Andrew Eaton

Portrait: Sarah Lee

Andrew Eaton works with filmmaker Michael Winterbottom as producer and collaborator. Together they formed Revolution Films in 1994, and have created a prolific, highly distinctive, and eclectic body of work that has won many awards in this country and abroad. The films range through genres: from the futuristic Code 46 to 24 Hour Party People, a biopic of Manchester's Tony Wilson; from the Western The Claim, which draws on Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, to the docu-drama In This World, following two young Afghans trafficked to London; from A Cock and Bull Story, a reworking of the eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy, to Road to Guantánamo, which traces the stories of the Tipton Three. Frequently working with small crews, digital cameras, or on location in unprotected filming environments, the films are bracing, provocative and idiosyncratic in approach.

The collaboration between Michael Winterbottom and Andrew Eaton is a partnership rare in film, likened recently by The Independent to that of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It lies at the heart of what they have achieved creatively.

K: When you were young, did you know that film was the thing you most wanted to do?
A: I enjoyed film the most, but it was so distant. I grew up in Derry, my family had no connections with any artistic endeavour at all. At school I had acted, but there was no digital equipment then, no-one thought of doing anything with film. I just knew I wanted to be in the creative world. I went into the arts because it seemed easier to grasp. So after university, where I studied law, I got a summer job at the Edinburgh Festival. JohnDrummond, director of the Festival, had a great passion for Diaghilev, who had made his company the defining creative force in the world at the time. At a lecture he gave on Diaghilev, I saw how exciting the producer's role could be. And I watched John himself as a producer too. It was an eye-opener: I thought, could I pursue that?

My first proper job was in press and publicity at Riverside Studios under David Gothard. It was an extraordinary time and we worked with extraordinary artists: Tarkovsky, Samuel Beckett, Michael Clark, Bruce McLean, Dario Fo, and others. David's view was that the artist is always right, that we should always defer to the creative spirit. It was infuriating and inspiring at the same time. He insisted that we're here to serve these artists, who are brilliant, and if we don't the show won't be any good, and we won't survive. As part of this, the culture was to check the box office sales for the previous night's performance every morning.

K: Did you make the move to become a researcher at the BBC because it would take you closer to a producer's role?

A: No, it was more that it was a step towards film, which as I got older I knew ultimately I found the most exciting and inspiring of the arts. I worked in the BBC Television Music and Arts Department for what ended up being nine years, learning all the time, how to sell ideas, get my foot in the door, building up my resilience, and in the end producing and directing my own documentaries.

K: How did you and Michael Winterbottom come together?

A: I had a desire to collaborate with someone who was my contemporary, who had similar tastes, whose work I felt was really important. I was producing Family by Roddy Doyle, my first project of this kind, and I asked Michael to direct it. The collaboration was a success, and Michael - who's very entrepreneurial in his approach - had the idea that we set up a company together to develop material. We were both ready, we're not institutional people, and there was an attraction in jumping off to be more in control of one's own destiny. If I'd realised how unsettling this could be, I might have worried more, but I don't regret it at all. From the start, it's been 50/50, we own the company evenly between us, and everything is on that basis: there's no separation in how we approach what we do. It works between us because we're quite different as people, as personalities. Michael is English, emotionally contained, very restrained as a basic modus operandi. He doesn't like to talk about his work much, he wants to keep it as direct and simple as possible, he's the most unpretentious genius I know. I'm an over-emotional Celt who comes from a very talkative culture, who tends to do the cajoling, the persuading, the bullshit to get our projects up and running, though I love the focus, the practical, detailed life of when we're on set too. We share a real work ethic, and a desire for this to be fun.

K: You've managed to produce work of real quality at an extraordinary rate since 1994. What is it between you that has made this possible?

A: We feel that this is our job; it's what we do for a living. Michael never says after a project, I'm creatively spent, I need to re-group, to take a break. I feed off that. I find it inspiring to work with someone who just wants to get on with it. The way we work together allows us to be clever on our feet. We're nowhere near running out of ideas, and we constantly make judgements about what's possible at any moment, in continual dialogue about how to raise the funds, and what to do if we don't. There's no separation between the creativity and the money.

As producer, I lead on raising the finance, but we couldn't do this unless we were a team. We vent our frustrations in private, and then think what else we can do to make them listen. It's only making films, but there are moments when you are in utter despair; so you take a deep breath, you regroup, and you figure it out. We re-energise each other. One of you reaches the limit, and the other steps up and carries on. We support each other all the time, as much when we're working to make a project possible as when we're actually filming. We help each other to do our jobs to the best of our ability. Inevitably, because I'm the producer, that's more about me protecting his space, but there is a great two-way traffic between us. The films wouldn't be as good if there wasn't.

One of the main reasons to create the company has been to get as much protection as possible, to square up to the outside world and achieve a creative space where we can follow and protect an idea. The film world is so economically driven, you have to be clever to protect your ideas. The way we work together, it's hard to break that down from the outside.

We made a conscious decision to do things we really believe in. I'm proud that we've stuck to our guns and done what we wanted to do in an industry that's constantly pushing you to do the opposite. We're making a film at the moment with Brad Pitt's company Plan B, starring Angelina Jolie, funded by Paramount, about the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in Afghanistan, and we haven't for one minute drifted from what we would have done if we'd been making it on our own. Brad Pitt saw Road to Guantánamo, and asked us to make the film. The invitation was always based on us making it our way, the way we always work.

K: How do you deal with risk in your work?

A: Michael and I own the company, and together we carry the risk of what we do. It's constantly on our radar, and we're adjusting to the changing picture all the time, but we're light on our feet in dealing with it. We want our films to be fun, edgy and different in their perspectives, but we have to be mature in the risks we take. We go to dangerous places to make our films, but we never put those we work with in danger. Politically, we have to hold the courage of our convictions. Commercially, I have to be able to make the big calls when I need to, take the risks I think right to take. I have to act as a responsible business person, and hold a reputation as one.

K: So how do you approach the business aspects of what you do?

A: Michael and I are instinctively resistant to being businessmen, but we have built things up, learning how to run a company, and invested in our team so that we can make the films we want to make. At times we've had to sail very close to the wind to keep projects on track. We've never had a master plan. We make it up as we go along, carried forward by our ideas.

The team here is fantastic. We've found and brought on some exceptional young talent - so exceptional that others then want to work with them -and I remember the atmosphere of Riverside Studios when I was there, and try to make this a place for interesting creative talent in town to drop in and visit.

K: What part does the audience play in your work, the connecting of your films with their audience?

A: We are asked to justify our ideas in terms of the audience they will appeal to, but we resist that: it's not part of our drive. We make the films we're inspired to do, and hope other people will like them. The films we've done that were audience-tested have been less successful, more often than not, than those that weren't. It's very hard to tell what will make a film successful with an audience.

The way the film industry is structured, we are rarely part of our films' distribution, either theatrically or on DVD. This is where the real money is made, and the creators of the work do not have a chance to participate in it. An exception for us was Road to Guantánamo, where it received TV finance, we only gave Channel 4 broadcast rights, and we took it on our own initiative - and risk - to distribute it theatrically and to sell it round the world. We had a political desire for people to see it, and released it on Tiscali. We were happy for it to be seen in this way.

There's much talk of the upside of the digital revolution and how it can change everything. It would be great if it had the same effect as on the music industry, even if very briefly, though the studios are trying to find ways to control it. We shoot our lower budget films digitally now. We've broken as many rules as we can with this format, because people at present remain fantastically cautious, and there is very little exploration in this country about what you can do with a camera and very little money. I don't understand this.

K: What do you feel is at the heart of the producer's role?

A: When I think back to Diaghilev and my earliest interest in producing, you'd think people would take it very seriously as a profession. Yet - as my wife constantly tells me - I don't have a profession, and my family remain bemused by what I do. It's an amalgamation of lots and lots of different skills in different areas -people skills, financial skills, business skills, creative skills, fantastic powers of persuasion, and a very good instinct for finding your way through a set of problems to get from here to there. The producer is there to facilitate the space for the creative team, and you have to be an enabler, have all the attributes that allow you to understand how to do it. You need to see through what doesn't matter in order to spot what's really important. I can see people who are really good at this right from the start. As they mature, they're just honing it.

Most people who are really good at it are not compromised by thinking they want to do something else more directly involved with the creative process. They have a sense of what they are doing as distinct and an adjunct and support to that, something that they in themselves excel at.

K: Do you think it involves some kind of maturity of self, not just a set of skills?

A: It certainly feels like that with the producers I have a lot of time for. But you should be able to break the skills down and coach people, help them build up what it is they will need. The stubbornness and incredible resilience, however, we can't help them with.

In the US, there are contractual terms that are only available for ‘the talent', not for producers - a distinction that I heard made explicitly the other day. I'd like to break that distinction down. Michael and I try to do that.

I deliberately got involved with the Film Council, where I'm Deputy Chair, to help change how things are done. I'm trying to get them to support producers more, so that we can build a stronger film industry. The terms of trade for producers in film are so different to those in television, where production companies can draw real revenues from what they do. And I feel in the worlds of culture and sport, we're lagging behind in bringing on the new talent. In film, there is an extraordinarily difficult process towards getting commissioned, and there's no proper career path. I feel it would be simple to spot the shortlist of real talent, give them what they need to get themselves up and running, and then bring the next bunch through. It doesn't seem complex. I wonder if it's the same in the arts.