Pope grew up in the north Londonsuburb of Enfield.[2]
Both his parents were bankers, and he has a sister, Amanda. He always knew that he wanted to make films, boasting in an interview once, "Even my dreams came with dirt on them, like my Standard-8 movies". He attended St Andrew's primary school, Cecil Road, Enfield, and then went to St Michael's boarding school in Otford, Kent, returning to north London to attend Latymer Grammar School, Haselbury Road. While still attending Latymer, he participated in the first ever Film Studies O-level and was featured in the Evening Standard as "Tim Pope, aged seventeen, who wants to be a film director".[3]
To achieve this aim, he began to attend Saturday morning film classes at Hornsey College of Art.[2]
Here he was able to experiment freely with cameras, spending much time photographing various happenings. His first school film was entitled Voyage, which was shot on a 16mmBolex camera – and another equally absurd creation was the film Canine Excrement, where he is purported to have followed a dog around the then bombsites of Seven Sisters, waiting for the inevitable to happen.
Pope applied to many film colleges, realising that film was something he seriously wanted to devote his life to, and having been turned down by many, he finally attended Ravensbourne College of Art & Design, Bromley. The course was more TV-oriented, and Pope achieved his highest course marks when a brief was set to create an idea to a piece of music. He chose Frank Zappa's "I'm the Slime" from his album Over-Nite Sensation (1973).
When Pope left college, two years later, he found himself unemployable and, after a period of working for Williams & Glyn's Bank in Islington, he got his first job with HyVision, a company in Covent Garden that trained politicians to appear on TV. One of the many people he worked with, apart from Trevor McDonald, Melvyn Bragg, and others, was the then Chancellor of the ExchequerDenis Healey, whom his boss, Stanley Hyland, trained to appear on the BBC's Panorama programme. Pope says that he left 10 Downing Street with the same camera and then went to Guildford to film the ska band The Specials on stage. Terry Hall, the lead singer, was later to be one of Pope's many clients, as a pop promo director.
Middle career
While still at HyVision, in 1979 Pope met Alex McDowell, who ran Rocking Russian, a company that designed T-shirts and record sleeves from a studio in Berwick Street. Alex had designed Iggy Pop's album sleeve for Soldier and Pope was a massive Iggy Pop fan. The duo went on to form a very successful and long-lasting relationship with McDowell as production designer and Pope as director – before McDowell emigrated to America in the mid-1980s to become a movie production designer for directors such as Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton.
At about this time, pop videos were starting to be made more frequently by directors like Russell Mulcahy (Duran Duran), David Mallet (David Bowie), and Brian Grant (Olivia Newton-John). Pope decided to turn his hand to this new form. His first attempts at rock video were shot in Carnaby Street and in Putney Bridge's tunnels on a non-broadcast format for the single "Cut Out the Real" by Jo Broadbery and the Standouts, as well as its B-side. After unsuccessfully pitching many videos (and with very little to show as his own work), he was finally engaged to make Soft Cell's first video for Some Bizzare Records, Non-Stop Exotic Video Show, which was a companion release to their debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. The collection was originally issued on VHS, Betamax, and laserdisc in 1982, and re-issued on DVD in 2004. The video for "Bedsitter" had Pope's trademark individuality, as it featured the band's singer, Marc Almond, wearing shirts that matched the walls behind him. In many ways, it is considered this video bears all the major hallmarks of a Pope video: individuality, linear progression in terms of story, and a slight psychedelic feel. (Pope has many names for different genres of videos and this type he calls a narrative/atmospheric. He has lectured all over the world on the subject, including at London's National Film Theatre.)
More Some Bizzare videos followed with Soft Cell, including "Say Hello and Wave Goodbye" and thereafter an entire album of videos for their debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, including the infamous "Sex Dwarf" that featured a handful of real-life prostitutes, their pimp, a trainee doctor in leather trousers, and a handful of maggots that Pope chucked in during, causing a riot when the prostitutes fled from the St John's Wood film studio. The video was later seized by the Scotland Yard Pornography Squad, but handed back soon after, as it was realized that hype was more at play than real facts about the video's contents. The video is considered a cult classic and is even banned from TV programmes about banned videos.
Videos for the Cure
By 1982, and with a few more videos made, (Scottish band Altered Images, Nancy Nova, Jersey pub-rockers-financed-by-a-millionaire "Volcano", etc.) Pope met The Cure's singer Robert Smith. Their work together was to prove that directors could be constantly innovative, on a factory-line basis. Pope ultimately directed over 37 videos for the group, including many of their most famous songs – "Let's Go To Bed" (1982), "Close To Me" (1985), "Just Like Heaven" (1987), "Friday I'm in Love", (1992), "Wrong Number" (1997). He also directed the 35mm movie of The Cure in Orange, which captures their performance at the eponymous theatre in the south of France.
"I Want to be a Tree"
Pope released his own song in 1984, "I Want to be a Tree",[4] The single's b-side was "The Double Crossing of Two-Faced Fred" (a choral verse poem he had written and performed at Latymer, a few years earlier) and, on the 12" version, "Elephants".
Pope described the project as "a real piss-take of what was going on in America", prompted by people referring to "Tim Pope Videos", and said that he "felt really strongly that they were not Tim Pope videos, they were Cure videos or Siouxsie videos or whatever".[5] Over the 1983 Christmas holidays, Pope and a friend, Charles Gray, recorded what Pope described as "this really stupid song" that they had co-written years earlier as teenagers.[6][7][5] Pope made an accompanying video for his showreel, asking several of the artists he worked with (the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Soft Cell, Talk Talk, The Style Council, Paul Young and Freur)[7] to "come along and slag me off on the showreel".[5] He then played the artists the song, while filming their reactions to it. The Old Grey Whistle Test screened the video, which Pope says resulted in several record deals being offered.
In between commitments to the Cure, The Glove and Siouxsie and the Banshees, Robert Smith found time to play most of the instruments on a new recording of "I Want To Be A Tree".[8][9] Released on the Fiction label, and produced by its manager Chris Parry, the song reached number 34 in the British charts.[6]
Work in the U.S.
Pope was invited to the United States for the first time in 1983 by Neil Young who asked him to film the video for his song "Wonderin'". Young personally drove him around Los Angeles on a guided tour to see the sights, using the car that was ultimately to feature in the famous "Wonderin'" video, filmed with its idiosyncratic speed-up, speed-down style. Pope shot many more videos for Young until 1997. He said of the experience: "I thought it was everyone’s lot to be brought to America and driven around by iconic pop stars in flash motors."
Pope's career in commercials began at this time, too, and he soon achieved a worldwide reputation, shooting for clients all over the world.
In 1989, Pope directed the TV comedy series The Groovy Fellers which he co-wrote with Squeeze keyboardist and TV presenter Jools Holland and comedian Rowland Rivron, about a Martian (played by Rivron) who lands in England and is shown around the country by Holland, being presented with many of the eccentricities of life peculiar to the United Kingdom. The TV series was one of the first to use members of the public and also featured David Steel, Michael Heseltine and Sir Patrick Moore. The Martian lands naked in episode 1, walks into a pub, and the series climaxes with a car chase with Holland and the Martian attempting to answer the question "Why are we here on Planet Earth?" with the police in hot pursuit. The programme was produced by Border Television for Channel 4.
Later career
In 1991, Pope directed his first short film, Phone, starring Bill Pullman, Linda Blair, and Amanda Plummer. The film earned many awards from around the world, and was based on a real-life phone prank that Pope came across on a tape in a skip behind a strip club in Hollywood Boulevard.
He continued working on videos, spending more time in America. He worked with many new bands of the period, though old clients such as Neil Young, David Bowie, The The and The Cure continued to request his services.
In 1996, Bob and Harvey Weinstein asked Pope to direct The Crow: City of Angels for their production company, Miramax; both were fans of Phone. The Crow: City of Angels put Pope together again with production designer Alex McDowell and the duo gave the film an individual look and feel. It reached number one in the American movie charts, though Pope refused to do the commentary on the DVD, saying the studio had tampered with his film too much.
Shortly afterwards, Pope read and bought the rights for The Last King of Scotland and brought Oscar winner Forest Whitaker to the project as Idi Amin (though he left the project due to differences on the progress of the film, in particular with the studio wanting to use writer Joe Penhall).
2000 to present
Pope returned to London from Hollywood and continued with his career making commercials.
In 2005, Pope was awarded a CADS lifetime achievement award by the music industry and after a prolonged and self-imposed period of 12 years, he returned to making videos again, working with The Darkness, KT Tunstall, The Kaiser Chiefs and Fatboy Slim.
In March 2008, Pope re-united with Neil Young to film In London which captures Young and his band during their multi-night engagement at the Hammersmith Odeon. The film was premiered in 2019 on Young's personal archives site.[10]
In 2013, Pope embarked with The Cure to film their "LatAm" tour across South America and Mexico, and a tour film is expected to be produced later with material both off and on stage.
In 2018, Pope filmed a documentary on Sheridan Smith called Sheridan Smith: Coming Home.[11]
On July 7, 2018 Pope directed the "Anniversary: 1978-2018 - Live in Hyde Park London" concert the Cure performed as part of the British Summer Time concert series. The concert was released on dvd as part of the six disc set of "Curaetion 25 - Anniversary", released in October 2019.[12]
He directed The The's The Comeback Special - Live at the Royal Albert Hall in 2018. It was released on dvd/blu ray in October 2021.[13]
