'I directed for Harvey Weinstein and three words he said terrify me to this day'

Director Tim Pope was scarred by an incident with Harvey Weinstein that makes his “blood run cold to this day”.

By the second half of the Nineties, Pope, now 70, had made a name for himself as a boundary-pushing music video director, responsible for visualising songs from the likes of The Cure, Iggy Pop, Neil Young and Queen.

He caught the attention of disgraced Oscar-winning producer Weinstein, who was revered in Hollywood at the time.

Weinstein and his brother Bob asked Pope to direct The Crow: City Of Angels, the 1996 sequel to superhero film The Crow, for their production company Miramax.

In Pope’s new autobiography, I Shoot Rock Stars, he details the difficulties he had shooting the film, as he had a completely different vision than the Weinstein brothers – who were decidedly unhappy with his work.

After screening an “awful” cut of the film, Pope remembers going to a bar with the pair. “Harvey Weinstein said three words that terrify me and make my blood run cold to this day: ‘We own you’.

And I realised they did own me at that moment. I was such a free spirit, and to feel like I was owned – particularly by them – was not a pleasant thing. They were very full of threat, and they operated like hyenas.”

Going into the film, Pope says he knew Harvey Weinstein had a “quite extreme” reputation, but it was hard to turn down the allure of Hollywood.

“I walked onto the set at this huge stage at Universal Studios, and I had a metaphorical suit of armour on, because I had an inkling – I wasn’t stupid. But then they started to prise it off me and [I was] stark bollock naked,” he recounts.

Weinstein is currently in prison for rape and sexual assault, his case helping the Me Too movement go viral in 2017.

Pope says he was “shattered by the experience and broken”, and hasn’t made a feature film since – but reliving it in his memoir has been particularly “cathartic” for him in helping get “rid of the past”.

Even though Brighton-based Pope says he “swore” he would never write a book, he started penning I Shoot Rock Stars five years ago after a friend sent over something from his past: “A message from David Bowie on an old answering machine from the Nineties.”

The message itself is fairly nondescript – just Bowie saying he’ll call back later – but hearing it years after the musician’s 2016 death was “especially haunting”, Pope says.

The two had worked together over the years, most notably when Pope filmed Bowie’s 50th birthday show at Madison Square Garden in 1997, and it inspired the director to relive his career in a bit more depth.

The book is full of encounters with music royalty (think Neil Young, Freddie Mercury, Lou Reed and more), and scandalous music video shoots – including Queen’s It’s A Hard Life, where Pope dressed Mercury in an outfit that was dubbed a “giant Mediterranean prawn”, and Soft Cell’s infamous Sex Dwarf video, which involved, among other things, raw meat, blood, themes of S&M and live maggots.

The 1982 Sex Dwarf video, which was never officially released due to its scandalous nature, “remains banned to this day, 40 years later”.

He’s now more keenly aware of his penchant for pushing the boundaries, saying: “I was quite shocked when I wrote the book about just how naughty I was – anything I could do to create mischief or test things, that was what I was clearly doing.”

Pope grew up in the quiet and leafy London suburb of Enfield, the son of two bank employees – so where did this come from? “Something in my DNA,” Pope says simply.

“Something in me – no answer beyond that.” It helped that Pope was working in the Eighties and Nineties, often seen as the ‘golden age’ of music videos thanks to the advent of MTV (launched in 1981 in America, and the UK in 1987) and ballooning budgets.

“There were these 15 years where videos were quite powerful and mad, and the chequebooks were flung wide open. We were encouraged to go as mad as we could,” Pope notes.

The director credits a lot of his vision to growing up with restrictions – in I Shoot Rock Stars, he recounts acquiring his first film camera, but he could only pretend to use it due to the high price of 8mm film stock.

“I was never a punk, but I grew up on that punk ethos about getting up and doing it against the odds. I think it’s quite good when you’ve got a wall to bang your head against – so when I couldn’t afford film, I was fantasising about making films.

“From when I was four years old, that’s what I wanted to do. Rather boring in some ways, but it’s what I’ve always, always wanted to do. Restrictions are really brilliant because what they help do is focus your mind.”

One of Pope’s closest working relationships has been with The Cure – directing more than 30 videos for songs like Lullaby and Close To Me – with lead singer Robert Smith penning a foreward for his memoir.

And more work is to come, with Pope set to direct a documentary for The Cure to celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary in 2028.

Pope plans on making his long-awaited return to feature film – years after having his confidence knocked by the Weinsteins.

He suggests he wants to do it “while I’ve still got this energy – which I do have. I’ve got a scary energy that people cannot keep up with, sometimes in a bad way. That’s why I want to make my film, while I’ve still got this energy – I presume I’ll have it just for a little bit more.”

I Shoot Rock Stars by Tim Pope is published by Wildfire, £25.