Coming off of a successful Cannes debut for his drama Another Year, director Mike Leigh is turning to a long-planned film chronicling the life of Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner. [24 Frames]
“We want to make a film about Turner the painter, and that’s all I have to say about it,” Leigh told the LA Times’s film blog, as famously unwilling to suffer fools or the media as ever, “It would have to be an expensive project, so we’re working to make it happen.”
Leigh’s last foray into the biopic genre was 1999’s universally acclaimed Topsy-Turvy, a look at Gilbert & Sullivan‘s volatile creative partnership and the inspiration for their classic play The Mikado.
J.M.W. Turner was a British landscape artist, watercolourist, and printmaker. He is commonly know as “the painter of light,” and his work helped elevate the landscape painting to the level of prestige held at the time only for historical paintings and other lofty subjects.
Leigh is famous for working without a script, relying on the actors’ improvisation in rehearsals, which then end up forming the structure of what is eventually filmed. “I’d like to paint a bigger picture. I’ve only done two period films,” Leigh told 24 Frames. The director has examined artistic minds before, with Topsy-Turvy and 1993’s brilliant Naked, which followed David Thewlis‘s philosopher on a restless odyssey through the streets of London. That film won Thewlis a Best Actor commendation from Cannes and put Leigh on the international map.
Leigh talked of his approach to the Turner story, which would be similar to his treatment of Gilbert & Sullivan: “The conceit there was to take these famous people and subvert the whole thing by saying they’re real people with problems and issues and relationships and vulnerabilities.”
The film has been planned for some time, but the budget seems to be standing in the way.
“With ‘Topsy-Turvy’ we were able to cut the budget by cutting the exteriors,” Leigh said. “You don’t make a film about Turner and cut the exteriors. This is a guy who strapped himself to the mast of a ship to paint a storm. He’s for real. So, yes, expensive.”
Films about painters tend to have big ambitions, but are generally underwhelming (such as the uninteresting Surviving Picasso, with Anthony Hopkins as Pablo and the anemic Girl With The Pearl Earring, a too-slight look at Vermeer). In films like Ed Harris’s Pollock and Robert Altman’s vibrant Vincent & Theo (a look at Vincent Van Gogh through his troubled relationship with his art dealer brother), the filmmakers truly unlocked the mind of these brilliant artists. Mike Leigh is a tough, snarly director, and his films always feature organic, lived-in performances – watching him tackle a painter like Turner could be fascinating.
What do you think of Mike Leigh’s chosen subject matter? Is it a good fit?