"It's amazing enough to have one film made about us while most of the principal characters are still alive, but to have two films is quite bizarre," says Joy Division/New Order drummer Stephen Morris. It is the second major film about these four northern musicians, their home town and the characters in their orbit, following Michael Winterbottom's 2002 movie, 24 Hour Party People. But in Anton Corbijn's new film, Control, Curtis, Joy Division and their extended Manchester family live on. Their lead singer, Ian Curtis, tormented by epilepsy and torn between his wife and lover, hanged himself on May 18 1980, on the eve of their first US tour. So is their manager, Rob Gretton, and their producer, Martin Hannett. The actors are often intercut with real contemporary concert footage, including the Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall.T ony Wilson, their label boss, is dead now. In one scene, one-time Buzzcocks member Howard Devoto (played by Martin Hancock) is shown having sex with Wilson's first wife in the toilets of a club the real Devoto, an extra in the scene, turns to the camera and says, "I definitely don't remember this happening." The fourth wall is frequently broken, with Wilson (who also acts as the narrator) frequently commenting on events directly to camera as they occur, at one point declaring that he is "being postmodern, before it's fashionable".
The film is a dramatisation based on a combination of real events, rumours, urban legends, and the imaginings of the scriptwriter – as the film makes clear. The narrative largely follows his career, while also covering the careers of the major Factory artists, especially Joy Division and New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column and Happy Mondays. The main character is Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan), a news reporter for Granada Television and the head of Factory Records. It begins with the punk rock era of the late 1970s and moves through the 1980s into the rave and DJ culture and the "Madchester" scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The film was entered into the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
It was written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom. 24 Hour Party People is a 2002 British comedy-drama film about Manchester's popular music community from 1976 to 1992, and specifically about Factory Records.
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