Make it New John (2010)

Overview

Make it new John tells the story of the DeLorean car, its creator John DeLorean and the workers of the Belfast-based car plant who built it. The film deftly contrasts the DeLorean dream with its spectacular downfall during a critical period in Northern Ireland’s history, and the canonisation of the car – the DMC12 – as a symbol of the American myth of mobility. As with the earlier works such as Bernadette (2008) and Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003), in Make it New John, Campbell fuses a documentary aesthetic with fictive moments, using existing archive news and documentary footage from the 1980s as well as new 16mm footage which imagines conversations between DeLorean factory workers. Campbell questions the documentary genre and reflects here on broader existential themes and narrative drives.