Curtis but also to a host of people and places that are no longer around. “Control” and “Joy Division” are both necessarily elegies, not merely to Mr. “We practiced for hours, between rehearsals and late into the night,” Mr. Curtis’s hectoring baritone, but the other actors were essentially learning to play their instruments (not unlike Joy Division in the early days). Riley, who had briefly been the singer in a band called 10000 Things, could manage a credible copy of Mr. To make things trickier, the actors in the band were also performing - not simply miming - Joy Division originals. “It was big pressure going out there and having 150 extras discussing my merits and my failures,” he said.
To populate the concert scenes in “Control,” the filmmakers rounded up Joy Division fans, which did not exactly calm Mr. He and Alexandra Maria Lara, who plays Annik, are now a couple.) (Filming the scenes between Ian and Annik were easier because “I was falling in love in real life,” he said. He had to enact the grand mal seizures that plagued him as well as the manic, uncoordinated flailings that were his signature dance moves. Riley, whose magnetic performance is the film’s scarred heart, playing Ian Curtis was a draining feat of psychological immersion and physical mimicry. Corbijn chose Sam Riley, 27, who had previously appeared in a few bit parts but was folding shirts in a warehouse when he landed the role. Samantha Morton signed on to play Deborah. The real thing: Joy Division in Manchester in 1979 from left, Bernard Sumner, Ian Curtis and Peter Hook. Corbijn added, corresponds with his memories of ’70s England. The covers for “Unknown Pleasures” and “Closer,” the group’s two studio albums, use black and white imagery. “That felt like the proper approach,” Mr. Like that image - and many others of Joy Division - “Control” is in black and white. Within two weeks of relocating there, he had tracked the band down for a shoot and taken what is perhaps the most defining photograph of Joy Division: the members walking into a tube station’s neon-lighted tunnel, Mr. Corbijn, 52, was drawn to London in his early 20s by the flourishing music scene and, in particular, Joy Division. Speaking at the festival in Toronto, he said he had initially turned the project down but changed his mind, figuring that an “emotional connection to the material” would serve him well on his first feature. But before “Control” he had no feature film experience. Corbijn’s hefty résumé includes four coffee-table volumes (mostly of celebrities and rock stars) and dozens of music videos for the likes of Depeche Mode and U2.
No release date has been set for the documentary.) (“Control” opens Wednesday at Film Forum in Manhattan. The Weinstein Company is releasing the two films, having acquired “Control” at the Cannes Film Festival in May and “Joy Division” at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. Intentionally or not, both return a mythic figure to life-size proportions. The two projects, which evolved separately, are complementary but also work in similar ways. The music’s coiled, haunted sound and nihilist lyrics, the documentary argues, are inseparable from the decaying postindustrial dystopia that was Manchester at the time. Curtis and his band, but also of the social and existential conditions that produced them. By contrast, what emerges in “Joy Division” is a picture not just of Mr. Curtis’s personal pain: his struggles with epilepsy, overmedication and a guilt-inducing love triangle. Curtis’s book, the other members of Joy Division, which formed in Manchester in 1976, recede into a blur. Curtis’s surviving bandmates, who went on to form New Order. “Joy Division,” directed by the music-video veteran Grant Gee and written by the author and critic Jon Savage, takes a panoramic approach, combining archival footage with revealing interviews of firsthand observers and Mr. Curtis’s widow, Deborah, of their life together. “Control,” the feature directing debut of the portrait photographer Anton Corbijn, is loosely based on “Touching From a Distance,” a 1995 memoir by Mr.
The Joy Division story, a sacred narrative to legions of cultish fans (and a natural for the movies, complete with doomed, charismatic hero), is now the subject of two new films, the biopic “Control” and the documentary “Joy Division.”īoth were made with the cooperation of those who best knew Mr. Curtis hanged himself on May 18, 1980, two months shy of his 24th birthday and on the eve of what would have been his band’s first American tour. IAN CURTIS, the frontman of the beloved post-punk British band Joy Division, has been dead 27 years, longer than he was alive, but his moment in the film spotlight has only now arrived.