Sundance Film Festival

Below are comments from Julien Temple, director of the 2007 Sundance World Documentary competition film The Future is Unwritten - Joe Strummer.

“Right at the beginning, in 1976, I was trying to do this film about the Clash, then jumped ship to the Sex Pistols and cut off all communications for something like 20 years, even though I had a deep love for the band and what they stood for,” says Temple. “Back then I couldn‘t get too close to Joe. So it was quite a surprise, ten years ago, when he turned up at my garden gate. He was looking for somewhere to live in Somerset and I was genuinely shocked to meet him again - we had a great night lighting fires and trying to raise this hot air balloon I was building. From that moment on there was a closeness that lasted until his death.”

For Joe Strummer, the idea of a “campfire” - any loose assembly of people bonded by the rising flames and the advancing dawn - became an art form in itself. The campfire was the melting pot, the wisdom stone, the HolyGrail; the essential outdoor forum for constantly evolving ideas and conversations.

First perfected backstage at Glastonbury Festival - where the nightly assembly was first dubbed ‘Strummerville‘ - Joe took his campfires, and his circle of friendships and voices, all around the world, and finally back home to Somerset, where a Stone Circle now commemorates the campfire.

Director Julien Temple: “The campfire was always going to be one of the central themes of the film. In the last ten years of his life, really the time I got to know him best, we had our deepest conversations around the campfire. It was a much bigger thing, once he‘d moved to Somerset, where Joe‘s house was. Up on the Quantock Hills, a rebel outpost…a place even the Romans had never managed to conquer.

“Just as in his lifetime, we had people from all walks of life sitting by the fire, listening to the music that was so much a part of him. It was a place to lose themselves in the flames; in the firelight everyone is equal, the famous people no more relevant than the not so famous people. By interviewing that way for the film we were freeing ourselves from the ‘talking heads‘ of a conventional documentary. We were getting a real sense of the friendship and the connections.

“I had to make it work because it was so important to Joe. He once said to me that he thought the campfire was a better idea than any of the music he had ever made - some nights it really did get that good. The whole thing was about people from completely different backgrounds around that fire, and I hope we have brought the essence of that to the film.

“More often than not, Joe was the last one at the fire. To whoever was left standing he‘d say: “It‘s you and me at Club Dawn…”

Reflected in the flames in The Future Is Unwritten is a cast of Joe‘s closest friends and relations - among them his oldest school friend Dick Evans and his cousins Ian and Alasdair Gillies - and artists, friends and musicians from his formative years. They‘re joined by Joe‘s first wife, Gaby, his second wife, Lucinda, Clash members past and present, fellow actors, musicians and artists, and many other unsung heroes who played an important part in his life.