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Making movies in a creative fury

'Tristram Shandy' director Michael Winterbottom is almost peerless in his productivity and versatility.

Michael Winterbottom works fast, cheap, madly. Directing one or two films annually, he has racked up 14 theatrical features in 11 years. An itchy appetite for the uncharted has made Winterbottom almost peerless in his versatility, invoking comparisons to protean directors Howard Hawks, Robert Altman, Richard Linklater and Ang Lee.

Watch him genre jump. There's the literary period piece "Jude," the war-journalist thriller "Welcome to Sarajevo," working-class family drama "Wonderland," rock 'n' roll mockumentary "24 Hour Party People," Middle Eastern road story "In This World," elliptical sci-fi romance "Code 46" and, this year, timely political statement "The Road to Guantánamo," which critics lauded at film festivals just as his 2005 meta-comedy "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" landed in American theaters to terrific reviews. (It opens today in Austin.)

Revolution Films/Picturehouse (enlarge photo) Steve Coogan in 'Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.' Reviews of 'Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story'

Winterbottom, a Briton who turns 45 on Wednesday, speaks the way he works: lickety-split. Words tumble forth in a discursive tangle, like commuters jostling out of trains in rush-hour Tokyo. He begins then promptly aborts thoughts, hopscotching his mind for solid ideas that won't crumble when he lands. In a way, his style reflects the shambling structure of "Tristram Shandy," a pretend documentary about a movie crew struggling to film the famously unfilmable "Tristram Shandy," Laurence Sterne's nine-volume, 18th-century novel.

"One of the jokes of the book is that it's endlessly digressing away from its subject," Winterbottom says from his Revolution Films office in London. "The book is so much about writing. Tristram's constantly complaining about the problems of writing his life story because it all escapes him. You couldn't really engage the text of the book without actually having the equivalent of the problem of writing, so the obvious thing was to have the problem of filming."

"Tristram Shandy" is Winterbottom's hilarious foray into the backstage/movie-set comedy. Consider it another genre conquered.

Up next for the director: a ghost story.

You're easily one of the most interesting filmmakers working in world cinema. In your prolificacy and versatility, I'd place you in the ranks of Takeshi Miike, Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, Werner Herzog and Wong Kar-Wai.

Sounds good to me. That's very good company.

And just as I would ask those directors, I ask you: Do you ever slow down? You're like this filmmaking machine, averaging one and a half to two films a year.

Traditionally, whether you were working in the Hollywood system, independently or in Europe, people used to make a lot of films. That was normal. In the last 20 or so years, it's become less and less. Maybe that makes sense for people working on huge, complex CGI films, but the sort of films I make are relatively simple. It's more fun to go make a film than hang around the office waiting for everyone. A lot of filmmakers spend time waiting for financing or for projects to happen, which is not a very fruitful time of it. The time you get the most ideas for what you do next is while you're working on something. It's dealing with the practical issues of how to make one particular film that gives you a sense of what to do next.

I understand you were inspired by the frenzied productivity of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who made something like 40 films in 15 years.

Yeah. There was a film society in my town and it would do a season of new German cinema, with works of Herzog and Fassbinder and Wim Wenders — people who were frequently and inexpensively making films. You felt watching them that they were kind of simple and at the same time quite exotic because they came from this different culture. Like Fassbinder, I work with the same group of small people. The first thing I ever made was a documentary for TV on Ingmar Bergman, and he was able to work with the same crew, same actors. By keeping things very simple, he was able to make 50 films, as well as do loads of theater work. So that would be more of a conscious model, being in the position where you made whatever interested you that year.

Do you consciously tackle unexplored genres?

Not really. There's usually a connection with something you love, but at the same time you don't want to feel like you're doing the same thing all over again. I just did a film about three British guys in Guantánamo. The first part of it is a sort of road movie, from Britain to Pakistan to Afghanistan. So while filming it, it was very much like filming "In This World," which is a road movie in the reverse direction, with Afghan refugees from Pakistan trying to get to England. Although I enjoyed it in lots of ways, parts of it were like, "Haven't I done this before?" It's always an attraction to do something different, but it's not, "Oh, I've done that before; let's move on."

Many of your films deal with hot social and political issues. Do you choose your topics based on the issues or more for the cinematic possibilities?

Both. "In This World," for instance, is about immigrants trying to come to Europe and why Europe is so hostile to letting them in. But it's also a road movie and I was interested in doing a road movie after "24 Hour Party People." I think there should always be something about the kind of storytelling that's interesting as well as the general subject.

You've been offered big-budget Hollywood fare like "Good Will Hunting" and the recent "Freedomland" but turned them down. Why?

I didn't get "Good Will Hunting." (Laughs) I think you have to get the script. Most of the stuff we do is stuff we originate. I've been involved with it from the start. When someone sends you a script, no matter how good it is, you have to get it in order to be able to make it yours. With "Freedomland," I was attracted by the writer (Richard Price); we couldn't agree on the casting.

Were you disappointed by how last year's (pornographic) "9 Songs" was received by critics and audiences?

Not really. The starting point of that film was the question of why don't movies ever really deal with sex, with the kind of physical intimacy of sex. It's avoided completely. Would it be possible — and if so, would it be interesting — to just start with sex and look at the sex in detail and try and show it honestly? It was always like: Let's see what happens.