Michael Dowse for It's All Gone Pete Tong (2005) Interview

It's All Gone Pete Tong
5th May 2006
Posted by: Gary Gray

This Friday sees the release of the long awaited Ibiza movie It's All Gone Pete Tong. And for those of you who have no idea what Pete Tong is well it's a number of things. It's cockney rhyming slang for Going Wrong, it's the name of one of the top DJ's in the world, and finally it's the title of director Michael Dowse's movie.

It's All Gone Pete Tong tells the story of legendary DJ Frankie Wild as he journeys from international hedonistic DJ fame to the lows of becoming deaf (and can you imagine how much of a nightmare that would be for a DJ?), and finally his mysterious disappearance. We sat down (well talked on the phone) with the director Michael Dowse about the movie.

Hailing from Canada and having previously directed the rock stoner mockumentary FUBAR you would have thought that he would have been a strange choice for a movie about a musical genre so completely different from his previous work. How did he get signed up for the gig? "I was showing FUBAR at the Raindance Film Festival in London, and through a friend we met with the producers Allan Niblo and James Richardson of Vertigo Films, they watched FUBAR, loved it and within a week the deal was done." So they liked his directing style and his black sense of humour but how much did he know about Ibiza and it's hedonistic excesses before he wrote the script and had you spent much time on the island beforehand? "I had never been to Ibiza before and I didn't visit the island until after at least four drafts of the script. Meeting a lot of the DJ's in London helped a lot, especially Brandon Block. Some of the stories were just nuts! I did spend time in Ibiza before filming, location scouting and that was just nuts, half of the crew missing on drugs!"

Originally the movie was rumoured to be a sequel to the BAFTA award winning Human Traffic, but there's nothing in the final movie that relates to that movie, so what happened to that? "There was never any plan to follow on from Human Traffic, that was more of a producer thing to get some interest in the project. When we first started the project all we had was the title, It's All Gone Pete Tong, and the setting of Ibiza."

From his first movie it's pretty obvious that Dowse is more of a rock fan with bands like The Beta Band being more of his type of music. So how hard was it to get into the dance culture and were the DJ's hard to get involved in the project? "We got Lol Hammond, the legendary DJ who started out DJ'ing with the underground Spiral Tribe at raves in the 90's, to sign on as music supervisor and this helped get us into the dance scene. This bought us a lot of credibility that made it a lot easier in getting the other DJ's involved with the production." So what was working with the superstar DJ's like on the movie? "They were great to work with, but very ego driven. We filmed a lot of them doing fake interviews wanting them to say that Frankie Wild was the best DJ ever. Not one of them could bring themselves to say that he was. Didn't matter that he is fictitious, all about competition and being No.1."

We then talked about what it must have been like to shoot a movie in the hedonistic party central of the world. "Nuts, just plain nuts, in August there's 50,000 people arriving and leaving the island on a daily basis and they are all there for the partying. We filmed at many of the island's clubs including Manumission. I cursed the filming as it was just so hard. The heat and the sweat, half of the crew disappearing, on drugs. But it all paid off as it's all up on the screen and helps make the movie more real."

Talk then turned to the main man of the movie Frankie Wilde. Played in an exuberant wasted fashion by Paul Kaye. Kaye started out in british TV as the utterly annoying but utterly excellent Dennis Pennis. Pennis was ostensibly a premiere interviewer who dared ask the questions that everybody really wanted to ask celebrities but would never actually ask. He then moved on to roles in TV such as 2,000 Acres of Sky and the comedy about lawn bowling Blackball. So why did Dowse cast him in Pete Tong? "I hadn't actually heard of him, and the producers recommended him to me, I watched some Dennis Pennis and I thought, oh no he's going to be a right prick! But no he turned out to be the perfect guy for the role. He showed up looking the part. Like he'd lived the life that I was trying to capture in the film. Totally wasted.When talking about how to play the role in the movie Paul would always try to veer it towards the more stupid side of things making it all the more funny and ridiculous with the right kind of tone."

So with such a fucked up central character as Frankie Wilde who does such mad and outrageous things as dropping into the middle of a packed Manumission dressed as Jesus and then falling into a pool twenty foot below, it must be asked how much of Dowse is there in the movie? " I'd say there's a lot of me in Max, Wild's manager. I found his role the easiest to write and his lines most fitted my personality. For Frankie I regarded him more as a rock n roller, more of a John Lydon type bad boy."

"With It's All Gone Pete Tong my aim was to rip cinema a new asshole, and by that I mean get rid of all the usual cliches of filming, and editing and try and do something that takes a different and hopefully more honest and funny look at a subject. We finished editing the movie last July and premiered it at Toronto where we won the Toronto City Award for Best Feature. The UK premiere takes place at the Empire Leicester Square on Thursday night and fittingly we'll be having a wild party afterwards!"

And of course I had to ask what's next for Michael Dowse after spending the best part of the last two years on Pete Tong. "Next up I'm working on a project called Cult-De-Sac. It's about a cult that's into human cloning, where everything above the earth has been created by a race of hyper intelligent humanoids from below the surface. I'm working on the script right now and we plan to start filming next summer in Canada."

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