In an interview on Film Directing

Your first book is Sex & Drugs & Rock’n’Roll: The Life of Ian Dury by Richard Balls. You have recently directed a very successful film by the same name. How much did the book inspire you to achieve that?

When I came on board the first thing I did was read Richard Balls’s biography, and Paul Viragh, the writer, had written out a list of ideas of where the film might go. We kept it all open for a while, because of course with anyone there are a million different films you could make. And that was particularly true for Ian Dury. He seemed to be a thousand different people all trapped in the same body.

There is a new biography on Ian by Will Birch that came out last month, but when I started the film the only thing that was available was Richard’s book, which luckily is very good. It’s 500 pages and it goes into lots of details, which was difficult for me as a film-maker because we were trying to make a 110-minute film. So we decided to cherry pick moments from the biography.

What moment stood out for you when you read the book?

Well, I wanted to re-create Ian warts and all. And one thing that struck me in the book is when Richard wrote about how someone came into a room where Ian was sitting and told him that his schoolteacher, at the disabled school where he was brought up, had killed himself. And Ian told everyone in the room, ‘That’s made my day, that has.’ For me, that is such a shocking thing to say about anyone, but it said so much about him.

I thought this is the type of thing we should be including in the film and, although we were in two minds about it, we spoke to people who had been there and they said, ‘Yes, that’s absolutely true, it did happen.’ But, the problem is, when you talk to the people funding the film and say you are going to make a film about someone who can say such things, they get windy.

I just thought that the episode revealed his vulnerability. And the fact he had been abused as a kid was important to leave in. Some of the critics have said I went too far, but the whole point is he was incredibly complex, generous and charismatic, but also very cruel and that is what reading the biography taught me.

So, for people who have seen your film, is it worth reading the book?

Absolutely. We always said our film is a surreal take on his life. It is almost as if he is an MC telling his own story. What I told everyone is that the film is a starting point: from that it is great to go and rediscover his life through the two biographies about him and his music.