Grant Gee Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Looks like the Weinsteins are big Joy Division fans. First they picked up Control, a biopic about the band's lead singer, at Cannes in May. And now The Weinstein Company has acquired the documentary on the band, simply called Joy Division, after its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The Hollywood Reporter says the movie's price was "in the low- to mid-six figures" -- typical for a documentary, a genre that usually doesn't make more than a few hundred thousand dollars at the box office or on DVD. The Weinsteins added it to their Toronto shopping cart, which already included Boy A, Diary of the Dead, and the Spanish thriller King of the Hill. (Our report on the Boy A deal is here; on Diary, here.)

Cinematical's James Rocchi saw Control at Cannes and proclaimed it very good. He saw Joy Division at Toronto and lo, he declared it also very good. (Specifically: "A dense, rich and exciting look at a band who helped make modern pop music become truly modern.") The Rocc interviewed the doc's director, Grant Gee, too. James is now our resident expert on all things Joy Division and the movies pertaining to them.

The press notes for Joy Division offer that director Grant Gee "Essentially is a geography teacher and owns two corduroy jackets ..."; he's also a film maker whose music-based projects like Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy and Demon Days Live have both been Grammy-nominated. His latest film looks at the music and influence of the Manchester band Joy Division; speaking with Cinematical in Toronto, he shared his thoughts on process, on the state of the modern film industry, and the challenges and pleasures of making and releasing a documentary roughly in parallel with a fiction film on the same band. To download the interview, click here.

It's been one of the more pleasant coincidences of the Toronto International Film Festival this year that there's not one, but two separate films focusing on the times and musical legacy of Manchester's Joy Division. Anton Corbijn's Control is a bio-pic about the band's late singer, Ian Curtis; I had the chance to see it in May at Cannes. The other film -- simply titled Joy Division -- is a documentary take on the band's genesis and influence, their victories and struggles. Directed by Grant Gee (Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy,) Joy Division may not be as immediately striking as Corbjin's film -- with its stark-yet-warm black-and-white photography and Sam Riley's performance as Curtis -- but it's just as compelling.

Formed in the industrial city of Manchester, Joy Division marked a unique turning point in popular music: Where punk turned to post-punk, where anger was replaced by angst. Formed by Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Ian Curtis, Joy Division released only two full-length albums before Curtis's suicide; at the same time, tragedy isn't the only thing that made Joy Division's short discography a legend.

Indeed, Gee's demonstration of that legend is a great demonstration of his technique here -- forming a collage of ephemera and seemingly-random information that forms an easy-to-read big picture. To illustrate just how many bands have covered Joy Division's seminal single 'Love Will Tear Us Apart," we're shown ... an iTunes search screen. And while you'd think that simple blunt instrument of a visual may seem inelegant or crude, it instead works perfectly -- not only proving Joy Division's place in the hearts of their admirers but also in an instant reminding us how completely the music business has changed since the days of hand-crafted 7-inch single sleeves and cut-and-paste artwork -- which, thanks to Gee's fractured-yet-focused technique, we also see.