1. Michael Winterbottom was born on 29 March 1961 and is an English film director.
24 Facts About Michael Winterbottom
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Michael Winterbottom began his career working in British television before moving into features.
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Michael Winterbottom followed this with the 1990 television film Forget About Me, starring Ewen Bremner, which followed two British soldiers who become involved in a love triangle with a young Hungarian hitch-hiker on their way to Budapest for a Simple Minds concert.
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Michael Winterbottom next directed the 1994 mini-series Family, written by Roddy Doyle, the author of The Commitments.
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Michael Winterbottom's final early television project was a 1995 episode of the documentary series Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood, focusing on Scandinavian silent cinema.
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Michael Winterbottom followed that with 1999's With or Without You, a Belfast-set comedy starring Christopher Eccleston, about a couple trying desperately to conceive, who each have past loves re-enter their lives.
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Michael Winterbottom's biggest-budgeted film up to that point, at $20 million, his 2000 film The Claim was an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge set in 1860s California.
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Michael Winterbottom's 2005 film A Cock and Bull Story, released in the United States and Australia as Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, is an adaptation of the famously "unfilmable" The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, an early novel.
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In 2009, Michael Winterbottom was reunited with his The Road to Guantanamo co-director Mat Whitecross on a documentary based on Naomi Klein's bestselling book The Shock Doctrine.
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Michael Winterbottom's 2010 film The Killer Inside Me is an adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1952 noir novel.
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Michael Winterbottom's 2011 Trishna is a modern retelling of Tess of the d'Urbervilles is his third Thomas Hardy film.
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Michael Winterbottom filmed a second series of the hit BBC show The Trip To Italy in the summer of 2013 in Italy.
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Michael Winterbottom reunited with Coogan and Brydon for The Trip to Spain in 2017, a third six-episode series in which the duo travel through Spain.
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Michael Winterbottom began filming his portion of this film on 5 September 2020.
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Michael Winterbottom co-directed the 2022 documentary Eleven Days in May, which focused on the deaths of over 60 Palestinian children killed during the Israeli bombing of Gaza over an eleven day period in May 2021.
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Originally titled This Sceptred Isle, Michael Winterbottom was set to direct every episode of the miniseries, which he co-wrote with Kieron Quirke.
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However, after filming began in February 2021, Michael Winterbottom stepped down from directing in March, reportedly due to health issues.
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In February 2025, Michael Winterbottom began production on Gaza Year Zero.
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Sawwaf is directing on location in Gaza, while Michael Winterbottom is co-directing and editing in London.
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In June 2025, Michael Winterbottom was scheduled to begin filming a new series of The Trip, with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
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In 2017, it was announced that Michael Winterbottom was developing a 10-part TV series with Annapurna Pictures about the war in Syria, focusing on the involvement of foreign journalists and Non-governmental organizations.
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Michael Winterbottom first announced in May 2017 that he was researching the project.
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Michael Winterbottom was attached in May 2011 to direct Bailout, an adaptation of author Jess Walter's novel The Financial Lives of the Poets, which Walter adapted for the screen.
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In 2021, Michael Winterbottom published Dark Matter: Independent Filmmaking in the 21st Century, a book about the workings of the British independent film industry.