By Gill Pringle at IFFAMacao Twitter #gillianpringle
Just six years old when he met John Lennon, one might argue that veteran documentarian David Batty was destined to make a film about the swinging sixties.
“My parents were friends with Dick Lester who did all the Beatles films but, of course, I was too young to know who Lennon was at the time,” recalls Batty who, fifty years later, would collaborate with Sir Michael Caine to take a nostalgic look at 1960s London in the documentary, My Generation.
“Michael has always wanted to make something about his breakthrough as an actor in the ‘60s. He was friends with most of those ‘60s music icons and became the unofficial father of that generation because he was quite a bit older,” says Batty, 55, talking at the International Film Festival & Awards Macao where My Generation was part of a Special Presentation programme.
It was only after Caine, now 84, met with Britain’s Pop Idol and music entrepreneur Simon Fuller, himself a massive ‘60s music fan, that the project took off.
Four years in the making, Fuller was able to clear the rights to some of the greatest hits of the ‘60s including The Who’s title song, ‘My Generation’, The Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, The Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and The Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Wild Horses’.
With Batty on board, together with Caine, they conducted scores of interviews with ‘60s legends, Paul McCartney, Roger Daltrey, Mary Quant, Twiggy, David Bailey, Sandie Shaw, Lulu and Marianne Faithfull.
The filmmakers amassed so much raw material, that they chose to focus on Caine’s narration paired with archival footage for My Generation, saving hours of interviews earmarked for a 6-part TV series due to air at the end of 2018.
Notably absent was Mick Jagger.
“Mick was very vocal back in the ‘60s so we used a lot of that old footage,” says Batty pointing out how the ‘60s was a time when Britain finally threw aside its class system making working class heroes out of a new generation.
“Michael Caine identifies very strongly with that theme and Jagger simply isn’t working class unlike so many of his contemporaries. Keith Richards would have been the catch for us, I think.”
While Batty might seem an odd choice for this tale of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, given that he has directed several Christian documentaries, he claims this to be more by accident, “I’m not the God Squad, quite the opposite,” he laughs, pointing to his acclaimed 2005 film, The Cult of The Suicide Bomber, as the antithesis.
“My Generation’s darkest story is probably Marianne Faithfull’s overdose which she says was due, in part, to the poison pen letters she received over the fact she was Jagger’s girlfriend. It was a bit like trolling today,” says the award-winning documentarian who has made more than 40 films tackling such diverse subjects as Adolf Hitler, the British royal family, the Japanese Kamikaze and homeless runaways.
Born in 1962, the sixties, per se, passed him by. “But I grew up with the story of how the ‘60s changed lives. Both my parents were mini-Michael Caines, from working class backgrounds. They both came from the north and did the same things that Michael did – my dad became a BBC journalist and filmmaker, and my mum was a ballet dancer. They were huge Beatles fans.”
My Generation doesn’t over-analyse why the ‘60s were so special: “If anything, it was a unique time because it was the first time for so many things and the stars of the day were a lot freer. There was no paparazzi and the few journalists who ran around after them were their mates who weren’t going to do the dirty on them.
“Fame wasn’t so deadly back then and didn’t seem to affect them so much. It only starts to get nasty in the late ‘60s after the drug busts and campaigns in the tabloid press.”
London’s time in the sun, he concludes, was specifically from 1965 – 1967. “That was when it was the centre of everything and after that it moves away and goes to America – LA and NY, civil rights and anti-Vietnam,” says Batty. “Musically and creatively-speaking, London makes a return during punk and rave but by then there’s scenes in multiple places, and it’s impossible to pin down one city.”
