Tim Pope

Director Tim Pope first made his name with music videos, working with, among others, The Cure, David Bowie, Neil Young and Soft Cell.

I have lived in Brighton on the south coast of England since July 14, 2006. We are lucky enough to own an entire Regency house made up of five floors and we love it. Our upstairs living room has windows that are ten feet tall and it leads on to a small balcony. That room is where I work during the day. A crystal chandelier hangs at one end, above a French wooden table.

Our area of Brighton is a bit like Notting Hill 15 years ago, before it got poncified. It is quite something to come out of your own front door each day and get a fantastic view of the ocean. Living beside it, you get to realise that it looks entirely different every day. All this and we are only a 49-minute train ride from London’s Victoria Station.

I recently married my partner of 10 years, Victoria. Our kids, Jazz, eight, and Isabella, who is nearly a year old, were able to walk back down the aisle with us when we were finished. The Wedding March was played on an accordion.

A fellow actress friend of Victoria’s sang at the ceremony and we chose Syd Barrett’s Terrapin, one of the most beautiful songs about love. It contains the line: “Well, oh baby, my hair’s on end about you.”

We worked night and day, in fact until eight o’clock of the night before, to get the house ready for the big day. The last thing we did was to hang up pictures and photographs. My proudest photographs (apart from some signed Mick Rock/ Syd Barrett originals that I bought in New York) are some shots I took of my Isabella with Iggy Pop after a recent Royal Festival Hall appearance. Iggy and Izzy now stare austerely down at you as you are on the bog, hanging beside my gold disc from The Cure. The “smile like a reptile” man genuinely looks terrified to be holding one so beautiful, so lovely.

I just got back from an intensive week doing something called the Hoffman Process, where we beat pillows with whiffle sticks for two days, visualising the traits that our parents passed on to us and working through each one – literally beating it out of ourselves. I think I am a good dad and I love my children more than anything on this planet. I suspect my parents were the same, but perhaps they did not have the vocabulary to show or express this, especially dad.

I am no longer an angry person; my change is complete and perfect. The Hoffman Process has put paid to all these anger issues, and I am a man reborn. True. My eyes are clear and my heart no longer protected by a wad of black-looking, spiky material that seemed to be made of that material they protect frying pans with. Teflon. Damn it, do I need to spell it out? I AM NO LONGER ANGRY.

My first memory is of being in a carrycot, between my parents, covered in a blanket. I can still feel the rhythm of their walk, see the breath coming out of their mouths and the stars overhead twinkling brightly. In my mind’s eye this is a real and visceral event.

My dream as a child was always, always, always to make films. This was just a given; it was clearly what I was going to do. In fact, I used to boast that I was able to experience my dreams with specks of dirt on them, just like my Standard-8 home movies. I saved up for my first roll of Kodak film from Boots in Enfield by singing in the choir. I used it to photograph my sister, Amanda, riding clockwise around a paddock. Her obsession was horses; mine was cameras.

I have been lucky compared to my sister, who has suffered from schizophrenia since puberty – that’s when these things can often rear their head. I have a great relationship with Victoria, great kids, a lovely house and wonderful career. Amanda has had none of this. Yet she is so damned strong and I respect her incredibly for the steps she has taken in her life. I spoke with David Bowie once about this very subject; his brother Terry, who was a schizophrenic, chucked himself in front of a train. Bowie reckoned that we all have a little bit of the schizophrenic in us, especially when we are creative, and I don’t think he’s wrong.

At school, I decided I could attract girls by writing poetry. I wrote a kind of nonsense choral poem called The Double Crossing of Two Face Fred that I still tell to my kids at bedtimes. When we first performed it, I roped together 60 people and orchestrated it like I was some mad musical conductor. My favourite part was a farting noise (written down as “thrrrrrrp”) that very effectively panned across the entire stereo sweep of my performers and back again at the small gesture of my right hand’s finger. Jazz often says, “Oh no, not that one again, Daddy.” Isabella’s too young to know better. I recorded this poem as a B-side when I made I Want to be a Tree with the popular beat combo known as The Cure, which you can see on YouTube and which certainly pre-dated any building society advertising campaign [the idea was copied in ads for the Prudential].

When I left film college, I could not for the life of me get a job in film or TV. Perhaps my parents were not part of the Old Boy Network, or maybe it was because I didn’t have a doublebarrelled name like Tim Pope-Smith. I begged everyone to let me sweep their floors but had to work in a bank while I did this. I hated working there – mainly because my dad had been a banker, but also because I wore a cheap suit made in material that felt like a Brillo pad. Every time I crossed my legs on the train into London it scoured my knees.

Eventually, it turned out that my dad knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone at HyVision, which trained politicians and big businessmen for their TV appearances. I soon ruthlessly manoeuvred myself behind the cameras and even went with my boss, Stanley Hyland (an ex-head of BBC current affairs), to Number 10 Downing Street. Stanley had grown up with the then Home Secretary, Denis Healey, and we trained him to go on Panorama to put over the Labour manifesto the year that Mrs Thatcher got into power. So basically you have me, in some small part, to thank for her 12 years of political power and union-crushing stranglehold over Blighty. Sorry.

I did not realise at the time that I would also be making many TV appearances myself, probably more than most of the people we were training. Stanley always said it was “about the eyes”, and to a degree I think he was right. Look at Mrs T, who had the maddest, Klaus-Kinski-in-Nosferatu eyes. Anyway, whenever I appeared on programmes like Saturday Morning Superstore or Jukebox Jury, I allowed my eyes to swivel in their sockets. I would therefore like to beg your forgiveness if you witnessed one of these performances and it made you choke on your breakfast cereal.

The first advertisement that made an impression on me was for Consulate menthol cigarettes. It was saturated in dark green colours and depicted glamorous people who were sitting about a lush waterfall, clearly enjoying one another’s company in what I now know to be that boy-girl way. You could almost smell the delicious menthol. I think it started early cravings in me, but not for cigarettes. Years later, I obtained a 35mm print of this very commercial and, penetrating the red bobbin with my finger, I used to hold it up to the light to see the colours, which had not faded with age. They were just as fresh and lush, and I can still see the fawn rhythmic pips and peaks of the optical soundtrack on the film’s edge.

Despite the fact that I am a passionate non-smoker, if you show me a disease-blackened lung and facts and figures about smoking I will not believe you. Cigarettes will always be about sitting around in healthy places, hanging out with cool, aspirational people. What more proof could one need of the insidious power of advertising?

Where do I stand politically? When I was younger, I used to say that I was not interested in the cogs that made government work. How naïve... I no longer think like this. As Hughie Green said in his famous song: “Stand up and be counted! Take up a mighty stance!” Complacency, as we know from history, is the mother of many a bad event.

By the way, one of the techniques for TV is never to answer the question.

My film The Crow II: City of Angels came about because I was in Hollywood when they were looking for a director, and one of the producers of the movie fancied my assistant. They went on to get married and have beautiful American/Italian/Anglo kids who are chips off the old blocks. Something good came out of the experience, at least.

It may also have been that I was vastly talented, was in the right place at the right time, and had made a very successful 31-minute short film, Phone, that had “heat” on it after winning a few awards. The Crow II was cited as being within the top 1,000 money-makers of all time, and may still be for all I know. But it did feel awful that they basically re-edited the film to the point where I did not recognise it. Bob Weinstein, one of the legendary film-mogul brothers, phoned me after I was back home to say, did I want to see the director’s cut?!

My connection with music is pretty simple:
passion.

For a few years I gave up doing music videos. I felt that I had “done my bit” there and instead developed a passable career doing commercials. But in 2005, I was hauled onto the stage at the CADS [Music Week Creative & Design Awards] and given a lifetime award. Although I was chuffed, it felt like they were giving me the equivalent of a carriage clock. I was thinking, “I am not ready to die yet!”. Four weeks later I made the almost-favourite video of my career for Fatboy Slim – Slash Dot Dash.

My favourite video I worked on is Neil Young’s Wonderin’. Talking to him recently, he fondly remembered the time I tied him to an oak tree on his ranch in San Francisco, then got him to wear a boxing glove. He repeatedly hit himself in the face along with the anvil-like sound in the song. He said he saw stars literally and blacked out for five minutes, but remained vertical because of the rope that bound him to the tree.

One of my favourite early videos would be Satisfaction by Devo. Second would be The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields: a bunch of herberts with long hair running about in a muddy field – my kind of video. Third would be David Mallet’s Ashes to Ashes for David Bowie. I used to hang about in pubs with the first video jukeboxes, telling folks that this was what I was going to do. Seeing this video created a lovely tight feeling in my chest that I still get when I am deeply involved in any project.

I refuse point blank to work below a certain budget and I always insist on interaction with the artist. Take it or leave it. A lot of people do – leave it, that is – though taking this stand means that I get to work with decent people of some intellectual capacity, which gives me enough bloody hope to keep going.

These days, videos are very often just done to a formula. So-called glam squads should be turned into shooting squads. They could line up pouting artists against walls and have away with them all.

If I talk about “editing inside my head”, I mean that I have to be able to perceive a film inside my head. It’s not that I can’t be flexible enough to react to events as they occur, but beforehand I do like to be able to visualise the whole film. These images literally play on the backs on my eyelids – be it a wardrobe falling off a cliff, a spider crawling up someone’s leg, or Steven Berkoff pulling off his face in a BBC trailer.

I want more than anything to make good commercials again, but I do not control the scripts like the vids that I write and create, so it’s obviously harder. There are plenty of commercials I have made which I can no longer put on reels, as they tend to biodegrade faster than videos. I think all I can say on this one is… I have yet to make my favourite commercial, and please, if you’re out there, call Crossroads Films and give the codger a chance, as I am a lot of fun to work with, very attractive, as creative as Michelangelo, smell nice and, after a cup of coffee, move like the clappers.

Many people have told me that they started in this business because of my work. I also get it from shop assistants or bank tellers who were probably Goths in previous lives. It sounds like I am bragging, but it is honestly true. I was just doing something I really loved; it never occurred to me that anyone would even see the damned things. In those days, I would finish one job, then literally move onto the next, and then the next, so there was no time even to think. I once shot 13 videos in three weeks. It’s lovely that I seem to have inspired so many people.

Do I worry about getting too old to make good music videos?
Fuck off and die!

By comparison with so much that you hear about on the news, very few bad things have happened to me. Have I ever had my house blown down by a monsoon, have I ever been forced to live on the streets, have I been raped or molested or been left to starve? No.

Children need many things; honesty, love, trust, consistency, bedtime reading, tickling sessions, jokes, long boring car journeys, grandmas and grandpas, a clear definition of “yes” and “no”, a place to make a mess, dreams, hopes, aspirations, and McDonald’s but once a year. Jazz said the other day, “Dad, when I go to McDonald’s next year…” and my heart skipped a beat and I nearly wept on the bus. Although in an earlier guise I did make a McDonald’s commercial or two.

I am coming close to making another movie very soon, about voyeurism. So many great films have been made on that subject – Rear Window and Peeping Tom, for example. My movie follows the adventures of a young fellow, Henry, who encounters Daria, whom he believes to be his spiritual soul mate. Except that she wants to go into the heart of the matter far deeper than he is prepared to. Charles Steele, who did The Last King of Scotland, is producing for me and it is being written by Jay Basu, whose original novel the story is based on.

Would I describe myself as a voyeur?
Is the Pope a Catholic?

The music I would like to have played at my funeral is, without a doubt, Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium, written for 40 voices split into eight choirs of five. The first 20 voices all enter with exactly the same phrase, making what is known as imitative entries, before the next 20 voices enter with new material. All the parts come together finally in harmony. It produces a magical effect and is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed.

I am less afraid of dying as I get older, funnily enough. It pisses me off that people might say, “he’s the one that did the wardrobe video”, but hey, what can a fellow do?

If I could relive my life I would…
be Iggy Pop’s penis.

In the end, what really matters is…
love.