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Radio On, Christopher Petit’s 1979 debut feature, is a singular and melancholy road movie that feels plucked out of time. Echoes of the period in which it was made—that bleak and politically tumultuous stretch of British history known as the Winter of Discontent—can be felt throughout the film, yet Petit set out to offer an antidote to the social-realist works of his contemporaries. His was an experiment in creating the kind of observational film he felt was missing from British cinema.
Driven by a soundtrack composed of Petit’s favorite rock-and-roll, new wave, and post-punk artists—from David Bowie (whose German version of “Heroes” opens the film) and Kraftwerk to Devo and Robert Fripp—Radio On follows an enigmatic young disc jockey (David Beames) as he journeys from London to Bristol to investigate the recent suicide of his brother. Along the way, he goes on several detours in the form of encounters with eccentric strangers, including an Eddie Cochran–obsessed gas station attendant (a boyish Sting), a mentally disturbed soldier, and a pair of women tourists from Germany. Expanses of the desolate countryside, sparse hotel rooms, and the concrete contours of urban motorways are captured in striking monochrome by the German cinematographer Martin Schäfer, a frequent collaborator of Wenders and camera assistant to Robby Müller on such films as Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities, and The American Friend. The influence of those New German Cinema classics can be found in the film’s languorous visual style, interest in psychogeography, and rejection of classical narrative, funneled through Petit’s own distinct vision of his home country.
Four decades after Radio On’s U.S. premiere, a new restoration, which debuted at the 2021 New York Film Festival, is now streaming exclusively on the Criterion Channel. To celebrate the occasion, I spoke to Petit about the making of his cult classic and the role that cinema has played throughout his life.
How did your early career working as a film critic and editor come to bear on your filmmaking?
I was a Time Out magazine editor for about five years, but I wasn’t a vocational critic. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting in movie theaters and writing about movies. At that time, there was still the opportunity for someone who had no qualifications whatsoever to end up making a film. There didn’t appear to be any British movies that addressed what interested me, like movement, landscape, motion, weather, and music. The dominant genre in English cinema was social realism. Because of my job, I was able to talk to Wim Wenders about the script I had written. The New German Cinema directors had always interested me. In Wenders’s Kings of the Road, someone talks about how the German subconscious has been colonized by the Americans. The Germans absorbed American music the way we did in Britain. Even Herzog slapped some Leonard Cohen in one of his films, and you thought, blimey!
I’m curious about what kinds of films were accessible to you when you were growing up in England in the fifties. What were you watching?
It wasn’t until I was sent away to boarding school at the age of nine that cinema became a part of my life. Every other Saturday we were shown a film in the afternoon, and it would be prefaced by two short films. Many of these short films came from an English documentary series called Look at Life, and they were astonishing because they were in color, which was then still a novelty. I was confined to this boarding school but exposed to these images of suburban and urban England that seemed quite attractive. The second series of short films we were shown was a crime series that had to do with sensational murder cases; otherwise we were fed a diet of English films with the occasional western thrown in. Later, I started to make my own inquiries and seek things out.
Was there a particular movement or filmmaker that hooked you and made you want to pursue a career in film?
There was a never a moment when I thought, oh gosh, this is what it’s all about. I either liked an actor or I didn’t. I never liked Cary Grant, so there were a lot of Hitchcock movies I didn’t like. I quite liked James Stewart, so I’d watch westerns he was in, but I wouldn’t watch a John Wayne western because I thought he was kind of dumb. I’d watch Robert Mitchum or Ava Gardner in anything. So I cherry-picked. Luckily, when I was writing about films and working at Time Out, I was allowed to be selective and skip what I didn’t want to see. I liked cheap B movies that told their stories in unique ways. When I discovered the American critic Manny Farber, I thought, at last I’ve found someone with whom I can agree, because I’m not interested in plot. Like Farber, I was concerned with action and the ways in which people move around a room. Because I wasn’t interested in story or dialogue, something like Monte Hellman and Rudy Wurlitzer’s Two-Lane Blacktop was an influence. It taught me that you can get away with characters saying very little.
Radio On shares much in common with the films of the New German Cinema, especially in the way it captures the beauty of mundane spaces. I can’t think of other British films from the seventies and eighties that share this sensibility. I’d love to know more about your relationship to New German Cinema.
I felt a real sense of recognition when I came across New German Cinema. My father was in the army, and when I was about seven my family was sent to Germany for fourteen or fifteen months. So, at a fairly important age, I ended up in this foreign territory. When I was much younger, I’d been taken to Hong Kong for a year, so I was used to being extracted. But the German landscape caught my attention, and I became aware of the country’s historical background. It was the first time I started to ask adult questions. Years later, when I was at Time Out, a couple of Americans named David and Barbara Stone turned up in London, opened the Gate Cinema, and brought over a lot of German films. Suddenly, within a period of six months, we were given a crash course in filmmakers like Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders. It was intense. Watching these films felt like being exposed to a forgotten landscape from my childhood. It was like being shown a photo album and recognizing it. These films gave me a model for the kinds of films I wanted to make; it was like being shown the size of a canvas and a scale on which I could work. I especially took to Fassbinder’s films, which were basically about people sitting in apartments and bars with their friends, and jukeboxes that would occasionally play records you recognized.
What was the initial spark for Radio On?
I was staring at my feet in the bath one day and the radio was on the ledge. I can’t remember what was playing, but I thought, well, that’s like an opening shot of a film. I started getting up early every day to write for an hour before work—just to see if this image could lead to anything. Then I realized I wanted it to involve a journey. I didn’t know what kind of journey, but I was familiar with the route from the east to the west of England, so I drew from my memories of the landscape and put it together piece by piece. Dialogue is largely absent from the film; it’s driven more by music and physical spaces.
What was your writing process like?
With a road movie, you really only have a camera and a car. In those days, I always liked driving, and I was reminded of how a windshield is like a cinema screen. Both cinema and driving are forms of projection. So when I was working on the script I just went for drives. Apart from the feet in the bathtub, I was inspired by cassette machines in cars and this idea of creating an operatic soundtrack for your own journey.
You didn’t have to listen to whatever was being played on the radio. If you wanted to play Kraftwerk, you could. So I wondered, how can I make a film from these observations without getting tied up in the usual narratives of the journey film? How can I make a film about what simply happens to be passing by?
Tell me about collaborating with cinematographer Martin Schäfer.
Robby Müller was Wim Wenders’s main cinematographer, and originally there was talk of him shooting Radio On. In fact, he and I were meant to meet at the Baker Street station in London. But the problem with Baker Street is that it has two exits and two entrances, so we ended up waiting at opposite ends for each other and never met. In any case, I think Robby would have been too experienced. I didn’t know anything about film crews, but I asked Wenders who Robby’s assistant was—I’m amazed I even knew cinematographers had assistants. Martin had shot a couple films on his own, so he was ready. He was very quiet and observant, and when we didn’t have very much to say to each other, I knew things were going well. We took a drive from London down the A4, and when we came to a particularly featureless field with just a pylon, I asked him where he would put the camera. He showed me, and it was in such a way that the pylon was splat in the middle of the screen. I thought, okay, he knows what I want.
The use of black and white also makes the film feel dreamlike, especially in contrast to the social-realist portraits of England being made at the time.
I told Martin early on that I wanted to shoot the film on 35 mm in black and white, and not grey. I thought that if the film was shot in color, we wouldn’t be able to achieve the singularity that I wanted to get across and it would just become about a certain kind of redness of bricks throughout England. He suggested we use Ilford stock, which was an English film stock quite hard to get a hold of. I believe Godard shot Breathless on it.
As a first-time filmmaker, was it difficult to get the film funded?
It was quite easy because of something called the British Film Institute Production Board, which was an experimental film fund for novice filmmakers. The Board had a deal with film unions so that films could be made on very low budgets with skeleton crews. I knew the Board was looking to expand and they had an ambitious head of production, Peter Sainsbury. I was smart enough to work out that if I could secure Wenders as a coproducer, I’d get the money to make the film. It was as straightforward as that.
We had about twelve people working on Radio On, and we all fit into three cars. When I was making my next film, I remember going to one of the locations and counting fifty cars in the driveway. That was just crude. The methods used to make Radio On were very flexible; you knew everyone and could talk to everyone. We made it on something like eighty-five thousand pounds, which couldn’t even buy you a quarter of an apartment these days. I don’t remember feeling uncertain, whereas with other films I’ve made, I often sat around waiting. I’d run into Derek Jarman and ask him what he was up to, and he’d say, “I’m waiting, what are you doing?”
Were you friends with other filmmakers in the UK then?
There were directors like Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach, and Karel Reisz, who came out of a certain tradition that I had no part of. Then there was a slightly yuppyish generation of filmmakers who came out of commercials and advertising, and whose basic ambition was to get into Hollywood—like Ridley Scott, who would probably kill me because of what I wrote about his first film. So, no, I wasn’t hanging out with English filmmakers, but the ones I did know I met through interviews I had done for Time Out, or at film festivals, which is how I became friendly with Herzog. I knew Derek Jarman, who came out of the gothic tradition because he used to work with Ken Russell, and we always got along fine.
I have to ask about Sting and the scene in which he sings at the gas station.
I’m always given a hard time about the Sting part, but back then we didn’t know what he’d go on to become. He’d been in Quadrophenia and had an agent who kept pushing to have him cast in the lead role. I had friends in the music business who didn’t think very highly of the Police, and he’d done adverts for Brutus Jeans, which was enough of a reason to disqualify him. But when we met, he turned up on a really hot day wearing a heavy motorcycle jacket, and I remember thinking, well, gee, you’re going to be a star, aren’t you? The Germans—Schäfer and our sound recordist, Martin Müller—came up with the idea for his scene at the petrol pumps. It was very cold and we didn’t finish what we needed to do that day, so everyone agreed to come back the following week on our Sunday off. We were all grumpy, and the Germans suggested Sting stand by the pumps and sing “Three Steps to Heaven.” I thought it was an awful idea, but it gave him something to look forward to, and I assumed we could always cut it. But the film is so dour up to this point, so the scene lightens the mood. The two Martins were right, and I was wrong.
Do you think Radio On occupies a specific place within British cinema?
Looking back, there wasn’t anything in the UK particularly like it, so in that sense it stands on its own. I think Radio On belongs to a certain tradition of British film; I like to call them “cul-de-sac films,” because they come out at the end of a decade, and you think they will have an influence, but in an odd way they don’t. Another example is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, which pretty much finished his career, and then there was Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance.
Now that Radio On has been restored and is available to stream, how does it feel to revisit the film today?
At the time, I wasn’t sure it even worked. But I do remember being spellbound by the long shot in which the camera is in the back of the car as it comes off the motorway, and we’re waiting at the roundabout while Kraftwerk is playing. But I don’t think we had secured the rights to any of the music for more than five years, so there was no expectation that the film would have any life after that. There is this assumption that Radio On was overlooked, but that wasn’t the case. The critics were quite generous, and the film elicited strong audience reactions. There was a screening at MoMA in 1980 in which the first audience question was from a woman in the back who screamed, “Why did you make such a boring movie?”
Time has actually been kind to the film. When I see it now, it feels less slow than it used to. Despite having no expectations for its future, I did tell Martin Schäfer that if anyone digs the film up in twenty-five years’ time, I would like it to not look embarrassing, that it should be quite classical. So we had certain fashion rules, such as no flared trousers. In fact, we dressed the protagonist in suits, which was not common at the time—nor was his haircut. In retrospect, I was quite picky about the way things looked, but I think my judgments were sound.
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