Julien Temple

Julien
Temple is a multi-award winning film director with a special interest
in punk and cult music of the UK. In 1976 he released his first film
Sex Pistols Number 1 which launched Temple into a career making music
videos where he worked with the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and the
Kinks as well as others. He then directed influential alternative
comedy The Comic Strip with Rik Mayall and Jennifer Saunders. In the
mid-80s Temple worked with David Bowie again on a short Jazzin’ For Blue Jean after which he adapted Colin MacInnes’ book Absolute Beginners into a musical featuring Patsy Kensit and David Bowie.

He
relocated to Hollywood where Tony Garnett
employed
him to direct Earth Girls Are Easy in 1988. The resulting film
achieved worldwide cult status. Temple
went on to direct Bullet (1996) featuring Tupac Shakur and Mickey
Rourke which was released a month after Shakur’s murder. Back
in the UK Temple made a series of films in the late 1990s including
Vigo (1998), and Pandaemonium (2000), a critically acclaimed film
about the friendship between Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge
and William Wordsworth which won the Evening Standard Film Best Actor
award for Linus Roache.
He
continued investigating influential music acts in the 2000s with the
critically acclaimed The Filth And The Fury, a picture about the Sex
Pistols. He then directed Glastonbury, a chronicle of thirty years of
the music festival.

Temple
then directed The Future Is Unwritten celebrating the life of his
close friend Joe Strummer of the Clash. It premiered at Sundance in
2007 and won the BIFA award for best documentary. His
2008 narrative opera film for Channel 4 Eternity Man won him the
Golden Rose award at Montreux 2009 and the Silver Medal at the New
York Television awards.
Temple’s
Requiem For Detroit (2010) won the Grierson Award for Best Historical
Documentary, whilst that same year his Imaginary Man for Alan Yentob
at BBC, a biography of long term collaborator and Kinks songwriter
Ray Davies, screened on Christmas Eve at prime time on BBC 1.

He
continues to make videos for the likes of Ray Davies, Pete Doherty
and a posthumous Jimi Hendrix release, and is currently working on
You Really Got Me, the story of the intense love/hate relationship
between brothers Ray and Dave Davies, which fuelled the creative
force behind the legendary British band The Kinks.