Exclusive Q&A by Brad Balfour
Having taken place June 4–15 in New York City, the 2025 Tribeca Festival — presented by OKX — featured selections across narrative, documentary, animated works, and music video realms. But at this year’s recent Festival, music docs dominated my viewing experience.
And among those seen, “Boy George & Culture Club” made a particularly lasting impression. The film details the new wave pop group’s meteoric rise and fall in the 1980s. The quartet [lead vocalist Boy George, guitarist/keyboardist Roy Hay, bassist Mikey Craig, and drummer Jon Moss] debuted just as the new channel MTV hit TV screens. The band’s striking visual approach to videos impacted on the channel and the world at large. This seminal ’80s band not just defined itself through sound and image but also as leading a growing cultural movement that was transgressive in its gender-bending and pop contradictions.
Veteran director Alison Ellwood directed the film, composed of impressive footage and employing surprisingly candid interviews with all four band members including the controversial lead singer, Boy George. It reveals in greater detail than ever before the love affair between George and drummer Jon Moss. As Elwood has said elsewhere, “This unique story is perhaps more culturally relevant today than it was when the band first formed.”
Among Ellwood’s feature film directing credits are the Cyndi Lauper doc, “Let the Canary Sing,””Laurel Canyon,” “The Go-Go’s,” “History of the Eagles,” and “Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place.”
The Australian-born creator has also produced and edited several feature documentaries including Oscar-nominated “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” “Catching Hell,” “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” “My Trip to Al Qaeda,” and “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.”
The 64-year-old was co-producer for the feature documentary “Finding Fela” and for HBO’s “Brett Killed Mom: A Sister’s Diary.” She also was consulting producer for the Sundance series “Brick City” and two more feature docs “The September Issue” and “Food Chains.”
Her television directing credits include “Women of Troy” for HBO Sports, “The Osbournes: The Price of Reality” for the A&E series Culture Shock, “Locked In: The Victoria Arlen Story” for ESPN’s 30 for 30 Shorts, CNN’s “Death Row Stories,” “No Limits” for ESPN’s Nine for IX series, The Human Behavior Experiments, the Emmy Award-winning series “American High,” “The Travelers” and “Sixteen.”
In order to appreciate the movie even further, Ellwood answered questions about this film’s creation and other music and pop culture documentaries she’s made previously. This conversation took place shortly after the film’s World Premiere at the Tribeca Festival.
Q: At what point did you get exposed to Boy George?
Alison Ellwood: I was born in Australia, but I grew up both in London and the States, so I was around. I was in New York in the ‘80s, so I experienced them when they landed in the US as well, and I loved the music, the look and attitude.
Q: You reflect on the way the world at large reacted to him. Being in New York, it was not that weird that somebody would dress the way he dressed and look the way he looked. You could go to Danceteria or The Mudd Club and see that.
Alison Ellwood: Exactly.
Q: I marveled at the impact that MTV had on the rest of the world. I don’t know if you felt the same.
Alison Ellwood: It exposed people that didn’t live in London, New York or LA to these different things that were happening. The world at large was exposed to all of this. So, yeah.
Q: How did that inform you when you decided to make this film and then, ultimately, find the four guys and put them all together?
Alison Ellwood: I was a huge fan of the music, and ironically, the music videos they did for MTV. Most of them were really odd. Also, they did get coverage in interviews and stuff like that. So the world got to meet them through interviews with MTV. That had, I think, a bigger impact because of the music videos. They’re the first to admit it. They were really kind of strange, but it got their look and music across to a huge crowd.
I just loved the music. Ironically, when they were first introduced in the U.S., those singles were sent in plain white envelopes. So nobody had any idea what they looked like when they first started getting airplay here. When people met them, they were surprised. They were expecting to meet a reggae band.
Q: One interesting thing about Culture Club was that –– even though they had this very all-encompassing look using Jewish references and all that –– there was a consistency to the songwriting that didn’t make them sound like they did 15 different styles and songs. Something integrated the music. What do you think was the secret to their ability to integrate them? Was it the pure musicianship of the rest of the members, or George’s ability to corral them?
Alison Ellwood: It was the very differences that came together that they integrated organically and made their sounds so unique. Nobody else sounds like them. I think it’s those influences that gave them that unique sound because they’re all there, but somehow, they merge together to create this new sound.
Q: What do you think you brought out in the film that people hadn’t realized? One of the big insights was getting the real inside story of the relationships among them, particularly George ….
Alison Ellwood: George and Jon.
Q: George and Jon. It was a coup on your part. How were you able to achieve that? What did you do? What persuasive methods did you use?
Alison Ellwood: It’s what I do when I start these projects with any band members. I say, “Look, you guys. Be honest with me and I’ll tell an honest story. I’m not after the salaciousness of this. I want to understand where this music comes from. What drives you as individuals? And what drives you as a group?” They understood that. They made that agreement going in.
I had met George prior to that, because I interviewed him for Cyndi Lauper. But I hadn’t met the other three prior to interviewing them. We just hit it off instantly. Especially with Jon. I was a little bit worried I was going to have to coax him a little bit to go into that story. Out of the gate, he just went right into it, totally honest and forthcoming.
First of all, they’re all very, very funny. They all recognize how funny they are. Jon is sort of the ringleader of being kind of crazy funny. I think that they knew that if they were going to tell their story, they had to tell it honestly and show their humorous side. That’s one of the main things that kept them going for as long as it did. And to this day, frankly.
Q: Do you think that they were kind of relieved? They were happy and glad that they had this chance to really emote and reveal things that they had not yet been able to reveal? Back then, it was hard for them to reveal this. It would have really would have been pounced on. But now, in a way, this is what justifies it all.
Alison Ellwood: Yeah, and oddly, today, unfortunately, it’s even more relevant that they’re willing to be honest about this story because of all the backlash against the LGBTQ+ community. I think it was a huge relief for all of them to be able to talk about it. Especially Mikey and Roy, who felt their story had never been told before.
Most of it had been focused on either George’s drug problems that came out of left field or the relationship issues. It was an opportunity for them all to talk not just about their relationships and how they all interacted with one another. But also about how their musical influences came to create such an incredible sound.
Q: It’s interesting when you watch George on this particular record. When all that stuff was going around, you didn’t really see both the heartfelt and the intellectual sides to him, his own self-awareness. It was heartening to see that because in a way, it kind of puts a cap on all the other stuff that has happened with them.
Alison Ellwood: I think so. Again, I think they all saw this as an opportunity to tell the real story and get it out there, doing it their way in their own words with some ability to control the message and be honest about it … not have other people twist and turn the story. I think they were all genuinely relieved and willing to tell it properly.
Q: When you did the Cyndi Lauper film, she, too, was a flag bearer of one kind or another, both in her outrageous look and her obvious “girl power” point of view. You used your skill to bring that out of her and were then ultimately able to apply some of her interview in this film. But you were also able to apply a similar kind of skill in pulling something out that maybe not had been revealed.
Alison Ellwood: I thoroughly research things before I go into the work. I know the story really, really well. We just have very casual conversations. It’s not like I ask a list of questions in order. It’s like we start with a question and then it turns into a dialogue. We kind of bounce all over the place and then come back around to get to particular story points I might have missed. It becomes very conversational.
I think people’s guards are down and they don’t feel like they have to tell the same story over and over the same way. Because sometimes people have been interviewed so many times, their answers can feel rehearsed with all these guys. I felt like their answers felt fresh and they were finally able to tell the depth of their story.
Q: With that, you felt the same way with Cindy.
Alison Ellwood: Absolutely.
Q: Did she feel that she got a chance to talk about certain things that she’d never really touched on before in a way that she wanted to?
Alison Ellwood: Definitely. That’s my goal with all these films: to give an opportunity to these artists to really tell their story in their own words.
Q: Was it a little different? Or was it similar in the way of bringing it out of them as well?
Alison Ellwood: Very similar. Again, we just had a great rapport. I had met the girls prior to them even agreeing to do the film, much less be interviewed. So we had a bit of a rapport to begin with. Again, it’s just a very casual setting and very conversational. Their story had been sensationalized over the years and they were wanting to set the record straight.
Q: Definitely. Then there’s certain members of the band that don’t get enough credit and felt that they got overshadowed. There were things that she was a little bit more cagey about than with others. The other ones were so open that there could be an interesting dynamic between the band there. Was that similar to this with the Boy George film? It seemed like you got more candidness than I’ve seen in a lot of the films with bands. How much time did you get to spend with each of these different personalities?
Alison Ellwood: It was basically a full day with George because of his schedule with “Moulin Rouge.” We had to split over two days because he had to perform. So we had to do slightly shorter days with him. But it was basically a long full day with each of them.
Q: Obviously, you had a plethora of material for all three in one way or another. It was probably more about what to cull it down to. Can you talk about the process of trimming things down and trying to figure out what goes where and what to emphasize? It isn’t strictly chronological in all cases.
Alison Ellwood: No, it’s not chronological. We bounce around a little bit. The main spine, I think, is quite chronological, but we do jump around in time. I try to do that in all my films so it’s not “this happened, that happened, this happened, that happened.”
Q: Talking about jumping around versus being chronological, how were you able to structure things… When you were able to insert a song, and when you were able to do it in all three cases. It’s a kind of a ballet about where to bring this in and then bring it out.
Alison Ellwood: First of all, Mike and Kate, the archivist, did such an extraordinary job. We had an embarrassment of riches to work with. They were digging up stuff that none of us knew existed, like Jon playing with The Clash. Jon had told the other guys in Culture Club that he had played with The Clash at one point. But they actually didn’t believe him until they saw the footage in the film. It was sort of magical stuff like that. Paul Carlin, the editor, did an extraordinary job and is very open to different ideas about structuring things. There were a lot of really smart people behind the scenes on this one, helping to find the material that enabled us to tell the story.
Q: Thinking about it now, if there wasn’t an MTV, would all three artists, groups or units have ever been as successful as they were? They emerged at just the right moment in the world in the early ‘80s. MTV was rising up as a way to take music and show the visual side of things in a way that hadn’t been shown before. Obviously, all these talents could play out characters in the videos that they couldn’t necessarily do on stage till they established themselves.
Alison Ellwood: Certainly, these bands made huge impacts before MTV. It was just a different delivery system. And, in a broader way to, as you say, visualize them for sure. Certainly, bands and artists have had huge successes prior to MTV. But things did change.
I think there was also a lot of pressure put on them to do these music videos quickly. And, I think Culture Club –– they’ll be the first to admit –– made some very odd choices in how they did their music videos.
Q: What led you to use the couch for the interviews?
Alison Ellwood: It was a discussion I had with my cinematographer, Michelle McCabe. Because the ‘80s were so colorful and busy and everything, we wanted to have sort of a minimalist warehouse look. If they’re on the couch and there’s room for someone else there. It was just a visual concept that we came up with that felt more casual and intimate.
Q: Although the other two teams, Go-Go’s and Cyndi Lauper et al, were not so drug-affected, this film really does touch on that. It addresses drugs as a touchstone in the ways that bands have evolved and devolved. Do you think there was a lesson to be learned that you were able to show in a way that maybe hadn’t been addressed as openly?
Alison Ellwood: The drug situation with the Go-Go’s was very much a part of their story. And we got into that quite a bit in the film, especially with Charlotte. Cyndi did not do drugs.
Q: Yes, she didn’t. I knew that.
Alison Ellwood: That was not part of her story. It was a part of the Go-Go’s story. It often is a part of the rock and roll story from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Hopefully not so much now. Or at least if it happens now, we don’t hear about it in the same way. You know, it was the ‘80s. There were drugs. There were a lot of drugs around.
George wasn’t doing drugs initially. The other three were to some extent, but not to the point of being problematic. But George’s quick descent was, I think, quite surprising to all the members. Certainly, it was surprising to me. I hadn’t remembered it being so overnight.
Q: Looking at your history, you have the Ken Kesey film in there. In a way, he’s sort of a godfather for the counterculture. How did dealing with Ken Kesey inform you as a filmmaker and as a pop culture historian?
Alison Ellwood: That was an amazing thing because we found out Ken shot all that footage of the road trip and he tried to edit it together for, I don’t know, 25 years. They were cutting the original. They shot positive and they were cutting the original positive. Restoring that footage took five years. Scorsese’s Foundation and UCLA got together and it took five years. We would get some of it restored. We’d work a little bit on it. We’d get some of it restored. We’d stop. We’d start.
In the interim, I did “Gonzo,” which was also another pop cultural moment. That stuff has always interested me and music has always interested me. Music has driven all those other films, as well –– using music from the time, what was influencing and inspiring those artists, too. Those things have always been kind of my natural go to places.
Q: Where does this lead you to the next film?
Alison Ellwood: I’ve got a couple of other music talks. We’re in development right now. Pretty much everything is just in development. It seems a little sluggish getting things greenlit, but there’s at least two, possibly three music talks in the hopper right now. I can’t say what they are because they’re not greenlit yet. But there’s another couple of other things I’m working on in development. I hope something gets greenlit soon.
Q: You’re living in L.A.?
Alison Ellwood: I actually live on Martha’s Vineyard.
Q: Martha’s Vineyard. That’s a kind of interesting way to sequester yourself to get away from all of this, to think it through.
Alison Ellwood: I lived in New York and Los Angeles for years, and I just can’t do the city thing anymore.
Q: One of the interesting things about George is he’s a really good Irish boy, George O’Dowd. His parents were both from Ireland and had moved to England at a time where there was a lot of that going on. It was a tumultuous time for being an Irish person in England. One of the things that influenced George was his Irishness. What do you think?
Alison Ellwood: Absolutely. No doubt.
Q: Do you know what county he was from — where his parents were from?
Alison Ellwood: I don’t remember the origin. He was born in England. His mother was born in Ireland. I don’t remember what county. He did tell me. Honestly, I’m sorry, I just don’t remember.
Q: He made some reference to his Irish roots as to how they affected him in the movie. Can you talk a bit about what he said to you? I know you didn’t get too into it, but it was there.
Alison Ellwood: He just said that he was an Irish guy. Jon was a Jewish guy. Mikey had Jamaican roots. And Roy was from Essex.
Q: You have a really international band in a funny way with all kinds of different cultural influences.
Alison Ellwood: Exactly.
Q: Ultimately, they were really a product of their time and the era. Do you think that it was just this moment where there was a freedom to go beyond what your gender identity was, what your cultural identity was, and to find a universal message that defined the alternative rock, new wave, post-punk, scene or whatever. I never quite knew how to describe bands like Culture Club because on the one hand, they were outsiders. On the other hand, they had followed a pop tradition.
Alison Ellwood: A lot of them get grouped into what’s called the New Romantics. But even that’s kind of a vague thing — who fits into that? Mikey will say it was that new wave which came out of the aversion to punk. People were tired of being spit on, and they wanted to get back to more musical roots. Punk was about… It was considered bad to know how to play your instrument. You were supposed to be just winging it. And these guys were really talented musicians. They wanted to explore that.
The Police had a similar thing. They came out of the punk scene, and then suddenly Sting starts writing these pop songs. So these bands find their voice and each of their stories is different. That’s why they’re so interesting to talk to. I don’t think there was a specific movement or such. I think that people were just, as all artists do, learning to figure out how to find their voice and break through.
Q: Do you have a favorite song of Culture Club, a favorite song of each of them?
Alison Ellwood: “Church of the Poison Mind,” I think, is my favorite Culture Club song. There’s a lot of others I love. I also love this song, “Mistake No. 3,” that I think would have been taken more seriously if they hadn’t done such an insane music video for it, which is just so over-the-top nuts. They’ll be the first to admit it. Yeah, “Church of the Poison Mind,” which is what we start the film with, was fun for me.
Q: And Cyndi and the Go-Go’s?
Alison Ellwood: Cyndi… “True Colors,” probably. For the Go-Go’s… Obviously, “We’ve Got the Beat” is amazing. There’s so many from all of them that I love. It’s hard to have a favorite, really.
Q: You’ve managed to get to work with lots of different artists. All of the have touchstone songs that really define them and have become chestnuts in a way. It always amazes me how some songs transcend just being part of the repertoire, and people just can’t get them out of their minds.
Alison Ellwood: It’s true. They become anthems for our time. When people hear those songs, people that lived through when they were released, it takes them back to specific moments. They’re like, “Oh, wow. That was when I was doing this or that.” It connects our history in a way.
Q: Are there dream artists that you would love to do a film of that you haven’t gotten a chance to do.
Alison Ellwood: Heart is a dream band I would like to do.
Q: Hopefully you can find that guitar. Did they find the guitar? You heard the story about Nancy having her guitar stolen, right?
Alison: Yeah. I don’t know if they found it.
Q: What’s happening with the Boy George film in terms of a release and all that?
Alison Ellwood: I know that talks are happening. I don’t know at what stage they’re at right now, but presumably soon we’ll know. We had our premiere at Tribeca, so it’s still early.
Q: It sometimes seems a bit passe, but do you think about the audio release, the CD release, the vinyl release. Do you envision an opportunity to get a release out? Or is that too entangled in all kinds of rights issues?
Alison Ellwood: It’s probably a big rights issue, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with that. I don’t know what the plans are for that, but they’re definitely rights issues.
Q: You never wanted to make music yourself?
Alison Ellwood: Oh, I did. I just suck at it.
Q: I do think the Irish experience is somewhere in the background because Irish musicians and the Irish culture often put somebody in being an outlier right from the start, if you really think about it.
Alison Ellwood: Our whole team is Irish that made the British… yeah. Fine Point Films, Trevor, Bernie, Andrew Tully, Eimhear O’Neill, all Belfast- based. We finished the film at Yellow Moon in Belfast.
Q: I saw Irish names, but didn’t really put that all together.
Alison Ellwood: Yeah. It’s a big Irish family. I appreciate any efforts to get the word out there about the film. The experience at Tribeca Festival was spectacular. People loved it. So it’s very encouraging and exciting.