Years ago, the Britpop band Ash told director Michael Winterbottom that life on a tour bus was more mundane than you could imagine. That thought stuck with Winterbottom, who’d go on to explore music in 24 Hour Party People and 9 Songs, two films that skirted the line between fiction and reality. Though Steve Coogan captured Factory Records’ eccentric founder Tony Wilson well in the former, a modern classic about Manchester’s music scene, Winterbottom couldn't shake his curiosity about filming real musicians—but with a twist.
In his long-simmering exploration of rock’n’roll’s touring mundanities, On the Road, Winterbottom finds a middle ground between documentary and drama. Setting off in March 2015, Winterbottom and his crew accompanied British quartet Wolf Alice as they toured 16 cities across the UK and Ireland over the course of three weeks. Tucked within on the bus, however, are fictional subjects: label intern Estelle (played by Leah Harvey) and roadie Joe (James McArdle), whose budding tryst allows Winterbottom to explore the intimacy of the road without disturbing Wolf Alice's own rhythm.
The film is long and weighty, evoking the humdrum monotony of another identical day in a different venue. Peppered with unintentional humor and grotty living circumstances, On the Road veers away from the cliché rhetoric of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll to provide insight into working musicianship. “They could have prised in more, but they were really casual,” Wolf Alice’s Joel Amey says of shooting. “It never bothered me. But I found it nerve-wracking watching it back, seeing how much of a loser I am.” Which viewers can soon do: On the Road screens this week at SXSW and opens beyond film festivals later this year (September in the UK, TBD in the states).
Pitchfork: Had you always wanted to go on the road with a band? Is this the first time you did it?
Michael Winterbottom: It was definitely the first time I'd spent any amount of time on a tour bus. Was it always a fantasy of mine? No. Not really. When we were making 24 Hour Party People, we were researching, talking to people at Factory Records and people who had been in those bands. A lot of the actors took part in the film because they wanted to be in a band. 24 Hour Party People was a fake experience of what that might be like. During that time, I found there to be lots of elements of the music world that were more attractive than filmmaking. That's when I initially thought that about immersing myself in a band at the beginning of their career, rather than looking back 15 years and recreating the past.
It’s been more than a decade since you made a film about music. Was there something about the current UK music climate that made you want to explore it again?
To be honest, I don't think that's why we ended up making it now. Wolf Alice are similar to bands 20 years ago, and those bands 20 years ago are similar to bands 20 years earlier. You get those cycles in music. There were a variety of reasons for choosing Wolf Alice and making this film now. It wasn't like, “OK we have to make a film about Wolf Alice.” We had the time and space to try this idea we'd been talking about forever. We looked around to see which band would be interesting. There were lots of coincidences that pointed us towards Wolf Alice. One of the main reasons was that type of music—that classic British guitar band sound—is the sort I like.
Did you meet several bands in order to decide?
We didn't meet any other acts, no. We wanted it to be a young tour bus band and in a way there aren't that many. It's a particular strata of bands that are doing that kind of tour. Also, we didn't realize when we started that because Ellie [Rowsell] fronts the band, all the hardcore fans at the front of shows tended to be 14-to-16-year-old girls who connected to her, not the teenage boys you assume this kind of music appeals to. I loved that. That made it very interesting to film.
The blending of fly-on-the-wall documentary style with romantic drama is unique, almost the reverse of the idea you had for 9 Songs, where a couple’s relationship is set against the backdrop of performances from real bands. How did following a band help you build out the fictional storyline?
You wanna feel what it's like to on the bus, and it has to be a real band for that to work. If you do a fictional version of the performances themselves, it's very hard to make a point. Bands are about their own chemistry, the huge passion the fans have for them. What worried me, however, was that if we just did a straight documentary this whole aspect of being away from home and living in a very confined space with a bunch of people you don't know wouldn't be captured. It would just be a record of gigs and rehearsals, but without the feeling of what it's like to be a person put into that world. The private personal story was a way to round out the experience of touring.
The two leads are unknown actors and it feels like they're method acting 24/7. Leah even told journalists coming to interview the band during filming that she was their publicist and began acting as their PR on the bus.
Ha, yes. It was a strange job from an actor's point of view. Leah and James had to be Estelle and Joe the whole time. Estelle was directly engaged with the band because she was supposed to be an intern from the management company, whereas Joe was supposed to be part of the sound crew, which is a more tight-knit world. The experience of living on the road is a lot of hard work, especially for the crew. In 24 Hour Party People, the bands had lots of fun as opposed to the industrial nature of filmmaking. With this, making films felt a lot easier than being in a crew in a band where every night they get the gear in and out, do soundchecks and so on.
Did you travel on the same bus as Wolf Alice?
We travelled on the crew bus, separate from Wolf Alice. Occasionally some of the other crew and some of the support bands would join our bus. The set was where we were living. We'd pack up at one or two in the morning, travel to the next location, then at five or six in the morning we'd be getting up again. It was a claustrophobic experience, especially in Britain. Most of the journeys are an hour and a half long. I found I could sleep when the bus was moving, but as soon as it stopped I'd wake up so I didn't get a huge amount of rest. It was like being on a submarine. It's smelly, lots of snoring, and you'd wake up at 5 a.m. in a car parked outside a venue. I didn't wanna make too much noise because people were asleep, so I wound up walking about city centers at six in the morning looking for somewhere to sit and read a book.
Any revelations from life on the road?
I'd never imagined that from the band's point of view, the bus would be their house. As soon as they woke up, they'd go into the dressing rooms at the back of these venues and that would be where they'd while away the hours until the performance. It was a weird cocoon. The film is about routine. Wolf Alice's set is exactly the same each time. But at the same time, the experience from the crowd—from Folkestone compared to Glasgow, or Manchester compared to London—is an interesting way of seeing Britain. You've got exactly the same thing happening in different cities and each with a different texture. When we finished filming, Wolf Alice were about to go and endlessly tour America for two months. I thought, “Thank god we're getting off.”