For someone who seems so impatient during interviews Mike Leigh must hide a mountain of patience.
After all those familiar with the British filmmaker’s oeuvre will know that Leigh has a uniquely glacial process for developing his projects. Beginning without so much as a narrative Leigh casts actors and improvises for months on end to build characters and develop a story before he ever rolls out a camera. Just the thought is surely enough to turn any Hollywood studio executive’s hair white in anguish.
That is partly what makes the indie auteur’s latest epic even more incredible. After all with Mr. Turner not only has he crafted an accurate award-winning biography about the life of a legendary English artist but he did so using the same ad hoc process of his previous works — with nary a script.
“If you make a documentary the world you’re shooting lives whether you film it or not. It existed before you ever showed up and it exists after you leave” says Leigh during an interview at last year’s Toronto International Film Fest. “What I try to do is create a world in front of the camera that has that three-dimensional integrity.”
Mr. Turner can certainly boast that. In fact not only did the film earn lead actor Timothy Spall a distinguished award at Cannes this past year but Leigh has been praised at length for weaving his simple technique into a fascinating well-researched hypothesis about 19th century painter J.M.W. Turner — a man who despite his misanthropic tendencies became known as the “master of light” thanks to his highly influential landscape portraits.
“The tension between this very real strong but vulnerable guy and this amazing epic sublime stuff that he created seemed to me to be subject for a movie” says Leigh who spent months digging up research to support his first stab at a biopic since 1999’s Topsy-Turvy. “The hard part was actually to work out how to get it to come to life on the screen. You can research as we did until you’re blue in the face but then you’ve got to make it happen.”
As much as Leigh had scoured the history of the “massively written-about painter” he’s also quick to point out that the movie’s emphasis on accuracy should not be confused with facts — a detail that is further supported by the presence of Leigh’s familiar “kitchen sink realism” which he mastered in such Oscar-nominated hits as Secrets & Lies Happy-Go-Lucky and Vera Drake.
“We could’ve made a (straight) biopic I suppose. I found the prospect uninteresting really” he says. “Yes we can read that he had this relationship with this seaside landlady and they shacked up; that’s documented everywhere but nobody tells you what it was like how they behaved or what happened in the room — that is something you’ve got to create. And for me it’s all about those moments.”
Well into four decades since the release of his first feature Bleak Moments Leigh’s blunt answers often seem curt — even antagonistic (“Next question!” he occasionally commands when finished a thought). One could forgive the white-bearded virtuoso for holding on to the practices of a grumpy old artist but in reality he does no such thing. Even as his contemporaries speak out about the preservation of film or the death of cinema Leigh has been quick to embrace changing times. For the first time in his career he turned his back on celluloid and filmed Mr. Turner using digital methods. And when probed about a recent comment from Dustin Hoffman about cinema being at its “lowest point” ever Leigh scoffs.
“I don’t think I agree with him at all” he says with a snort. “I think it’s buzzing. Of course there’s a load of shit out there — there always is. But the more anything happens at any radical level the more the dinosaurs are still producing all that massive expensive crap that dominates a lot of our screens. But I think to be as negative as Dustin sounds like he’s being I don’t agree I really don’t.”
Next question please.
MR. TURNER directed by Mike Leigh starring Timothy Spall Paul Jesson and Dorothy Atkinson opens on Friday February 6.
