Mike Leigh
-
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
