What do you think about the state of music today?

JT: I think there's great music out but not any great commercial music. That's a kind of contradiction. It's certainly much harder for really good music to be seen as commercial or meeting a mass audience than it was in the past. I think that's partly the problem. There is great music out there but people don't get to hear it. Same with movies. You're fighting a machine that only wants you to hear shit. I saw a punk band in London -- which normally would scare me, but now how pathetic that idea is. The band was really [good] but they'll never get an album. A lot of people don't think [so], but there are still people who do [good music] and what they do is as good as it ever was.

Was Joe Strummer unhappy after the Clash broke up?

JT: I didn't really know him at the time. I was working with the Pistols already. I was given the ultimatum by the Clash: "Us or them." So I didn't really see The Clash very much for like 20 years. I did bump into them, funny enough, [when] Joe came down to where I lived, by chance, to Somerset. He was on his way out of that [dark] period. I got the feeling he was very lost and haunted by a lot of things and unable to find a direction that made sense to him. A lot of people I got to know [who were] close to him didn't [recognize] that thinking. Sometimes you'd get the sense that was a really dark place he was in.

It seemed so long between the Clash and [Strummer's last band] the Mescaleros. I wondered where he'd been.

JT: He was always capable. That was exciting to me because I was part of seeing that process. He did really do it around campfires. He would find musicians and talk to them in-depth around the fire and he'd play incredibly diverse music around the campfire -- music from different cultures. You could see him piecing a way to the Mescaleros between different fires. He had different attempts at it with characters that weren't in the final lineup of the Mescaleros. That was really interesting, it wasn't overnight.

Was he really haunted by his brother's suicide?

JT: I think he was. He never really talked to me about it. He spoke with my wife when we were living with Joe in Somerset, because she lost her brother to suicide. Joe was very responsive to her and what she was feeling but he wouldn't talk to most people about it. He did say that he made a point of thinking about it once a day.

Is that similar to a political or world view of --

JT: Yeah, I think Joe saw him as a real victim of that school system. And I think Joe saw himself as a survivor who had to move as far away from what he expected to become as a product of that system. So it did have a sort of springboard effect on what Joe would become. I don't think it was a kind of a 'rosebud' thing to what Joe Strummer is.

Joe Strummer wrote a lot of notes to himself. Was he always writing randomly or did he have a diary?

JT: He was constantly doing that. I think it came from writing lyrics. By the end it became a thing in itself, it didn't have to be part of a lyric, if he thought something he'd write it down. He had plastic carrier bags of these doodles in his bath. It's funny, he could slam the door on different parts of his life and still get away with these carrier bags full of doodles and ideas. He was funny. He did have a sense of some kind of destiny about him. Some sense he'd do something important. Maybe everyone does but he certainly delivered on that.

What else are you working on?

JT: I've just done an opera film, actually. It's called The Eternity Man, it's an Australian Opera. I had Guy Pearce wanting to do it for a while and it's a difficult decision but in the end he couldn't do the arias. Opera is quite an art. We tried out musical theatre people and they couldn't do it. It's not like you can master the technique in two weeks. It's probably harder to get actors to sing but it's hard all around. These opera singers are used to having to hit the back rows. It's never going to be the same as in a regular close up, they're singing, but we did need to find a way to get them to feel 'in the moment.' I also didn't realize how important counting and conducting is. We actually had a conductor off-screen conducting and keeping time, white gloves and all. They [the singers] are actually looking at this conductor and then trying to deal with entering and how to act in each scene.
Are you working on any other music biopics?

JT: I don't want to do another one like this immediately. You know, you get pigeonholed. And they're hard to do, energy-wise. It's quite nice to have a script when you edit. You know: This shot goes next to this one and that one before this, whereas [in a documentary] you've got all this footage for this film and there's a million ways to put it together. So I'd like to work on some narrative films, but I'd like to be free with them the way I have been with these [documentaries]; where I've not been told so much what to do. I have a project called Wise Children by novelist Angela Carter, who died in the early 1990s. I have a thriller about Christopher Marlowe, the playwright from the time of Shakespeare. I do want to do a film on The Kinks at some point. I'm sort of searching and not quite ready. Though I think that would have to have a layer of fiction involved in it.

What do you hope a young person who doesn't know anything about the Clash might take away from this film?

JT: That you can create a whole code of liberties when you're young that you don't have to give up on when you're older. I think a lot of people grow out of who they were and that paradigm of having joy making whatever it is they make. They don't have to take on that paradigm of thought that once they grow up they have to let go of their right to think. I love that about Joe: he had a code he created when he was young -- though you don't have to come up with it when you're young -- and he held by it. He knew you don't have to abandon those ways of thinking when you get older. You're forced to do it on many levels but in the core part of you, you don't have to do that. And Joe was a philosopher. He really enjoyed thinking things through and trying to find a new way of looking at whatever it was. I think that's very good for everyone.