Beyond the Multiplex

You've waited a long time to make your directing debut, but you've done it with a splash.

I didn't really think I was waiting. I didn't ever think I was going to be a producer, to be honest. That was a bit of a surprise. I was just a guy who started off loving movies and going to the cinema. I had my own repertory cinema, and then I started a little video company in the early '80s, based on the kinds of films I was showing in my cinema, which were, you know, "Eraserhead" and "Fitzcarraldo" and "Mephisto." Before I knew it I was producing "Company of Wolves," and I went on to do all sorts of films with Neil Jordan and other directors. I never thought, "Oh, that's it, I'm a producer," any more than I thought, "Oh, that's it, I'm a cinema usher." It was an organic progression, just enjoying working with movies and being able to continue and contribute.

One of the things that's really fun about "Stoned" is the way you capture the period. I know you've been very careful about having the filmmaking techniques, the colors and the actual film stock be true to the '60s -- which is a very Neil Jordan thing to do. But the little things all look right, and I really enjoyed the hallucinatory style.

Well, you know, I had to focus on the minutiae of the period. That was crucial. I couldn't do what people with lots of money do -- huge armies of extras and massive wide shots. Instead of that, instead of reconstructing Oxford Street or Carnaby Street in 1969, I went for something else, which was re-creating that era through small details and through the music. [The soundtrack includes music by the Jefferson Airplane, the Small Faces, the White Stripes and other bands, but only cover versions of Rolling Stones hits.] You really get to see what Brian is wearing, for example, and what Mick and Keith are wearing when they come to fire him.

Yes, the clothes are extraordinary.

You see the slow metamorphosis from the more innocent puppy-dog band that Brian ran at the beginning of the film to the ruthless band that fires him at the end. This is also the story of how Keith and Mick became so much more assured and in charge of themselves. Letting go of Brian -- which was going to be the title of the film at one point. That's what they finally did, and that's what everyone did. He was left in that house to drift off, because people were fed up with his behavior. They were quite happy to say, "Well, Brian's in his house. Great. We don't need him in the band anymore. Let's let go of him."

Do you think, if the surviving Rolling Stones ever see this movie, that they'll recognize themselves in it?

I didn't really want to make a film for the Rolling Stones or about the Rolling Stones. I couldn't get permission to use Rolling Stones music, and I suppose that answers the question of what they think of it. Mick and Keith haven't seen the film, or if they have seen it they haven't commented on it. I wanted to make a film about the times, the '60s and the headiness of that time as exemplified by Brian Jones. And also, just as important, a movie about Frank Thorogood and characters like him, who represented the majority of Britain at the time.

Yes, your portrait of Thorogood is remarkably sympathetic, considering you're accusing him of murdering one of rock's most legendary figures.

As a child growing up, all my uncles and my dad had fought in the Second World War, or certainly had been greatly affected by it. So when these guys came along, these effete, long-haired, effeminate-looking pop stars of the '60s who got all the fame and the girls and the money, there was a huge amount of anger. Those guys who had fought in the Second World War weren't that old! They were only in their 40s at that time. They had come back home to London when it was a bomb site, and they were now witnessing this social change in Britain where, you know, anarchy and rebelliousness were the order of the day. Smashing guitars onstage, and letting your hair grow long. You wouldn't have won a war that way! You won a war through discipline and order.

So there was a huge amount of anger in my family. I remember my cousins who were older than me just being whacked around the head. Girls told to get back to their rooms and put on decent clothes -- how could you wear a skirt as short as that? I don't think the generation gap has ever been as wide as it was in the '60s.

So I really wanted to show Brian's side of it, which was this tiny little '60s world, this tiny bubble, with the world going on outside of that. Most of us as children wanted to be inside the bubble. We were looking in enviously. The generation above us, our parents, were trying to smash the bubble. They didn't want that world; they wanted to do what Frank does to Brian in the film. It wasn't as if parents wanted to kill their children, but they got that angry. You felt sometimes, when my uncles came back from the pub, that if they got any angrier there'd be real trouble  That's the war I wanted to put in the film.

I was really struck by the extent to which Brian invented the rock-star archetype. You know, dressing in women's clothes but being a ladies' man, the flamboyant but deadpan manner, the cultivation of an ultra-cool inner circle. All of that is a cliché now too, but then it was genuinely shocking.

Yeah, it was. You know, there was a period when Mick and Keith were fairly boring looking, and then, around '65 or '66, you see them taking on Brian's persona. They're suddenly going to the same tailors, they're wearing flamboyant clothes, the beads are on.

Brian was the person you wanted to visit in London in the early '60s. When Dylan came over, he wasn't interested in the other Rolling Stones. It was Brian he made a beeline for. John Lennon hung out with Brian. Pete Townshend thought Brian was the genius of the band

I wanted to show that Brian was a truly original '60s icon. He experimented with drugs, he experimented with sex, he experimented with music. In America, you obviously had your extroverts, people like Little Richard who were blurring the edges of sexuality. People who took their stage acts to extremes: Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown, that spirit of showmanship. None of it was as intellectually fueled as Brian Jones, none of it was about Aleister Crowley or the Moroccan music he recorded. He was the first white guy to record those people

What got him tongue-tied, and made him lose his nerve, was when Mick became the spokesman for the band, and the so-called spokesman for a generation  then I think Brian got lost in a world of drugs. He was no longer a coherent or in any way reasonable voice for the '60s generation.

Next page: The "rebellious, anarchic character" at the heart of the Stones