How did you see the Glastonbury festival evolve through years ?
That was what the movie was about, how it evolved and more importantly, how it mirrors the evolution of a wider culture. It was important to maintain the ideas of the beginning of the festival, those of the sixties and seventies, for all the people who went there, but obviously it exists like a spaceship travelling through a changing world, and it mirrors that world. You can see people, how they move, what they wear, you can nearly see how they think, you can see the changes, it’s like a Darwin evolution of a specie. It happened very fast. I wanted to make a movie about the crowd not the music, the music evolved too, that was part of it, but music is like a fuel to the spaceship, it’s just an element like the rain or the mud.
You see the festival overcoming a lot of obstacles to survive, and the biggest threat is the commercialization. It’s such an institution in England you see big companies want to put big signs everywhere.

The movie goes constantly forward and backward in time, was it a way for you to try to catch the “Glastonbury spirit” ?
Yes and it was also a way to make people think to themselves what time was that image. I didn’t want to put 1981 – 1993 – 1972, I didn’t want to put captions, I want them to think hard, that obscene man walking around with this crazy short was this 1989 ? I want them to go “what fucking year was that ?” and then three years later they’re down here, 1993. You have to think your own way about the changes, about what makes the mid eighties different from the early seventies or the late nineties.

Different types of people join in the festival, hippies, punks, which links do you see between these different cultures ?
I think they’re different stations on the same road, it goes way back, it’s a rebel counter-culture as they called it in the sixties, there’s always been a rebel spirit. Sometimes it’s more powerful, sometimes it’s smaller, sometimes it has to be organized in a political shape, sometimes it’s freer, but that’s it.
These groups have to be different because the punks had to destroy, hippies to create. When you look at it now, 35 years away, you see the similarities, by the time you only see the differences.

Could Joe Strummer be a key between these two cultures ?
Yes, that was another interesting thing, when I was editing the Glastonbury film is when I thought I could make a movie about Joe. Joe is the one who took me back to Glastonbury. He became a vegetarian there. In fact I saw the event that made him a vegetarian. There was a guy with a chicken on his shoulders saying “Don’t eat animals”, and at one point the chicken flew up and got stuck in lights above the stage, he started to burn, smoking, and the crowd was going “Free the chicken ! Save the chicken”. The finally got the chicken and the guy came on stage “Don’t eat meat ! Don’t eat meat !”. And Joe didn’t from that day.
Someway he’s now a kind of major figure of Glastonbury and, as the movie about him shows, he was a kind of hippie before being a punk.

You did almost every kind of rock movies, would you consider doing a biopic ?
Like Johnny Cash or something like that ? I would consider it but I tend to hate them. To me it would be great if you took the Johnny Cash film and the Ray Charles film and you mix the reels, it’s like kids building bricks the way they make these films, there’s a formula. And I don’t see how you have Brad Pitt playing Joe Strummer, there’s only one Joe Strummer cause we know who Joe Strummer is. Maybe the Joy Division movie (NDLR : Control by Anton Corbijn, in theatres on September the 27th 2007) cause I think it’s helped by the fact we don’t really know this guy, Joe Strummer you know.

By Olivier Gonord.