Filthy rich

GREED I Coogan and Winterbottom skewer inequality in fashion and the tycoons at the top…

The main character in Michael Winterbottom’s Greed isn’t actually Philip Green, but the similarities are striking. Steve Coogan’s Sir Richard McCreadie is a supremely wealthy retail magnate throwing a lavish 60th birthday party at a Greek resort, with a guest list of celebrities. “We didn’t want to make it a biography of [Green],” says Coogan, “the target being all those people in the industry. He was just a very good basis for the character. We wanted to be able to go off on tangents and invent things.”

Winterbottom and Coogan have collaborated eight times, including four series of The Trip (Greece is up next). While Greed is a satire – Gladiator-obsessed McCreadie’s Roman party makes the Fyre Festival look like a sensibly organised soiree, and his vulgarity and excess are played for laughs – it also strives to make a point about the wealth disparity between the fat cats of the fashion industry and the people producing the clothes in Sri Lankan factories.

“The conditions of the workers and what they’re paid shocked me,” Coogan adds. “I knew there were sweatshops. I didn’t know the extent of how much the prices are driven down. It’s effectively a slave trade.”

McCreadie’s “hubris” and the toga dress-code also invoke a sense of epic tragedy: “It’s sort of Shakespearean in some ways, and like a Greek tragedy in others.” But for all the stinging social commentary, Greed is extremely funny.

Coogan sees comedy as a way to bring these issues to mainstream attention. “People want to be entertained, and you slip the message under the door when they’re watching the film,” he says. “If you provoke them and ask questions and make them think about something, they don’t mind doing that because you’ve entertained them. You’ve bought credit in a way that a documentary doesn’t.”

ETA | FEBRUARY 2020 / GREED OPENS NEXT YEAR.