Michael Winterbottom on The Trip to the Northern Lights: “Steve’s not worried about appearing grumpy or lonely”

For a director as restlessly exploratory as Michael Winterbottom, The Trip has become an unlikely constant. Its fifth instalment, The Trip to the Northern Lights, follows Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon through Scandinavia and up to the Arctic Circle, dining at another enviable succession of increasingly remote restaurants.

The dour spirit of Scandinavian heavyweights Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg permeates their Nordic sojourn, providing exactly the kind of high-flown reference points favoured by Coogan. Brydon would rather bring the conversation around to ABBA and A-ha. Each episode begins with a dream sequence, allowing Winterbottom, whose first directing assignment was a 1989 television documentary on Bergman, to pastiche The Seventh Seal (1957).

A lot funnier than Bergman, The Trip nonetheless shares the Swedish auteur’s fascination with personas and existential angst. But for Winterbottom, Bergman is also a model of the kind of highly productive filmmaking career that, as he argued in his 2021 book Dark Matter, has become increasingly difficult to sustain within the financial realities of British independent cinema. Ahead of the world premiere of the first two episodes at the BFI London Film Festival, we spoke to Winterbottom about improvisation, the porous line between film and television, and the economics of contemporary filmmaking.

Sam Wigley: I recall you saying that The Trip to Greece (2020) would definitely be the last in the series. Who persuaded you to go back to it? 

Michael Winterbottom: It was probably my fault. I thought doing a trip through Scandinavia would be interesting from my personal point of view. They’re enjoyable to make, it’s enjoyable to be with Steve and Rob, so I thought, actually we can go again.

Are the three of you always equally enthusiastic about doing a new one, or does one of you take more persuading than the others? 

No, all that side is fine. With Steve, there’s always a conversation about how it would be great to do something else as well. We think, let’s see what the next thing is, but probably because we hadn’t thought of what to do next, we say “OK, let’s do The Trip again.”

Has organising the trips to restaurants become easier now The Trip is so established, or does it take a lot of negotiation? 

On this one, everyone was enthusiastic about being part it. There’s benefits to them from a PR point of view. In Scandinavia, especially, it’s a huge space and it’s not a big population. So a lot of the places that are in the series are places where people have to go to especially. They’re destinations where people often stay at night and they’re going to travel quite a long way in order to eat there. So the only way they can survive is by people knowing they exist. They’re not like their restaurant in the city where there’s got a lot of local people and you might be getting in the way. 

I believe the way it works with the restaurant scenes is you plan roughly what the conversation is going to involve, but then they improvise as it’s going on. Is that right?

We’ve always had a roughly 80, 90 page outline of each series, and then we also have a lot of research documents for them. There’s usually some sort of starting point for the conversation. It’s a section of dialogue just to start the scene off. But we’re filming for four or five hours for each meal, so the vast majority of everything we film is improvised by Steve and Rob. Also sometimes there’s structural things that you know are going to recur through the series, so you want to make sure you get those things quite clear.

Some of the material around Steve’s midlife loneliness and romantic disappointment feels so frank and raw. You’ve said before that these personas are exaggerated versions of the real people, but have you ever clashed with Steve about how far to push that and how private to make it?

One of the great things about Steve is that he doesn’t want to project a great image of himself. He’s not worried about appearing, in this case, lonely or grumpy. There have been various points where the story has been closer to Steve’s real situations – what’s going on with his girlfriend or what’s going on with his family. But in reality, Steve isn’t lonely these days, so that’s a purely fictional element.

You started your career with an Ingmar Bergman documentary, so it must have been a pleasure for you to come full circle and riff on his films here. Does his work frame your view of Scandinavia? 

It was the first thing I got paid to direct, a long time ago. I spent quite a long time in Stockholm, but always in the winter. And then I did a couple of documentaries on Swedish silent cinema, but it was always in the winter. So I’ve been to Sweden lots of times, but this is the first time I’ve actually been there when it wasn’t winter. I think we all have an image of Sweden, which is the version Rob talks about in the series: it’s all quite bleak and gloomy, like the work of Strindberg and Bergman. So we’re trying to play with that with this series.

I know from your book Dark Matter that Bergman is also one of your models of a super-productive filmmaker, someone who was able to be prolific and keep up an astonishing work-rate.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to be quite as productive as Ingmar Bergman, but I think it’s a good model to have.

Well, you have up to a point. It’s very difficult to be prolific, particularly for directors working in the UK, as your book explores. But you’ve kept up a very impressive rate. Has it got harder for you in recent years?

I think so. Part of the motivation for the book was wondering, are we doing something wrong [in the UK]? Is there something we could change to make making films more enjoyable and more productive? I did that book for six months, during Covid. I hadn’t chosen those directors to prove a point – I just picked 15 people who all started in independent cinema quite a while ago and had a lot of success. But I realised once I started doing the interviews that about two thirds of them had only managed to make a handful of films. It seemed crazy when you think about all the films that could have been made by Lynne Ramsey or Pawel Pawlikowski. 

Ingmar Bergman made 50 or so, but filmmaking was almost a sideline for him. Most of his time was in the theatre. It was quite normal for people to do a film a year, or in the studio system a couple a year. So there’s no reason in independent cinema – when your shoot is probably six, seven, eight weeks – why you shouldn’t make a film a year, except finance. It’s really all about the struggle to get the finance.

One of the ways you’ve found to keep the production rate up is working across film and TV. The Trip is made for TV, but it is often shown at film festivals, like it is in London this week. To paraphrase a question that you asked Pawel in your book, do you see much difference between film and TV at this point?

We’ve done a lot in the area of crossover because of finance. Even when I started out, I was doing little things for TV, which we then showed as films at film festivals. We did a series called Family [1994] which was commissioned by the BBC and then shown as a film. There’s a couple of the films – say The Road to Guantanamo [2006] – where we went to Tessa Ross, who was running TV and drama [at Channel 4], and said “Can we make this?” And the situation that we found is that you can get £500,000 for a film, which isn’t enough to make it, or you get £1.5 million for a TV programme, which is enough to make it. 

The Trip came out in a slightly different way, but it’s the same thing: you can fully finance it as a TV thing here and then you can show it as a film around the world. But if you try to get the money for a film, you just can’t.

The Trip to the Northern Lights has its world premiere at the 70th BFI London Film Festival.