How did the idea for Another Year come about?
I have ongoing preoccupations of an emotional, social, personal — and, if you like, political — nature, which you can see in all of my films. And here we are looking again, I hope, in some way that digs a bit deeper than some of my films, at issues of family, of the relationship between work and the personal, responsibility, of isolation, of disappointment, of parents and children. So to talk about where the idea came from is not really appropriate. I felt I wanted to make a film that started from where we — that is to say, we who are in our late sixties — are.
You’ve said that you have reached a point in your career where you want to “paint on a bigger canvas”.
Yes. If epic can be measured in terms of the emotional experience of the audience, then I hope this is an epic film, just as Naked is an epic film and, I would suggest, Vera Drake is an epic. In other words, my intention is to break through the apparent constraints of domestic life on to an epic or operatic scale emotionally. I think that’s important.
Do you think that the “baby boomer” generation squandered the proceeds of economic growth from which it benefited?
That is a deeply suspect position. I’m slightly older than the baby boomers because I was born during the war. But the world they and I grew up in was one in which what had been fought for and won was a national health service, a very good state education system, on the whole free university education for people, and so on.
Of course, the sins that are implicit in what I’ve just listed – the abandoning of fundamental ideology – cannot be laid at the feet just of the coalition government. We go back to Thatcher, we go back to the fact that we had well over a decade of so-called socialist government that did nothing to correct any of the things I’ve just been talking about. So to bash the baby boomers just because they had it so good is obscene, because it can only be some kind of massive excuse for inequality.
Class seems to be back on the political agenda. What do you make of the way it is portrayed on screen in Britain today?
I don’t know the answer to that. You absolutely cannot make a film about England or Britain that is not rooted in class — in a way, you can’t tell stories about anybody anywhere, because in the end class is an endemic part of the social human condition. But, despite everything, I have never consciously gone around thinking about class, as such.
I grew up in a very working-class part of Salford where my old man was a doctor. We lived over the surgery and I went to the local school. I therefore have a very, very clear sense of working class and middle class. But because that’s my world and background, I take all this for granted.
The reason I can’t get to the serious answer to your question is that there are very few British films that I think depict life accurately anyway, and I take it for granted that class is part of what’s real.
Critics of your films say that they present caricatures of working-class life.
I take all this with a pinch of salt. If people start reacting to Another Year in that way, quite honestly they’re so missing the wood for the trees that it’s not really worth thinking about it. Life is complex. People are complex. That’s what I do and what I’ve always done.
We normally ask this question at the end of the NS Interview, but it seems appropriate to ask it here, too: are we all doomed?
Well, let’s put it like this: I find it very uncomfortable to think about the world in which my grandchildren and certainly my great-grandchildren will find themselves living.
You can read Ryan Gilbey’s NS review of “Another Year” here
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