Mike Leigh
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Cannes 2014: Mr. Turner, Salt of the Earth, Force Majeure and the Art of First Impressions
“What’s your elevator pitch?” people ask — the same people who’d recoil backwards, their body language flashing danger signals, if you actually collared them in an actual elevator and launched into a pitch of your movie. Indeed, it’s a paradox of the film business that the smooth-talking hustler is held up as some kind of model when most film industry types would prefer an approach by someone genuine — personable, even — who understands both the cultural and the transactional nature of their business. I watched one exec from an established production and distribution company last week at the 2014 […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 26, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner
One of several high profile titles premiering this week at Cannes, Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner explores the late career of the eccentric 19th century British painter. Foremost regarded for his alternately bleak and hilarious portraits of middle class London, it will be interesting to see Leigh tackle a (period steeped) biopic. Of course, character driven narratives are Leigh’s bread and butter, given his now widely imitated scripting process in which the fruits of rehearsals are folded into the pages. Starring frequent collaborator Timothy Spall, the film premieres tomorrow in Competition and will be released by Sony Pictures Classics on December 10. Watch the trailer […]
by Sarah Salovaara on May 14, 2014 -
Christopher Nolan, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach on the Painters That Inspire Them
The Tate Gallery in London launched a great little series of videos today entitled Film meets Art, in which prominent U.K. directors discuss their appreciation for and how they were influenced by a particular British artist. Above, Christopher Nolan talks about his love of Francis Bacon’s work and how it shaped his rendition of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight.Nolan says that Bacon was his favorite artist from a young age, which I find to be very unusual and striking idea. (What kind of a childhood did Nolan have that this was how he saw the world?) Mike Leigh […]
by Nick Dawson on Nov 26, 2013 -
FILMMAKER FLASHBACK: WINTER, 1994
Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Today’s is Winter, 1994. Today, most of our Filmmaker covers are original photography, but back in the day, we didn’t have the budget and were forced to work with supplied art from distributors. Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who went on to The Deep End, Bee Season, and, most recently, Uncertainty, made their debut with Suture, a formally challenging meta-thriller with a wobbly poster that produced for us a somewhat inscrutable cover. We took their key art, cropped it, colorized it yellow […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 7, 2010 -
GOING HOME
Director Mike Leigh is on London stages now with Two Thousand Miles, his first ever “Jewish play.” Linda Grant in The Guardian talks to Leign about his Jewish heritage and why it hasn’t surfaced in his work until now. An excerpt: It was a kosher home, though they only went to synagogue now and again and they drove on the sabbath. “But it was very, very Jewish. My grandparents were immigrants – they talked in Yiddish – and there were some outreaches of the family where there were genuine frummers [Orthodox].” It was a time, he points out, when many […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 17, 2006
