Danny Boyle, director of the upcoming Sex Pistols TV series Pistol, said he was happy that John Lydon had been so against its production.
Created from guitarist Steve Jones’ memoir, the show will premiere on Hulu on May 31, following an unsuccessful lawsuit launched by the former Johnny Rotten.
Boyle expressed surprise that the show had been made at all, accepting that the Pistols story was a difficult sell in the current socio-political environment. “You just have to wind your way through and hope your actors make them feel believable,” he told The Guardian. “And therefore you’ll empathize, because of what they’re going through and because they make themselves understandable. One of the advantages of streaming is that it’s willing to take on board that kind of complexity – and look for the attachment of the audience not through quite such easy tropes: the lovable one, the hero moment where he’s not quite as bad as you thought he was.”
The reason he’d wanted to make it, he explained, was to record the impact the punk icons had had on the world he grew up in. “[W]hat the Sex Pistols introduced, by their profanity and disrespect and vileness, was a break point that said: ‘No – you can do whatever the fuck you want with your life. If you want to waste it, waste it. Be vacant, be futile, be fucking hopeless, disgust everyone. But it’s yours – you do what you want with it.’ In retrospect, you realize that’s what made the difference – people never went back to that sense of stepping into your father’s shoes and following him into the factory.”