The XXX files

What interested him was to make a film that left nothing to the imagination sexually, but everything to be imagined about the couple’s characters and lives and motivation... hence the sparse dialogue. He wanted to show the trajectory of a love affair spanning the cycle of nine gigs, from its giddy beginnings through its cosy domestic interlude to its last dying gasps, but to restrict the narrative to what the audience can create for themselves through observing the changes in the relationship from what takes place in the bedroom.

Winterbottom has been exercised for some time by the desire to extend the sexual possibilities of film. (He had originally wanted to adapt Michel Houellebecq’s provocative novel Platform for the screen, but the writer apparently wants to do the job himself - and his 1997 film I Want You, starring Rachel Weisz, set in Hastings, was thought by some critics at the time to be very daring sexually.)

“Why aren’t we allowed to show sex?” he asks rhetorically. “What is wrong with showing sex? I think cinema is the obvious media to show sex in that way. Lots of books are written about sex and just as graphically and in as much detail as anything else.

“Films can leave things to the imagination but the idea with 9 Songs was to go to the other extreme and really just try to be as simple and honest as possible; to start with two people in bed together, making love in a relationship, an intimate relationship, and try to show that as intimately as possible, and leave to your imagination who they are, what their relationship is, what they feel for each other, what’s going on outside the bedroom.”

9 Songs has quite a different feeling - more tender, less ambiguously a love story - than other sexually inflammatory films such as Last Tango in Paris or Intimacy, where the coupling is deliberately anonymous and devoid of sentiment. It is sometimes touching and arousing and always sensitively filmed, with a lovely score by Michael Nyman, believable human beings, and groovy music by bands such as Super Furry Animals and Primal Scream.

“The idea was to show a normal relationship and one which is recognisable,” the director says. “I think for most people in their lives, the relationship between making love and being in love in a relationship is complicated... and at different moments, it can be different things. You can be incredibly intimate with someone who’s a stranger, you can be in a relationship where you’re in love but in bed it’s not so intimate.

“Making love can express intimacy and love, but it can have lots of different meanings. And the trouble with films dealing with relationships is that you never ever even attempt to try to explore that area of physical intimacy in the way that it affects emotions and the way it affects people’s behaviour towards each other. So you’re constantly seeing stories about people who are supposed to be in love but missing out something that for most people is part of that relationship. Not all of it but part of it.”

The hullabaloo that greeted 9 Songs when it was shown at Cannes last May - boosted by the 21-year-old female lead’s last-minute desire for anonymity (impossible since it was too late to remove her name, Margo Stilley, from the credits) - meant that it was considered too risky to allow the video to leave the confines of the Clerkenwell site of Revolution Films, the production company Winterbottom runs with his business partner Andrew Eaton.

The office is very Clerkenwell: flooded with natural light, unrendered walls, concrete ceilings, wide floorboards, beaten-up toffee leather chairs and the aforementioned glass box viewing area at its centre. The morning I am there, the space is dominated by young women who resemble a posse of high-tech gunslingers with multiple mobiles stacked on their hips. The company has the tribal self-sufficiency of a family, which can make the outsider feel a bit spare.

Winterbottom himself when he arrives for the interview is somehow smaller than life. He is like a rather earnest young boy, in his trainers and T-shirt: likeable, at ease with himself, very much his own person. There is about him an obdurate quality that must stand him in good stead as a film-maker, but can be frustrating in person.

As a director, he has been accused by critics of being “withholding” - of emotion, of hinterland - particularly in Wonderland, a gloomy but ultimately buoyant Mike Leigh-ish tale of dysfunctional relationships in South London. As an interviewee, he is withholding in the sense that he simply will not talk about any aspect of his life, including his family and childhood: “I just don’t, it’s my private life... and I prefer to keep private private.” This said extremely pleasantly and even with an apology when I say that in all my years of interviewing, I’ve never encountered someone quite so self-protective.

He talks ridiculously quickly and quietly and I interrupt him half a dozen times, with a sense of mounting helplessness, to plead with him to slow down - which he cheerfully ignores. He also insists on keeping the panels of the glass box open so that there are additional distractions of chatter and kitchen noises.

At the beginning of our interview, I bombarded him with questions about In This World - a documentary-style drama, with real teenage Afghan refugees rather than actors, covering the many challenges of the journey asylum-seekers have to endure in order to get here. That is, if they do endure. I could not get certain scenes out of my head: the most distressing of which was the one in which several families, including the main characters, are trapped in a container. This was the impetus for Winterbottom to make the film, after reading the news accounts of the 58 Chinese immigrants who were found perished in similarly harrowing circumstances in Dover.

It is only when we move on to 9 Songs that I manage to persuade the director to close the wooden screen - which may make him claustrophobic but at least gives me a fighting chance to hear what he’s got to say. Part of the controversy around the film is the ethical problems arising from filming a young girl, barely out of her teens, with no acting experience, in such an uncompromising way. Winterbottom’s position on this seems to me to be rather too detached - how could he not harbour any doubts about the project? - even for someone who is reluctant to expose let alone parade his inner feelings.

Personally - whatever the merits or not of the film as a cinematic exercise - watching it, I felt it was pretty demeaning for Margo Stilley to be filmed from behind riding her co-star’s penis, as well as in the long fellatio-ejaculation scene - and it is these two portions of the film that Winterbottom felt could be cut if necessary in order to secure an 18 certificate. (Unlike Hamish McAlpine, the chairman of Tartan Films, who insisted that the film would remain untouched by the censors, which prompted Winterbottom to find an alternative UK distribution company.)

Kerry Fox was the first actress to be filmed performing oral sex for a mainstream film in Intimacy, the 2001 adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s novel, but she was both considerably older than Stilley and already had a track record as a respected film actress. The younger woman, from a Bible-bashing family in North Carolina, had been taking a break from her college studies - travelling and modelling - when she turned up for a casting in London and was picked.

In an interview Stilley gave to The Guardian, who had inadvertently created the tabloid chase in the first place by reporting her desire for anonymity, she sounded level-headed and composed - enthusing about the “incredibly respectful and professional crew” and saying of the more graphic scenes: “I dealt with them as best I could... I expect Kieran [O’Brien, her co-star, ten years her senior and a professional actor who was in 24 Hour Party People] did the same.”

Charlotte Higgins, the film writer, asked Winterbottom whether Stilley didn’t run the risk of being forever known as “the girl who was in the sex film” and wondered, as do I, whether as an experienced film-maker he shouldn’t have prepared her better for the inevitable fallout. His response was to bat back the question with another question: “Is Marlon Brando just the man who was in Last Tango in Paris?”, thereby hoisting himself by his own petard - since Maria Schneider, Brando’s then unknown co-star, is still known, if she is known at all three decades on, as the foxy chick who got buggered with a pat of butter by the veteran star of every great film from On the Waterfront to Apocalypse Now.

Now there is no particular reason why Stilley should go the same way, but there is something almost shut-down about Winterbottom’s hands-off response to questions of responsibility: “I don’t think I have the right to tell Margo or Kieran or anyone else what is right for them or what’s wrong for them... they are both grown-ups.” And he says, more than once, that before the film Stilley wasn’t able to get an agent, and now she’s got a really good one: “I think she’s a really natural performer, very talented and so hopefully she will go on to do lots of other things.”

There was a day’s rehearsal where the “couple” were together without having full sex to see whether they wanted to carry on, and then alternative weeks of filming and breaks: “To give everyone a chance to think about what we were doing”. So she could have pulled out at any point, if she had misgivings? “Essentially,” he says. “We didn’t want that to happen but everyone’s free to do what they want and so they took those decisions themselves. Whether that turns out to be a good decision or a bad decision, obviously it’s impossible to...” Did you really have no pause for thought at all? “Of course, everyone told me it was a really stupid idea; everyone told me it was stupid.” People you respect? Your mates? “Yeah,” he laughs. “My mates.”

As a teenager one of Winterbottom’s favourite writers was D. H. Lawrence, and yet he affects not to understand what I mean at all by the idea that there is something sacramental and mysterious about sex - the most intimate physical act two people can do together - which is intrinsically coarsening at some deep level for the actors to perform.

“I’ve done scenes with actors who have had to imagine, pretend, act the idea that their mother’s died and they have to cry. That’s an incredibly intimate thing - the experience of your mother dying - and to cry is an intimate thing, and you want that to be emotional. So does that coarsen the actor to repeatedly have to be close to something so raw, to repeatedly pretend something like that?” he asks.

“Maybe it deepens them, maybe it gives them some other insight. Actors are always having to expose very intimate things in order to find something intimate. That’s why actors are brave and why most people can’t act. That’s why the last thing I’d ever want to do in the world is to be an actor. I couldn’t ever do that. But nevertheless there are people acting and the best actors are the ones who are the most willing to expose themselves and be intimate and show intimate things. And this [the sex in 9 Songs] is a very extreme example but I don’t think it’s a million miles away from two people caressing each other in bed or someone crying on screen or laughing on screen. You know, acting is about recreating things that most of us want to keep private and recreating them for the public.”

Winterbottom’s mother was a teacher, his father a production engineer for a Phillips company, and he has one sibling, an older brother who went up to Oxford to read PPE and left the year Michael arrived to read English, which he found “not really fantastically interesting”. When I ask him if he was happy as a child, he says: “I don’t know. I think you have so many experiences in your childhood that you can choose to remember all the happy ones or choose to remember all the bad ones.” And then he says that he doesn’t particularly like to talk about his childhood anyway: “What you think about your childhood says more about who you are when you’re thinking about it than who you were then.”

He was the youngest member of the Blackburn film society, which had apparently won some sort of cash prize and had splashed out on a season of new German cinema: “So you had all these films that were strange, and what was nice about it was that they had one 16mm projector so the mechanics of the film, compared to going to the cinema, were very obvious. You were listening to the projector noise and at the end of each reel the lights came up and they had to change the reel, so it’s quite sweet in a way that you had this very low-tech disjointed projection of these films that were very beautiful and very weird, with strange and interesting ideas, but you could also see were very simple low-budget films.”

As well as being a serious film buff, the young Winterbottom was also a voracious reader - and laments that as an adult, he squanders his time reading comparatively mediocre contemporary novels out of habit, rather than the great novels of his youth. It was not by chance that he came to film Jude the Obscure, since it was one of his favourite books as a boy. He is at perhaps his most forthcoming and eloquent when he explains why: “I loved the love story which I think is beautiful but also the whole idea when Jude says, ‘Maybe not me, but my children’s children will achieve what I want to achieve.’ And I was that generation of his children’s children, the first generation to go to university and that stuff. So it seemed to me that the book was much more radical than people give him credit for.

“To write a book about the urbanisation of Britain and the way in which transport was changing communities, the way in which physical mobility created a kind of social mobility - so that Jude a generation before would have been stuck in this village but suddenly has the ability to move around from town to town and work, and he has this physical mobility and he sees the possibility of social mobility which is actually just a mirage at that point,” he pauses for breath, “but he’s kind of, like, Hardy’s view of society is incredibly perceptive like that.”

Winterbottom’s films, apart from the riotous 24 Hour Party People - he will soon be teaming up again with Steve Coogan, who played the Hacienda’s Tony Wilson, to make Tristram Shandy - are not exactly cheerful. Although he himself seems genial and sanguine, he has been known to make the odd downbeat remark, such as: “As people get older, you have that gradual reduction of where you can go, and the older people get, the less happy they are.” He accuses me of quoting him out of context - saying that comment specifically related to Wonderland - but then adds, “I think it’s true that as you get older, you get more and more locked into the world you have. And of course that could be a very happy world, but your choices do get less and less.”

And so, of course, I ask him finally as he gets older has he become less happy? And, of course, he answers with a beam: “No. I’m very happy.”

9 Songs goes on general release on March 11