The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

“The funny thing is, in all those little snippets of live stuff that there are, they always seem like ghosts. It’s partly to do with the video cameras they were shot on and the way the tape has aged over the years, but it’s not like seeing something real, looking at that footage. It’s very spooky - especially the really rare stuff from Plan K in Belgium.”

Making a documentary about Joy Division was always going to be a chilling experience. No matter how much you try and focus on the good times and their accomplishments, they will always be overshadowed by the band’s sudden conclusion and the arcane figure of Curtis. But for Grant Gee, director of the film, simply titled Joy Division, the process became even more formidable and traumatic than initially expected. “It ended up being bloody difficult,” he says. “We had a 12-week period in which we were going to edit, and I found I could only live with the footage and work with it everyday for about three weeks at a time, and then I had to step away from it for a couple of weeks because it’s so deep and dark. You can’t make clear decisions when you’re in that frame of mind - it’s quite heavy.”

Rather than a being a competitor to last year’s feature film, Control, Joy Division is something of an unofficial counterpart piece, and the success of Anton Corbijn’s movie (he even appears in the documentary as a talking head) is likely to improve the bums-on-seats figures of Gee’s film. Corbijn managed to introduce a whole new audience to the band, but with the dust from Control nearly settled now, and given the limitation of making a film with only archive footage and commentary from various sources, is it really necessary to have another Joy Division film?

“Ultimately, it’s not necessary at all,” Gee explains. “The world could live without any documentaries. But, in that it was very surprising that Control captured people and, all of a sudden, people remembered Joy Division and realised they were an archetypal rock’n’roll story… you couldn’t script it, and given that Control wasn’t really about the band and the time - it was about a love triangle with kitchen sink drama and all that stuff - I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have a film actually about Joy Division.”

Whatever may be said or already known, the film does offer some light on the band. Other than Deborah Curtis, who originally agreed to be in the film but later declined due to the emotional exhaustion of being involved in Control, and those with the obvious limitation of being six feet under (except Tony Wilson, who was interviewed before his death), all the talking heads you might wish for are present and correct, and offering insight and anecdotes. That includes the surviving band members and Annik Honore, Curtis’ Belgian girlfriend and the person who took the most convincing to be involved in the project, having rarely spoken about the subject previously. But for Gee, it was important to have her on-board. “It’s a very male environment in the film and in that world and Annik, as well as simply being a woman, is the most sensitive person. She’s also the one who, towards the end, was probably closest to Ian.”

Away from compiling the commentary, Gee and the production team endeavoured to seek out the best live video-recordings of the band available, even if it meant digging out individuals who had been firmly embedded in the woodwork. Gee recalled a man who had taken footage of the band when they played in Holland. He was eventually tracked down to Mexico, where he was found to still be fuming for never being paid 30 years ago.

So, with two films now, surely this will be the final word on Joy Division? “No, I don’t think so,” says Gee. “I think there’s plenty more, especially about Ian.”