If the shoe fits ...
Collaboration between Winterbottom, Coogan skewers British fashion mogul
“You can interrupt when you want,” says Steve Coogan, near the beginning of our interview. It feels like a courtesy. Quickly, I realize that it’s essential advice. Because Coogan wants to set the agenda.
His latest film, directed by longtime collaborator Michael Winterbottom, mocks the downfall of British retail mogul Philip Green. What could have been simply light entertainment is in fact equal parts ideological statement.
“We owe a bit of debt to Philip Green,” Coogan starts off, surprisingly. “He’s unambiguous about what he is and what he does ... He’s shone a light on the whole system.” That system involves tax havens, financial engineering, poorly paid Sri Lankan seamstresses, and “the rather nefarious way” that big companies use celebrities to “window-dress” it all.
“When you go into the shop and see Kate Moss on the wall, you associate your cheap T-shirt with Kate Moss and you forget the women actually making it,” says Winterbottom. Workers’ wages, adds Coogan, “could easily double and everyone would still make lots and lots of money.” It’s odd hearing the face of Alan Partridge take on global capitalism, but you get used to it.
Greed is a film about inequality whose own budget almost proves its point. At C$8.6 million, the entire production, which portrays a retail mogul’s 60th birthday party on Mykonos, cost less than Green’s actual 60th celebrations in Mexico (C$11 million). Green paid for performances from Robbie Williams and Stevie Wonder; the filmmakers had to settle for James Blunt and Stephen Fry. “They probably did it for expenses plus a sandwich,” says Coogan. “And what I love is that they’re playing themselves as if they’re prostituting themselves.”
Winterbottom had wanted the closing shots to shame individuals — from Amancio Ortega, founder of Zara, to celebrities such as Leonardo Dicaprio and Gwyneth Paltrow, who attended Green’s party. Sony, which part-financed Greed, vetoed that. “This unwritten rule exists among entertainers the same way it exists among CEOS — we don’t diss each other,” laments Coogan.
Filmed in under 12 weeks, the movie nominally features a fictional Sir Richard Mccreadie, but the backstory and business practices — including crushing Sri Lankan suppliers and inflating the value of his brands by mortgaging property — are all Green’s. “Our lawyers were like, you’ve got to make it accurate, then it’s not libellous,” says Winterbottom.
The devil is in the retail, as the tagline puts it. This is a missed opportunity to play on the things that Coogan and Green have in common, not least a learned dislike of the paparazzi. Coogan insists he did find “redeeming features” in the mogul. “One, he’s quite funny ... and there’s a certain brutal honesty.”
Winterbottom, meanwhile, warmed to the retailer’s micromanagement. “The very fact that he didn’t have a team of PR people — that he was on the phone calling journalists up direct himself — there’s something quite attractive about that. Quite useful in a film anyway.”
Showbiz moralizing is not without its critics: at this year’s Golden Globes, Ricky Gervais told Hollywood’s finest that they were in “no position to lecture the public about anything.” On the one hand, Coogan is criticizing that same hypocrisy. On the other hand, he’s just another lecturing actor.
“Yes, I get it, but to me, you do something or you do nothing,” says Coogan, referring to Gervais’s critique. He campaigned for a second Brexit referendum and joined Extinction Rebellion protests, despite being a car enthusiast.
Coogan’s upcoming projects include a #Metoo drama for British
TV. I point out that one of the champions of British cinema was the now-disgraced Harvey Weinstein. “I’m very pleased I sent him an email challenging him on his attitude toward women five years ago,” Coogan replies, chirpily. “He said, ‘They know I’m only kidding.’ He wasn’t being predatory — he was just being bullying and using misogynistic language.”
This time it’s Winterbottom who is more forthright. “People who came out later and said, ‘I never knew he was like that’ — I think that’s incredibly disingenuous. Everyone knew what Harvey was like, he was always overtly a bully.”
It’s one thing to know something is happening, another to talk openly about how to stop it. But Coogan’s case is that working in show business gives you an impulse to speak out, not a duty to shut up. The Financial Times Limited
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