“Broadly speaking, I wanted to show two people who are sharing a lot of experiences together with different views of the world… I think in the end it was like 50 or 60 pages of stuff to shape the journey: background stories on ‘Rob’ and ‘Steve’ and different themes for their meals. But then when we were filming, they would start to talk all day, just ramble off.” – Interview with Michael Winterbottom on The Trip
The Trip is a unique movie. It is actually a British television series edited together to make a film. The surprising thing is that the film actually is better than the show. Either way though it is all thanks to the person who originally created the material, because as they say ‘garbage in, garbage out,’ then it also must be true for ‘success in, success out.’
Michael Winterbottom originally came up with the TV show and directed it. It was supposed to be about two guys touring the North of England, one for a magazine article on cuisine he is writing and the other to tag along. Yet, Winterbottom wanted to take it in a different direction – he wanted Steve and Rob, both of whom he has worked on other projects with, to really just relax and ramble on. Thus where most of the scenes come from.
No matter what they are doing – driving, walking, eating – they pay almost no attention to the task at hand – evaluating the restaurants – and instead just talk about their lives, their careers, their families, and impressions. There is a basic storyline underneath it all, but ultimately it is just two guys on vacation. Yet it is not just any two guys, Rob and Steve are both very personalized and interesting characters as Winterbottom had both Rob and Steve exaggerate their actual personalities to create the comedy in The Trip.
The episodes were edited down into important segments that would make a feature film, and in all honesty, for just watching the film, you don’t realize that anything was missing. Anything else gained from the removed segments of episodes would just bog down the flow of the comedy and make it intolerable.
It’s not to say that the TV show is bad because it has more of the same in it, it is just the nature of the medium. It is the difference between TV and film. TV you only have to sit through a half hour to hour at a time, so the endless comedy is broken up by a week of other stuff. Film you need to be there for about two hours straight.
Yet what is so amazing about Winterbottom’s movie is the selection of scenes. All of the main plot points, such as the relationship between Rob and his wife, Steve and his ‘girlfriend,’ and Steve and his job, are all kept intact and are cohesive in the storyline. As for everything else – the restaurant scenes, the driving scenes, etc. – there is a good balance between each. You don’t feel like they are spending too much time in one place; they are actually traveling and moving along.
And in their actual journey, they are moving along as friends as well. Even though they have arguments and fights about differences in views and achievements, they grow closer and become better friends.
I love the direction Michael Winterbottom took with The Trip in every way; it is unique, original, and hilariously funny – something you don’t see too often today. Now that I’ve seen the film, I want to watch the TV series.
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The interview with Michael Winterbottom can be found here: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/michael-winterbottom-the-trip#_
The Trip trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxq-I_e_KXg
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Senior Film Reviews - The Movie Industry 
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