Shining light on life less ordinary In The Look of Love, Steve Coogan (with Tamsin Egerton) plays pornographer and property magnate Paul Raymond, who became one of England's richest men. THE Look of Love is, at least for director Michael Winterbottom, a conventional film. In conventional terms, it is a biopic. Trust the director of 24 Hour Party People, 9 Songs and The Trip to make a biographical film about a man who appears to have been a fractured soul, an enigma. "Yes, but one of the things I like about real stories is it's hard to structure a coherent narrative around a real story because real stories don't have the coherence and shape that a lot of fiction has," Winterbottom says. But that coherence (in someone's life) is a kind of fiction. Sometimes it's so removed from the real world it's like it's not a question about me making a film that shows a simpler truth but actually it's just a faulty truth. The focus of The Look of Love, the enigma, is Paul Raymond. In kind terms, he was an English publisher, real estate developer and club owner who died in 2008, aged 82. In less flattering terms, he was a strip-club owner and pornographer who became, through his rapacious acquisition of real estate in London's red-light district Soho, one of England's richest men. Of itself, Raymond's King Midas tale is an interesting one. But as Winterbottom came to realise as he researched the film, Raymond was not an easy figure to pin down. Winterbottom had no intimate knowledge of the man before comedian Steve Coogan suggested Raymond would be an interesting character for him to play. The duo previously had collaborated on 24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and The Trip, and Winterbottom tends to extract the best of Coogan as film actor (his television and web performances as Alan Partridge or one of the Calfs are other matters). Winterbottom says, laughing, "if I was being really honest" Coogan's enthusiasm was the starting point for diving into a strange man's life. Yet he also saw the attraction of a man whose career went from unsuccessful mind reader to one of the richest men in Britain in a tale that spans five decades, the ups and downs of Soho and Britain's changing attitude to sex. "There's tonnes and tonnes of interesting material so it was more about which things to pick really," Winterbottom says. More important, though, was Coogan's attraction, the director adds knowingly. "It would seem like there was enough aspects that Steve and Paul shared that it would be an interesting character for him to play," he says. Indeed. Coogan has taken in Winterbottom's film and television series, The Trip, to pillorying his own reputation as a drug-using, commitment-phobic Lothario. His self-deprecating artistic portrayals of himself have wandered into sometimes disturbing territory. Winterbottom says it isn't as simple as Coogan believing he shares any aspects of Raymond's nature, particularly his headline-grabbing carousing - that would make the job easy. "Well, Steve's playing a character, but it's not so much that aspect which they share," he notes. From Steve's point of view, the fact Paul Raymond's from the north of England, was brought up as a good Catholic, was a grammar school boy, then went on to make his fortune down south and in the media, those are broad things that are kind of similar. Coogan, like Raymond or any other person in the public eye, has "obviously had their ups and downs." Those are the broad things they share, but Paul Raymond was quite a strange character. In their research, the duo discovered everyone had a different version of who he was, which was enticing for Coogan. "In a way he was a bit of a blank and led to the idea that Steve could in a way project aspects of himself back on to that character," Winterbottom says. The director has made other films based on real people, including A Mighty Heart, starring Angelina Jolie and based on the book by Mariane Pearl about the kidnapping and execution of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, by al-Qai'da in Pakistan). "Usually you gradually pull up a sense of who that person was and there's a rough amount of agreement," he says. They didn't get that with Raymond, perhaps because of the different way different people relate to him, from his granddaughters, who now control his fortune, to business partners, models, lawyers, police and more across changing periods of London history. Which brings him back to the difficulty of portraying an enigma. Winterbottom knew the "traditional 19th-century novel idea" of showing a real character whose life was coherent and followed a journey wasn't Raymond's reality. "He just did whatever was required in different situations," he observes. "When we were scripting, one of the key scenes was when Fiona Richmond (played beautifully by Tamsin Egerton) leaves Paul and he's left alone in his flat and he just sort of collapses," Winterbottom recalls. That's Paul Raymond by himself in a way that doesn't really exist. He only comes to life in a transaction with someone else and he would do whatever's required in different situations. In a sense our portrayal of him being fractured is maybe just who he was as a person. There wasn't necessarily any coherence between one aspect of his life and another aspect of his life. And that, to a director such as Winterbottom, is appealing, he adds, because the notion that any character is a good person or bad person or acts logically at all times is faux. Inconsistency and fragmentation is "more like the real world," he says. Of course, that's at odds with filmmaking's popular structure of the three-act hero's journey. "Yeah, that probably makes your films more popular but it's not a structure I particularly enjoy," Winterbottom says. A British newspaper recently ventured that Winterbottom and Coogan's collaborations are one of the most valuable in British cinema, ranking with Peter Morgan and Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon and The Queen), and Hugh Grant and Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill). Winterbottom says since the portrayal of the Manchester music scene in the 1980s and 90s in 24 Hour Party People, the duo have been trying to find projects to work on together although the production process means it always takes longer than they expect to bring films to fruition. "You never do as many things together as you want," he says. But Steve's a really great performer. Being a comedian and someone who generates his own material, he always brings stuff to a character and a role, and it's always fun working with him. You kind of hope that if you enjoy the process at work, that some of that will come out in the film. Are they similar? Winterbottom hesitates. No, well, yeah. No, not particularly, but we have enough in common that we understand each other. And they understood, no matter what the similarities, they shouldn't judge the King of Soho, master pornographer and enigma Raymond in The Look of Love. "When you're making a film you don't want to moralise within the film about them," Winterbottom says. You want to present that world from inside that world. You have to try and be in that world rather than keep pointing out that there are aspects to this that are wrong. When you watch a film you should be thinking about what you feel about things rather than someone in the film telling you how you should feel about something. I hope the film kind of feels like it's from within that world because that's what I kind of see my job is as a filmmaker. The Look of Love opens on Thursday.