Picture perfect

IT WAS supposed to be a beautiful day.

Anton Corbijn – the acclaimed Dutch portrait photographer, a close friend of U2, and the director of an astonishing debut movie, 2007’s Ian Curtis and Joy Division biopic, Control – had arranged a meeting in Italy with George Clooney. The American actor had expressed interest in a starring role in Corbijn’s second feature film, The American.

“I was very excited,” begins Corbijn. “But on the day we were scheduled to meet, April 6 last year, I heard of the earthquake in the region we were supposed to shoot.”

The news was awful; the L’Aquila region was devastated, with at least 308 people losing their lives in the area where The American was to be filmed.

Despite the disaster, Clooney signed up as leading man and producer, and they ended up creating an exquisitely rendered piece. In many ways it feels like a modern-day western: the script, drawn from the Martin Booth novel A Very Private Englishman, casts Clooney as an American hitman forced to seek sanctuary in a new town.

He hides out in Abruzzo, in the mountains near L’Aquila, and as an outsider can only find friendship with what Corbijn describes as “the two extremes in the town”, a prostitute and a priest.

“I like the western format very much,” offers Corbijn, “especially the Europeaness of the spaghetti westerns. And like with my film Control, there’s that sense that it’s better to redeem yourself; you should accept the responsibility and the results of the actions you have taken. In a western you very often have this morality thing where it is good versus evil. It is very simplified. I like that and the priest is there to emphasise that.”

The character of the priest in the movie is imbued with special meaning for Corbijn, who grew up the eldest of four children of a devout Protestant clergyman.

The photographer and filmmaker was born in Strijen, south of Rotterdam, in 1955. His father forbade television in the home so they would sneak next door to the neighbours’ house and watch it there.

“I loved those TV series: Rawhide, with Clint Eastwood, and then also Bonanza and High Chaparral,” recalls Corbijn.

With his keen artistic eye, it comes as no surprise to find Corbijn so enraptured with the Italian landscape. Although his film is visually stunning, its director hopes people will concentrate on its other facets.

“It is strange making films,” he smiles. “People think that still photography and filmmaking are similar but they are very different.”

Corbijn’s photography has ranged over a wide range of portrait subjects – some of his most recent shots include Nelson Mandela and the artist Lucian Freud – but he is perhaps best-known for his work with Dublin rock titans U2. “The cover of the album The Joshua Tree is probably the most famous work I did with them, I think,” he says, “but also I did The Unforgettable Fire cover. Really I’m a portrait photographer, not a rock photographer. I just happen to shoot a lot of musicians.”

His famous image for The Joshua Tree was shot in December 1986 out in Death Valley, in the Mojave Desert in California, “so it wasn’t warm although it is in the desert,” smiles Corbijn. “This is the most serious set of shots I have taken of U2 and they became my most well-known photographs at the time. It was taken with a panoramic camera to take more of the landscapes which was the main idea of the shoot: man and environment, the Irish in America.”

The relationship between band and photographer formed in the early 1980s, and Corbijn’s first work included the inner-sleeve shot on 1983 album War. “When I first met Anton, I had one request,” Bono has said. “Make me tall, skinny and good-looking, with a good sense of humour. His reply was, ‘So you want to look like me?’ He's a new Dutch master, a funny man and a serious photographer.”

Corbijn smiles when he's reminded of Bono's tale. “In a photograph you have to say it all in one,” he offers, “and that’s the challenge. But if it is a film you can afford to be slightly more poetic and let things find their way in the frame. If you get too precise at it, it becomes like a French film that is over-stylised.”

Corbijn's visual skills are late-learned. His father, to whom he was close, did not encourage artistic pursuits among his children, and his eldest child only discovered his talent with the camera during his late teens. “I was very shy and we'd just moved to a bigger city and a local band were playing on the town square one afternoon,” Corbijn explains. “Just for me to go and watch that performance, I was so shy I didn’t dare go. I took my father’s camera so I felt that I had a purpose there. I took a few pictures and I sent one to a magazine. They printed it and I thought, ‘Wow’.”

He notes that in Holland during the early 1970s, photography was not considered a serious area for academic study, and with no interest in studying anything else at college, Corbijn moved to England and tried to earn a living shooting musicians. He became close to Salford icons Joy Division, and upon the death of the band's singer, Ian Curtis, found his pictures in high demand. He became the chief photographer on the New Musical Express, and has gone on make short films and music videos and undertaken stage and photographic design.

“In film, all these elements come into play,” he notes. “It’s an extension although it's not as logical a step as you’d presume. I think I’m starting to get to grips with it slowly, though. My first film, Control, is much more still and this one has more movement in it.” He laughs. “Maybe, I’m working towards a film that is really fast.”

Given his laid-back Dutch demeanour, and inherent beauty in his pictures, that seems unlikely. So what will he do next? “I cannot say yet,” he says, “but I'm not done with filmmaking just yet.” That is good news for audiences that enjoy aesthetically pleasing and emotionally intelligent films; for them, when Corbijn calls action on his third feature, it will surely prove a beautiful day.

* Anton Corbijn’s behind the scenes photographs and recollections from the movie are featured in Inside The American, published by Schirmer / Mosel