BEST MADE PROJECTS

Happy birthday Joe Strummer.     

“The campfire was always going to be one of the central themes of the film. In the last ten years of his life, really the time I got to know him best, we had our deepest conversations around the campfire. It was a much bigger thing, once he‘d moved to Somerset, where Joe‘s house was. Up on the Quantock Hills, a rebel outpost…a place even the Romans had never managed to conquer.

“Just as in his lifetime, we had people from all walks of life sitting by the fire, listening to the music that was so much a part of him. It was a place to lose themselves in the flames; in the firelight everyone is equal, the famous people no more relevant than the not so famous people. By interviewing that way for the film we were freeing ourselves from the ‘talking heads‘ of a conventional documentary. We were getting a real sense of the friendship and the connections.

“I had to make it work because it was so important to Joe. He once said to me that he thought the campfire was a better idea than any of the music he had ever made - some nights it really did get that good. The whole thing was about people from completely different backgrounds around that fire, and I hope we have brought the essence of that to the film.

“More often than not, Joe was the last one at the fire. To whoever was left standing he‘d say: “It‘s you and me at Club Dawn…”- Julian Temple, director of The Future is Unwritten.