Pandaemonium

Synopsis

Although set in the past, Pandaemonium is a film about contemporary themes of friendship, creativity, addiction and betrayal. It is also the story of a love that outlasts all these things. When they wrote, the depth of feeling and experience conveyed in Coleridge and Wordsworth's poetry had as immediate and visceral an impact on their audience as great movies or popular music do today. Together they revolutionised writing in English and changed the direction of 19th century thought.

Both were clearly men of genius, but both were also flawed. It is these faults within each of them and their intense relationship with each other which makes this story not a literary biopic but an immediate human drama connecting directly with our own experience. I see the young Coleridge and Wordsworth as figures with great resonance for today. The 1790s, like the 1990s, were a time of profound political and technological change. The French Revolution, the social upheaval of industrialisation, the first exploration of flight, electricity and photography, all announced the beginning of the modern world. Like us at the end of the twentieth century, Coleridge and his friends were excited by these breakthroughs, yet questioned what the future of industry and technology might bring. Their deep trust in nature prefigures our own ecological concerns. Their status as celebrities, pre-dating Byron, Shelley and Keats, made them the 'pop stars' of their day, drawing sell-out crowds to their lectures and public appearances. Many in today's audience will sympathise with Coleridge's desperate struggle with his own insecurities and addiction, something that had never occurred in such a public context before. I hope to emphasise these important parallels and convey the emotional power of the story to a wide audience by shooting the film in a thoroughly contempory style. A mobile and often hand-held camera will be employed to give the film a raw and realistic edge, capturing the sense of young people doing things that had not been done before, and accentuating the spirit rather than the letter of the time. - Julien Temple.

Details

Year

2001

Type of film

Features

Running Time

126 mins

Format

35mm Fuji

Director

Julien Temple

Producer

David M Thompson, Mike Phillips, Tracey Scoffield

Editor

Niven Howie

Screenwriter

Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Director of Photography

John Lynch

Sound

Garth Marshall

Music

Dario Marianelli

Principal Cast

John Hannah, Linus Roache, Samantha Morton

Genre

Production status

Complete

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Last updated 26th November 2005