Michael Winterbottom is a predictably unpredictable filmmaker – always zigging when you think he's going to zag, and taking on material that is uniform only in the sense that it's always very different and very challenging. Everything from his hardcore sex romp "9 Songs" to his sci-fi-ish "Code 46" to a bunch of movies that don't have numbers in the title (like his terrific Southern noir "The Killer Inside Me" and his ridiculously funny "The Trip"), Winterbottom constantly surprises and even if they aren't all classics (like his revisionist literary take "Trishna" from earlier this year), they're all interesting. And with the release of the teaser for his new film "Everyday," set to premiere at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, his trend for eclecticism seems to have continued unabated.
Originally titled "Seven Days" (and later "Then Here and There"), "Everyday" stars John Simm (the original British version of "Life on Mars") as a man named Ian who has been imprisoned for drug smuggling. The film follows the relationship between Simm's Ian and his wife, Karen, played by Shirley Henderson ("Meek's Cutoff"), over the course of five years. What's so fascinating is that Winterbottom filmed the actors for a few weeks for the past five years, to capture the realism of the situation and chart the character's aging (which we're sure they loved). It sounds like a more manageable version of that crazy thing Linkleter is doing where he's charting the aging of that kid.
The brief, 46-second clip (via Vlicious), shows Simm and Henderson and their brood of four children as they scamper around the woods. This is presumably from the back half of the film, after Simm's Ian has been released from the slammer. The scene is captured naturalistically, with a handheld camera, and suggests that the whole film will be portrayed in this plainspoken slice-of-life style.
We're eager to hear the reaction from TIFF. Winterbottom's films tend to be polarizing, no matter what they are, and we expect this will be no different. If you're not lucky enough to visit TIFF this year, the film should play on British television later this year and, we're guessing, have some kind of limited theatrical run in America sometime in 2013.