24 Hour Party People director Michael Winterbottom has spoken to NME about capturing the “attitude and spirit” of Factory Records with the cult-classic film, ahead of it returning to cinemas for its 24th anniversary.

The riotous Madchester music biopic, originally released in 2002, hits the big screen again in UK and Ireland cinemas today (Friday October 9), remastered in 4K. It’ll be available digitally and on 4K UHD disc on October 26.  

Steve Coogan stars as charismatic Granada TV presenter Tony Wilson, who set up the iconic indie label Factory in 1978, after being inspired by an early Sex Pistols gig. He would go on to sign some of the most influential bands of that era, including Joy Division, Happy Mondays and A Certain Ratio. Wilson (aka Mr Manchester) also co-founded the legendary Haçienda nightclub, co-owned by Factory and New Order.

Winterbottom (The Trip, Wolf Alice: On The Road) spoke to NME ahead of a premiere screening as part of Manchester’s Beyond The Music 2026 conference on Tuesday (October 6), where he took part in a special Q&A with Coogan and producer Andrew Eaton.

The filmmaker told us about the unique way he brought the vibrant period in music history to life with 24 Hour Party People – a “blackly comic tale” that spans the late 1970s to the early ’90s. “I think it’s really unusual for any area of cultural activity to have such a big impact on a place like Manchester, as Tony Wilson and Factory Records had with their music,” Winterbottom explained.

Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson in ’24 Hour Party People’. CREDIT Altitude

“For me, the starting point of making it all those years ago was just the attitude and spirit of Factory and Tony Wilson, and all the bands. It just seemed really attractive, the idea that people do what they wanna do. It might be chaotic, it might be a bit stupid at times – but actually, music came out of it.”

He said this spirit wasn’t borne from “anarchy” but rather “freedom, and to some extent chaos”, adding: “That was the motivation for wanting to make it, and try to capture that. It doesn’t matter what year you’re in – let people get on with what they wanna do, don’t tell them what to do, try and experiment, and find things that they want to make.”

Check out the full interview below, where Winterbottom also discussed why Coogan was perfect for the role, the challenges of recreating the Haçienda, the “totally chaotic” final night of filming when New Order turned up to DJ, and how Peter Hook helped during pre-production.

NME: Hi, Michael. Was it important to have the freedom to improvise to capture the Factory and Manchester spirit, and include the meta aspects and nods to camera?

Michael Winterbotton: “I like improvising, generally. We’ve done quite a few films like that before, and we definitely had that approach on 24 Hour…. We were shooting digitally, just seeing what happened there, and hoping that the environment felt as natural as possible and the actors felt as comfortable as possible. They could just try and respond to what’s going on around them.

“We wanted to try and make the film in the spirit of Factory Records, in that time and place. Tony Wilson put a lot of those great punk bands on TV back in the early days. We were definitely deliberately trying to be as sort of loose and baggy and improvised as possible on our film.

“In terms of the narrating, the looks to camera and that, it was partly that obviously there was a lot of disparate material. At the beginning, especially, we thought we had lots of different bands. It was covering quite a long period of time, so it felt a useful way of narrating it.”

And you embraced Tony being an unreliable narrator…

“Very unreliable! Tony Wilson was great. When we went to see him the first time and said that we wanted to try and make the film, he told us lots of great stories. He was incredibly helpful and giving. Then later, when the film was finished, he claimed that a lot of the stories were rubbish, and he didn’t know who’d told us the stories. So he was a very unreliable narrator.

“Tony Wilson was a TV presenter, and I grew up in Blackburn. Within our film, we see the archive of him presenting bands back in the ’70s. It felt like that would be quite a natural and easy way of also him presenting towards the audience in the cinema some elements of the story. So that it felt like it would come quite organically out of the material we’re filming.”

Were there any stories too wild to include? Did anyone take issue with what you put in there?

“I think by the end, people felt we were doing it in the right spirit. It was a celebration of the music, a celebration of Manchester. So there weren’t too many people worried. There were one or two. I remember Tony’s first wife [Lindsay] – she has a small role in the film and told us lots of stuff. We had her having sex in the toilet with [Buzzcocks‘] Howard Devoto. Then she complained that it wasn’t in the toilet, it was somewhere else. So we put a little thing in – added a voiceover, I think. She was still upset, and then she did sue us or there was some sort of legal action against us.”

Steve Coogan and Michael Winterbottom on the set of ’24 Hour Party People’. CREDIT: Altitude

And Mick Hucknall stopped speaking to Steve over his dig at the end…

“If that’s what Steve says, I’m sure it’s true. But to be fair to Steve, that [line, ‘You were right about Mick Hucknall. His music’s rubbish, and he’s a ginger’] was definitely in the script. So it wasn’t Steve’s fault.”

Steve said the role broke him out of feeling typecast after Alan Partridge. Why was he right for the part? There are some parallels between the characters, both being frustrated local broadcasters. The hand-gliding scene felt particularly Partridge…

“When we first had the idea, included in that first conversation in a bar in the middle of nowhere, was that it should be Steve Coogan playing Tony Wilson. So right from the beginning, I felt like he was the best person – possibly the only person – who’d be right for him. I hadn’t met Steve before at all, but obviously he was in Alan Partridge, and I thought he was brilliant in that. Obviously Steve’s from Manchester, so that made sense. He knew Tony Wilson because some of the first comedy on TV he’d done, he’d been on things that Tony had been doing. He was part of that world.

“But yeah, you’re right. I first saw Tony Wilson as a child when he was a TV presenter. I always really loved the idea that in the daytime he was doing that sort of hand-gliding, kind of funny local news reporting stuff, and then in the evening doing all this amazing music. I just felt that strange dichotomy, of seemingly contradictory things to be one person, would be an area which would be really interesting to explore and funny, and that Steve would be brilliant at doing that.”

Steve said he landed the part in The White Lotus because creator Mike White loved 24 Hour Party People. Did you see that?

“I didn’t see that – that’s good! [Laughs]”

It’s cool that a cult film showing a more niche, underground pocket of northern England could cross over to US audiences…

“I mean, Mike White’s quite into music. It obviously isn’t mainstream music in America, but on the other hand, the people who really love that music… there is that audience. I think people there who love the music are really passionate about it. So I guess the film would have crossover from that point of view. I remember when we first showed it in America, Moby was doing quite a lot of stuff with us in New York because he really loved New Order. There are definitely people there who love it.”

Steve Coogan in ’24 Hour Party People’. CREDIT: Altitude

Tony said it was a “risky film” to make because a lot of movies “fail miserably” to capture moments of British youth culture. Why do you think you succeeded?

“Well, I hope we succeeded. It felt very like the attitude of Manchester. For six weeks, two months, we could pretend we were in that world, try and recreate it, but also just try and experience it. We had a great cast. A lot of the actors who came and took part, I think, were doing that because they loved the music, and they could imagine they were in the band. As someone who’s making films, it felt like music was much freer, much more enjoyable than cinema. A lot of bands know each other as teenagers; they sort of grow up together. They start off at home, and gradually their music gets heard around the world.

“That sort of grassroots up thing doesn’t really exist in cinema. When you want to make a film, you have to go to a big corporation or organisation and persuade someone at the top to give you a lot of money. So it’s very top down in cinema rather than bottom up. I think we all of us just thought, ‘Well, let’s enjoy ourselves’.”

How was the task of recreating the torn-down Haçienda to scale? 

“When we started pre-production, it was actually still standing. Me and Mark Tildesley, the designer, had a tour of it all there. It was really frustrating. We were like, ‘Here it is’. It was still pretty good nick, if I remember. But it was like, ‘Actually, by the time you start filming, it won’t be here anymore’. So we had to find a warehouse somewhere else, and then build it. Mark did such a good job that we then got sued by the architect because he said we’d infringed the copyright of his designs because, basically, it was exactly like the original Haçienda. We thought someone would be flattered or pleased that we got it right. Instead, it’s like, ‘You should have paid me to borrow my plans’.”

’24 Hour Party People’. CREDIT: Altitude

The real New Order even came down to DJ. I imagine all the extras had a blast filming those party scenes, too?  

“It was right at the very end of the shoot, and so the idea was: rather than just have extras and go out and recruit people, it was more like, ‘Let’s have it as a club night and let’s have tickets by invitation’. I think Andrew organised it, but maybe [former Haçienda DJ] Dave Haslam was involved. The whole thing was going continuously for four or five hours, and we were just filming stuff in the middle of the club. Because it was the end, the various bands and musicians were more comfortable with what we were trying to do, and it felt like they relaxed a little bit about whether we were doing it right or not.

“And so New Order were down there, and at the end, Bernard Sumner was up in the DJ booth wanting it to carry on and carry on playing. For me, that night was like totally chaotic – just running around with a camera in my hand all night. I think for everyone there it wasn’t like extras and, ‘OK, now we’re filming, you do this now’. It was just like, ‘OK, put the music on and let’s go’.”

How did you go about choosing the songs for the soundtrack?

“The biggest difference between the original idea and how the film ended up was originally it was like it’d be a whole tapestry of Manchester bands. So we originally had lots and lots of music, and Tony would guide us through this sort of family tree – almost a chaotic jigsaw of Manchester music. Then gradually, in the writing of the script, and then a little bit in the filming, and a little bit in the editing, it narrowed down to make it more manageable.

“In the end, that central strand of Joy Division to New Order to Happy Mondays kind of dominates the soundtrack. There’s not a huge amount of space out on the side, whereas perhaps originally it would have been a bit more all-encompassing. To be honest, there’s so much music in the film that a lot of the soundtrack is from that, and then just picking, picking what you like on top of that.”

And you had Peter Hook doing the DVD commentary…

“I didn’t know that! He was really helpful in pre-production. The design team were really keen to try and get everything as right as possible. I think Peter was very helpful in pointing them in the right direction to try and find the original guitar or original bass or whatever.”

What was the experience like of having real-life figures from the era making cameos? You’ve got Rowetta, Mani, Mark E. Smith and more appearing alongside the fictionalised musicians…

“All that was fun, and we wanted as much of that as possible. Rowetta was brilliant. She was able to try and get everyone else playing the Mondays to sort of be as much in the spirit of the band as possible. [Happy Mondays bassist] Paul Ryder came in and did a sort of gangster; Mark E. Smith was in a queue somewhere. At the wrap party, people like Bez were definitely there.”

Have you thought about making any more music films?

“Of course, there’s always loads of stuff you could do around music – but for me I just really loved that moment of Factory. Tony, in particular, and Factory really transformed Manchester. It never struck me that Manchester was particularly a massive party town any more than anywhere else when I was growing up. But nowadays, its reputation is that it’s a great place to be out at night. A lot of my daughter’s friends went to university there, just because they thought they were going to have a bloody good time of it. They’re out there, and would be out there all night partying.”

’24 Hour Party People: 24th Anniversary 4K Re-release’ is out in UK and Ireland cinemas now. 

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