and frank honesty, Rothwell has allowed the subjects to become fully rounded, entertaining characters in their own right. Interested first and foremost in the music, the film reveals a punk band subject to the same turbulent mix of ego, fantasy and desire that fuels any emerging band, and middle-aged men subject to the same anxieties and concerns as the director himself.
DFG: How did the idea for the film come about?
Jerry: I first encountered Heavy Load in a badly photocopied Mencap newsletter in my doctor’s surgery, and there was a black and white photo of this band with learning disabilities, and they did a version of ‘I Fought the Law’, and I just thought – well that’s a great combination. So. I made contact with them, went to a couple of rehearsals. And then spent a few years, really, trying to get funding for the film – and then finally we were funded by an independent film channel in the States, out of a pitch at the BitDoc Festival. And since then it’s been about two years in production.

DFG: What do you consider the film to be fundamentally concerned with?
Jerry: Yeah, I mean I didn’t set out to make a film that was a social issues documentary. Obviously it’s a film that is to a certain extent about disability, but it’s also a film to a certain extent about filmmaking, and about happiness and unhappiness, and about mid-life: it’s no coincidence that all of the guys in the film, including me, are middle-aged men. We have different ways of working out the problem of being a middle-aged man, and the frustrations of it. So in some ways it’s a Rockumentary, but hopefully it takes in other areas of life.

DFG: Elsewhere you’ve stated that documentary making, for you, is a journey of joint exploration for you and the subjects. What did you learn from your time with Heavy Load?
Jerry: [Laughs] Good research. Yeah, I think the kinds of films I make are, on the whole, films in which you’re in a kind of cauldron of creativity with the people you’re making the film about. I learnt lots of things about shooting observational documentary – I’ve never shot an observational doc before – but I also learnt a lot, from the band, about how to live!

For me it was quite important to show things that were going on behind the camera as well as those in front. It would be quite easy to make a documentary that was a sort of reality doc about a band of people with learning disabilities, that became a bit like a freak-show, and I really, really wanted to avoid doing that. It felt to me that, in some ways, if you made the ‘camera-voice’ more vulnerable, or as vulnerable, as the subjects of the film you kind of created an interesting mix – so that’s why I went down the route of setting this miserable documentary director against this, apparently, very happy band, which is maybe not so happy after all.
© copyrightmorganwhite 2008 © copyrightmorganwhite 2008 DFG: So that’s why you decided to involve yourself, and your concerns, in the film from the outset?
Jerry: I think mainly for that reason. I wanted to give the film a certain mood that wasn’t the mood of a fly-on-the-wall television doc. Also, in this case, the filmmaking process was in some ways the biggest thing that was happening for the band during those two years; it felt like if you tried to make a film without including that you’d be missing 50% of the picture.

DFG: How did your perception of the nature of the film, and your preconceptions about the film, change as time wore on?
Jerry: At the start of a filmmaking process, when you don’t know the subject very well, you’re often imposing very classic story-structures on it - the, ‘will the band make it?’ sort of story-structure – and I suppose I let go of that more as the film went on. You know, there are some scenes in there that don’t particularly move the story on, I’m thinking for example of the scene where Jimmy goes for a walk, but do tell you something fundamental about what’s going on in those people’s lives.

You always start with preconceptions, which often come out of pitching the film, because when you’re pitching the film you’re trying to make it sound the most exciting. But I think in the end the secret to filmmaking is to go with the things that you are interested in, at that moment - the things which you’re drawn to. And really just go for those things, and make the assumption that if you’re drawn to them other people will be, because you’re a human being and they are.

DFG: It’s been stated elsewhere that Heavy Load are a band who’ve neither improved nor deteriorated from the time of their inception. Would you agree? How did the film impact on the nature of the band, and their music?
Jerry: Yeah, legend had it that they’d neither improved nor deteriorated in all the nine years that they’d been together. I think actually during the film they improved, they certainly started being more adventurous. They started doing their own songs during the filmmaking process, and I think that was a huge departure for them, and that’s what I think is most exciting about them now. As well as their versions of Kylie songs, it’s about these lyrics that no other band could possibly produce.

DFG: So what music is on your iPod?
Jerry: I haven’t got an iPod! Erm, I listen to a huge range of stuff really - everything from American-‘guitary’ Pixies, Sonic Youth sort of stuff, through to new folk, and quite a lot of African music - a huge range.

DFG: So you did come with a knowledge punk beforehand then?
Jerry: Yeah absolutely. I mean I was 15 in 1977 so punk, for me, was my moment. And I think, again going back to the fact that I’m the same age as all of the band members…you know, if you had a bunch of middle-aged blokes playing punk in a pub now you’d probably think it was slightly sad, but there’s something incredibly energetic about it when Heavy Load do it.

DFG: What’s your favourite Heavy Load song?
Jerry: The new album is absolutely fantastic; the fist six songs on it are just this extraordinary wall of noise and disorder. I think my favourite song, just because I really like the lyrics, is ‘Is Bruce Forsyth Dead?’, which basically runs through all of those seventies TV personalities, who you think may or may not be still alive, and asks whether they’re dead or not.
DFG: It seems like the whole film was a really emotional journey for you, but was there any aspect of the process that that you found particularly affective?
Jerry: I think there were times when I was filming Michael when I felt that the process of filming him was doing him damage, in the sense that it was undermining his sense of stability in the world, and that worried me. I think, perhaps, I needn’t have worried so much; people are more robust than you think they are. Perhaps there’s a certain kind of arrogance in imagining that you have this great effect on people.

DFG: Can you talk a little bit about how you got funding for the film?
Jerry: Yeah, we had some initial development funding from the European Social Fund, from a project around getting marginalized voices in the mainstream media. That enabled us to do some initial shooting, and to cut together a trailer that had a fair amount of variety in it and was shot to a reasonable standard. We then took that to the BritDoc festival, the first BritDoc festival, and managed to get into the pitching forum there. And out of that, IFC - independent film channel - who are a cable broadcaster in the United States, basically came in with funding. They funded the majority of the film, and we also got some funding from ITVS and a small amount from YLE in Finland, and we’re in the process of making a one-hour version for the BBC.

DFG: The fact that you have a cinema release is fairly rare for a documentary; did you always think of this film as a feature?
Jerry: Yeah, I think we always conceived of it as a film that would be of theatrical length, and might have a limited theatrical release. It’s great! It was funded as a feature doc by IFC – they did two or three feature docs a year at the time – and it was great to be given that freedom to think of the film in that way, because I think, in the end, it’s not a very televisual film. That’s why I’m not unhappy about doing a one-hour cut for the BBC, because it feels to me that actually I need to do some work to make it more something that you’d happily watch on your TV set in your living room. But it’s great to have the freedom of making a documentary that’s for a cinema audience who’ve made a commitment to the film, so you can take them through more difficult areas, I think, than you can on television.

DFG: Do you see the future of documentary as being much more cinema-based?
Jerry: I think it goes up and down. I think the changes in distribution, and in technology, are very exciting for documentary. There have been a couple of very successful documentaries, like ‘Touching the Void’ and ‘Super Size Me’, but I think it’s difficult for people to replicate that. In the end it’s very hard to get an audience to the cinema for a doc, but I think documentaries have their place in the cinema and it’s great… that we have the opportunity, with this film, to be able to give it a general cinema release.

DFG: Now that you’ve had a bit of time to think about Michael’s final question, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? What’s next for you?
Jerry: I’m always wondering whether to give up making films. I think it’s a very punishing process, the whole thing, but I’ve got three films in development so I guess I’m a documentary-making junkie. I think, make 10 feature docs before you die - that’d be good.
There are three that I’m developing at the moment. One’s around a guy who spent his twenties donating sperm, and now he’s aged fifty and his children are coming back to find him. One is around the early founders of Greenpeace, in Canada, and one about a small town in Ethiopia which is the centre for Ethiopian long-distance running; and is about children in that town and children’s long-distance running aspirations.
Heavy Load is released in the UK from Friday 3rd October. For more details, see www.heavyloadthemovie.com

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