1 of 10 Under 50: Michael Winterbottom

1961: Born in Lancashire, England.
1996: Jude.
1997: Welcome to Sarajevo.
1999: Wonderland.
2000: The Claim.
2002: 24 Hour Party People.
2002: In This World.
2003: Code 46.
2004: 9 Songs.
2005: A Cock and Bull Story. (forthcoming)

More than any single project, the amazing thing about Michael Winterbottom is his prolific process, throwing himself fearlessly into situations of risk and creating feature films that take a quasi-documentary approach to reality, whether past or present, at home or abroad, in the warzone or in the bedroom.

Though critically esteemed, Winterbottom’s films can be hard to catch up with. There are several early films (and work for the BBC after graduating from Oxford) which I didn’t list because I haven’t seen, and I’ve only read about the last three. His work is so disparate that it took a while for me to realize that he was the connecting link to a number of diverse but surprisingly good films.

For Jude, the attraction was Thomas Hardy’s novel and Kate Winslet as Sue, but if you go in expecting a Masterpiece Theater adaptation, you are in for a surprise. There is no romantic haze over the dire doings of Hardy’s world, no flinching from his grim fatalism.

Welcome to Sarajevo is another open-eyed look at very bad things happening, this time the war in Bosnia, seen through the eyes of a group of English-speaking journalists. Based on a memoir, the film mixes in news footage and you-are-there re-creations to make reality present and pressing.

Wonderland comes back to contemporary London, and brings a sense of lived reality to its intertwined stories of three sisters and their romantic travails. If the scene called for a sister to be working in a Soho restaurant on a Saturday night, it was shot in a Soho restaurant on a Saturday night, with genuine customers as extras.

The Claim returns to Hardy in its transposition of The Mayor of Casterbridge to an authentic Gold Rush West, and deserves praise for holding its own in comparison to its obvious model, Robert Altman’s classic McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

But 24 Hour Party People is something completely different. If like me, you’ve never heard Joy Division or heard of the Manchester rave scene in the 80s, do not be put off. This is an extremely smart and funny film, a fractured fairy tale of real life, with Steve Coogan brilliant in the lead role (watch with subtitles, however.)

In This World literally follows two Afghan refugees trying to make their way to England. Winterbottom did not even understand the language of his nonprofessional actors, but just caught their simulated plight on the fly, through Iran to Turkey and into a container ship, on a tightrope walk between reality and representation.

In Code 46, Winterbottom goes to sci-fi Singapore with Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. His 9 Songs achieved notoriety, if little distribution, for being the first non-porn film in which the actors are not just simulating sex, though I suspect his impulse was more documentary than pornographic. I eagerly anticipate the release of his new film with Steve Coogan, as Tristram Shandy in A Cock and Bull Story, an adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century eccentric classic novel.

Wherever Winterbottom’s career may take him, you can confidently predict that his work will be radical (not for nothing is his production company called Revolution Films) -- far-reaching and profoundly unsettling in its embrace of complicated realities.