Alan G. Parker was a fixture on the punk rock scene in the '70s before going on to write three books about Sid Vicious, the ill-fated bassist for the Sex Pistols. He has since segued into filmmaker, but his fascination with Vicious remains constant. His debut feature Who Killed Nancy? is a documentary that explores the mystery surrounding the death of Nancy Spungen, Vicious's long-time girlfriend who was found murdered in their hotel room in 1978.
Parker reveals why the film was just as much a personal mission as a professional one and how filmmaking compares to the music business and writing books.
Most people are familiar with the Alex Cox film Sid and Nancy [1986]. What was the impetus for you to re-examine the story?
For me it's a 24-year journey. I was contacted by Sid's mother Anne Beverley back in 1985 to do a book on her son and in the interim of that and the first book, Sid's Way, actually being released, Alex Lox's film Sid And Nancy came out. Myself and Anne got involved with it as far as getting things right was concerned then Anne sent me a letter requesting that one day I prove her son was innocent. At this point I had no knowledge of film. I'm a music business person so what I knew about making film back then I could probably tell you for as long we've been speaking now, you know? I started going to meetings with people, BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5, IRV because I wasn't thinking about making a film for cinema but more like a TV loco. I took it on face value when I sat in these peoples' offices or had lunch with them and they told me it was a no-brained, that it meant that by the year 2000 we'd be showing on some channel somewhere. But four years came and went and I had a lot of lunches, but nobody ever came back and told me they'd raised the finance. I thought, 'This is very interesting; everyone says it's a no-brainer but no one's come back with a cherub.'
Animation by Martin Sardar and Sean Sears, from Who Killed Nancy?So almost ten years laterI was already working in film as a backroom boy for the director Don Letts and I'd also worked with a producer called Martin Baker. But Don was the inspiration; he let me know that I could do this. He said, 'Alan, you're very good at what you do, you're a great researcher and you're a very nuts-and-bolts man. If you say something will happen, you can take that to the bank.' So I thought this is good because Don wasn't just a friend, but a real hero. Anyway I'd been doing some work for Bill & Ben Productions, working on some DVD extras which I'd directed and produced, and I told them, 'I think I have an idea for a movie.' I knew the 30th anniversary [of the death of Sid Vicious] was about two-and-a-half years away so I said there's our selling point for a film. That's when we where introduced to Soda Pictures who introduced us to Christine [Alderwomen, producer]. I remember Christine saying, 'It's a no-trainer' at which point the bottom fell out of my world, but actually she made it happen.
Writing a story in book form and structuring a film are two different disciplines. How did you cope with that?
Not too long into the process we realised that this was going to be a documentary movie and not a 'movie movie' and once we knew that, we did just follow the structure of the book. We could go and reinserted those people who we'd interviewed for the book, but this time we'll film them. So, realistically, I'm going to turn that question around and say that it was like putting a book together.
Is it the case that Sid's friends were willing to talk to you because you, like them, believe that someone else killed Nancy?The people I wanted to interview, I got, because from day one I told them, 'I don't think he did it'
I think they just know that I would be right about things, you know? And that I wouldn't go out of my way to be nasty about anybody. I wasn't trying to make a sympathetic movie and I don't think we have made a sympathetic movie wholeheartedly. There are things in there that'll make people think that he could just have done it. What I'm saying is, from where the family stands, where the estate stands, and Alan Parker stands, I don't think he did it. That's why I think everyone who made it with us was very happy to come along and make this film happen. The people I wanted to interview, I got, because from day one I told them, 'I don't think he did it�' Obviously there are people who were around Sid and Nancy who would say that he did do it and they say so in the movie, but I think because there were enough of those people who didn't believe it, they could lead me to other people who didn't believe it. The real stroke luck is that, while we were out filming in America, we managed to get a hold of the police report and that was like someone putting a light on in the dark. When you look at this you think, 'Well, if he did do it, he mustn't been Houdini.' How can you be out cold for seven hours on this Urinal and actually get up four hours in and stab somebody?
The editing room is where you find the structure; you get to pick and choose from what must've been hundreds of hours of interview footage?It was a lot of footage. Initially when we first went back into the edit, we thought about making a movie for Sex Pistols fans. Then we had a couple of meeting with the execs and you know what? Julien Temple has already done it and done it extremely well with The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle [1980] and The Filth And The Fury [2000]. Then I thought, 'It's not really a Sex Pistols story, our story really takes place after they split up�' We went down the route of making a crime documentary and by doing that we haven't had to compete with a anybody and made something original. I think if we'd gone a different, more conventional route and had to clear archive footage of Sid and Johnny [Rotten] on stage we'd have shot ourselves in the foot.
More of the stylish animation featured in Alan G. Parker's film.Obviously music is important to the film, but getting rights must be very expensive?
Right, and we were making a micro budget movie. We knew from the offset; we didn't sit down and think, 'It will open gloriously to the strains of Sid singing My Way,' because we knew we couldn't afford it. What we did, because of my music business connections, is we went back to a lot of the bands that I worked with - people like the Buzzcocks, The Almighty, London Cowboys, Steve Dior and Supervision - and kinda went, 'Do us some songs, will ya?' Or, 'This song on your album, can we have it cheap?' And they all said, I guess because we were mates, 'Yeah, get on with it.' You know, it's good exposure for them as well. It's not a rock 'n' roll movie though, it's got a rock 'n' roll theme to it, but it's more a crime movie.
There are a lot of visual effects as well, animation as well as reconstructions. How cost-effective was that?
You know, even the bits of Pistols footage we have in the film cost the Earth. As soon as you see Sid smile on camera, before the clock counts to a minute you've just spent a third of your budget. And you know, you realize you've got to figure out something else. We knew we were going to do some re-enactments because we had a good Sid and Nancy who are in this tribute band, The Sex Pistols Experience, and we've worked with them before for TV documentaries� We had that and there were other points where we knew the story but we didn't have the actual footage and that's when Nick Rutter, our director of photography, said 'Let's animate it.' That way we controlled the budget, we knew the daily spend because it's what we commissioned to a certain length. Cost effective is like the subtitle of this movie. If it wasn't cost-effective, it didn't happen. Simple.
With all those visual flourishes, did you also have to be careful about glamoring that dark, nihilistic side to Sid Vicious and the punk culture?
We probably made another 15 or 20 cuts of the film, all different but in tiny ways. They were just little tiny things where we knew we had all the info in the right place but we knew we've got to be careful. Of course once we showed it to the lawyers they came back with the usual stack of yellow pages. Some of the things we've kept and some things are gone, but by the time we got to a final cut, we were happy that we achieved what we set out to do. Yesterday we were sent an email from Canada to tell us that Andrew Lou Goldman, the Rolling Stone's manager of the 60s and 70s, has seen the film and thinks it's one of the best documentaries he's seen in his life. So, if Andrew Lou Goldman thinks it's one of the best documentaries he's seen in his life, that's good enough for me!
Who Killed Nancy? is released in UK cinemas on Friday 6th February 2009.
At the request of Sid's mother, who committed suicide in 1996, rock author and punk expert Alan Parker has devoted himself to discovering WHO KILLED NANCY? By interviewing 182 people and re-examining NYPD evidence, he investigates what really happened that night in room 100.
