In 2001 Paul Cotter watched his father stare up into the sky in the German village of Peenemünde, which the elder Cotter had bombed 60 years before as a 19-year-old Royal Air Force pilot during World War II.
Cotter, who lives in LA, says his movie’s premiere in Chicago will be a “homecoming of sorts”: from 1998 to 2008, he cut his teeth and developed a career here as a director of short films, commercials, and theater.
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Cotter grew up in the resort town of Brighton on England’s south coast and was the first in his family to attend college, studying geography at the University of Manchester. After graduating in 1989, he returned to Brighton and went on the dole.
Evidently the BBC mistook this for persistence, and though they still didn’t have a paying job for him, they invited him to work as a volunteer reporter. “They gave me a microphone and a tape recorder, and I went out, and it came naturally to me,” Cotter says. “My stuff started getting on the air.” He did feature stories for the station’s magazine show Sussex Scene and interviewed bands including Throwing Muses and Happy Mondays for the rock show Turn It Up.
He had a temporary work visa but no green card, so he split his time between Chicago and London for the next several years. “I’m very fond of the city,” he says of Chicago. “It’s a place where you can expand and try things out and get things done. There’s always an uphill struggle because it’s under the shadow of LA and New York. That makes for a sleeves-rolled-up spirit that’s nice to tap into both with films and theater.”
“I’ve never been able to make money out of my art,” Cotter says. “I’ve come to make peace with that.”
That year Cotter participated in a workshop at the Institut Francais in London with Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami about directing professional and nonprofessional actors together. That was the final piece of the equation. In 2007 he chose a date nine months in the future and resolved that on that date he’d begin shooting Bomber with whatever resources he had. “If I have $10 in my pocket,” he told himself, “it will be a $10 feature.”
