Radio-Activity: A Conversation with Christopher Petit

You didn’t have to listen to whatever was being played on the radio. If you wanted to play Kraftwerk, you could. So I wondered, how can I make a film from these observations without getting tied up in the usual narratives of the journey film? How can I make a film about what simply happens to be passing by? 

Robby Müller was Wim Wenders’s main cinematographer, and originally there was talk of him shooting Radio On. In fact, he and I were meant to meet at the Baker Street station in London. But the problem with Baker Street is that it has two exits and two entrances, so we ended up waiting at opposite ends for each other and never met. In any case, I think Robby would have been too experienced. I didn’t know anything about film crews, but I asked Wenders who Robby’s assistant was—I’m amazed I even knew cinematographers had assistants. Martin had shot a couple films on his own, so he was ready. He was very quiet and observant, and when we didn’t have very much to say to each other, I knew things were going well. We took a drive from London down the A4, and when we came to a particularly featureless field with just a pylon, I asked him where he would put the camera. He showed me, and it was in such a way that the pylon was splat in the middle of the screen. I thought, okay, he knows what I want. 

I told Martin early on that I wanted to shoot the film on 35 mm in black and white, and not grey. I thought that if the film was shot in color, we wouldn’t be able to achieve the singularity that I wanted to get across and it would just become about a certain kind of redness of bricks throughout England. He suggested we use Ilford stock, which was an English film stock quite hard to get a hold of. I believe Godard shot Breathless on it. 

It was quite easy because of something called the British Film Institute Production Board, which was an experimental film fund for novice filmmakers. The Board had a deal with film unions so that films could be made on very low budgets with skeleton crews. I knew the Board was looking to expand and they had an ambitious head of production, Peter Sainsbury. I was smart enough to work out that if I could secure Wenders as a coproducer, I’d get the money to make the film. It was as straightforward as that. 

We had about twelve people working on Radio On, and we all fit into three cars. When I was making my next film, I remember going to one of the locations and counting fifty cars in the driveway. That was just crude. The methods used to make Radio On were very flexible; you knew everyone and could talk to everyone. We made it on something like eighty-five thousand pounds, which couldn’t even buy you a quarter of an apartment these days. I don’t remember feeling uncertain, whereas with other films I’ve made, I often sat around waiting. I’d run into Derek Jarman and ask him what he was up to, and he’d say, “I’m waiting, what are you doing?”

There were directors like Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach, and Karel Reisz, who came out of a certain tradition that I had no part of. Then there was a slightly yuppyish generation of filmmakers who came out of commercials and advertising, and whose basic ambition was to get into Hollywood—like Ridley Scott, who would probably kill me because of what I wrote about his first film. So, no, I wasn’t hanging out with English filmmakers, but the ones I did know I met through interviews I had done for Time Out, or at film festivals, which is how I became friendly with Herzog. I knew Derek Jarman, who came out of the gothic tradition because he used to work with Ken Russell, and we always got along fine. 

I’m always given a hard time about the Sting part, but back then we didn’t know what he’d go on to become. He’d been in Quadrophenia and had an agent who kept pushing to have him cast in the lead role. I had friends in the music business who didn’t think very highly of the Police, and he’d done adverts for Brutus Jeans, which was enough of a reason to disqualify him. But when we met, he turned up on a really hot day wearing a heavy motorcycle jacket, and I remember thinking, well, gee, you’re going to be a star, aren’t you? The Germans—Schäfer and our sound recordist, Martin Müller—came up with the idea for his scene at the petrol pumps. It was very cold and we didn’t finish what we needed to do that day, so everyone agreed to come back the following week on our Sunday off. We were all grumpy, and the Germans suggested Sting stand by the pumps and sing “Three Steps to Heaven.” I thought it was an awful idea, but it gave him something to look forward to, and I assumed we could always cut it. But the film is so dour up to this point, so the scene lightens the mood. The two Martins were right, and I was wrong. 

Looking back, there wasn’t anything in the UK particularly like it, so in that sense it stands on its own. I think Radio On belongs to a certain tradition of British film; I like to call them “cul-de-sac films,” because they come out at the end of a decade, and you think they will have an influence, but in an odd way they don’t. Another example is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, which pretty much finished his career, and then there was Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance.