There was always this sort of weird process in the development and pre-production, thinking, 'How do we get the studio tracks that Joy Division recorded that are so clean and pristine but sound rough and live and how do we get the live versions to actually sound clear enough so you can make out what they're saying?' That was sort of the frustration with Anton Corbijn and myself, figuring out how we make that work.
I think the Control has really opened up the music to a whole new audience. I've met kids recently, kids of people I know who are 14 and 17 who love Joy Division and have been a fan before the movie, which is really weird. How does that happen? I have no idea. But, the music that's out there today is heavily influenced by these bands from the 70s and 80s like Joy Division. I want them to take away a little bit of what Ian Curtis was and, at such a young age, he had so much going on.
The Control movie is not about suicide, it's not about epilepsy, it's not about everything else, but it's about an individual who was thinking out of the box and took his own passion and created music. His negativity and whatever else, he bottled them up and spilled them out onto his world of music. I think a sense of hope comes from the end of the movie, in my mind. Some people come out of the movie and think, 'That's the saddest thing I've ever seen,' and others come out and think, 'God, there's optimism.'
