How To “Be Anarchy:” Making Danny Boyle’s Punk Manifesto ‟Pistol”

“It’s so not the story that everybody wants to be told,” says Boyle, “but it is the story that should be told.”

It’s no coincide that FX’s Pistol punk miniseries arrives during Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee.

(That’s a celebration of the UK’s monarch being on the throne for 70 years, and if you like that sort of thing, then good for you! If not, then in the UK, at least, we get a couple days’ holiday.)

In 1977, occasion of the queen’s Silver Jubilee, The Sex Pistol’s ‟God Save The Queen“ single was released, with the punk rockers’ reference to “the fascist regime” shocking the establishment.

The album from which it came, Never Mind The Bollocks, is a bone fide classic, #125 on Rolling Stones’ all time 500 list (per the 2021 update), even if that’s the last thing the band’s members would have wanted.

Now director Danny Boyle has helmed a miniseries about the band which ended in notorious front man John Ritchie AKA Sid Vicious’ death of an overdose after the (possible) murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen.

That the six-part series is made for Disney-owned FX may be one reason Johnny Rotten, one of the band’s original members, has refused to endorse the show; but that’s par for the course, and Boyle says wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I want Johnny Rotten to attack it!” Boyle told The Guardian. “It’s so not the story that everybody wants to be told, but it is the story that should be told.”

Sex Pistols on the Big Screen

The Pistols’ story has already been made into the feature Sid and Nancy (starring Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb directed by Alex Cox), and The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle — orchestrated by the band’s manager Malcolm McLaren to claim the whole thing was a contrivance to make money.

In 2000, the band members released their own movie, The Filth and the Fury, but IndieWire claims Boyle’s is by far the most ambitious.

It is based on guitarist Steve Jones’s autobiography, Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, and stars Toby Wallace as Jones, Anson Boon as John Lyndon (Rotten), Louis Partridge as Sid Vicious, and Emma Appleton as Spungen.

The Sex Pistols were the “philosophers and the dress code” of the punk revolution. Boyle tells the New York Times, “I tried to make the series in a way that was chaotic and true to the Pistols’ manifesto.”

That meant taking an experimental approach to filming: “We would just run whole scenes, whole performances, without knowing if we had captured the ‘right’ shot or not. It’s everything you’ve been taught not to do.”

Before filming began, the actors playing the members of the Sex Pistols spent two months in “band camp,” with a daily routine of music lessons, vocal coaching and movement practice tutored by Karl Hyde and Rick Smith from the British electronic music group Underworld.

To keep some of that raw, DIY edge Boyle also decided not to do any postproduction work on the music. This was apparently a passion project for the director of Yesterday, a Beatles-soundtracked romantic comedy.

“I am very music-driven, but I never imagined doing the Pistols,” he said. “I had followed John Lydon’s career closely, and the hostility he felt for the others wasn’t a secret.”

But after reading the script, Boyle immediately said “yes,” an answer he describes as “ridiculous since I didn’t even know if we would have the music, the most important thing.”

Lydon opposed both the use of the Sex Pistols’s music and the series itself, but eventually lost his court case when a judge ruled that the terms of a band agreement gave Cook and Jones a majority vote. Boyle said he had attempted to contact Lydon during the dispute. He added that he hoped the series would “reveal the genius and the humility” in the frontman.

Flattery got him nowhere with Lydon, who told the Sunday Times that Pistol was “the most disrespectful shit I’ve ever had to endure.”

(Though Lydon arguably sold out years ago, if you look at his appearance as a contestant on the reality show I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here in 2004 and his subsequent promotion in commercials for a brand of British butter).

According to his interview in the Guardian, Boyle believes that one of the advantages of streaming (as opposed to telling the story as a 90-minute feature) “is that it’s willing to take on board that kind of complexity — and look for the attachment of the audience not through quite such easy tropes: the lovable one, the hero moment, where he’s not quite as bad as you thought he was.”

Punk’s Outsize Influence on Boyle

He tells Esquire that the show got made: “If I’m being brutally honest, I think it was more to do with my age and ability to get it made. I wanted to do punk because it was the big formative experience for me, and it’s overshadowed everything I’ve done.”

Arguably you could trace a lineage of punk in Boyle’s own work; heroin addiction in Trainspotting, to which be brought an energy outside of mainstream filmmaking, and traced through Slumdog Millionaire (a rags-to-riches saga set in Bombay) — though it’s a stretch to call the Boyle of Steve Jobs, 28 Days Later and The Beach a punk filmmaker.

He also cemented establishment credentials by directing the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics, which featured Daniel Craig’s 007 on Her Majesty’s service to launch the Games.

Music aside (Boyle was 21 in 1977, just the perfect age for punk rebellion), it is the director’s working class, Northern England roots that are the strongest through line in his work from Shallow Grave to Pistol.

The Pistols “were a bunch of working class guys who broke the order of things, more than the Beatles,” he tells the New York Times. “It was especially resonant in the UK, where the way you were expected to behave was so entrenched.”

The line: “There is no future in England’s dreaming” is arguably even more political today, post-Brexit, than it was when James Callaghan was PM.

Perhaps Boyle’s most punk career moment was choosing to stick by his guns and the creative vision of regular screen writing collaborator Andrew Hodge when disagreements arose in the making of No Time To Die. Boyle was fired and hints to Esquire that the issue had to do with the way they used Bond’s child as a plot device.

Perhaps getting caught up in the machine, as he did with Bond, is a mode of working to which Boyle is not fundamentally suited.

“I’m much better under the radar a bit,” Boyle told The New York Times in 2007, “and actually figuring out how to make things work.”

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