Director Mike Figgis.MIKE FIGGIS:
A NOT-SO INNOCENT ABROAD
By
Alex Simon
Editor’s Note: This article originally ran in the June 1999 issue of Venice Magazine.
Mike Figgis was born in 1949 in Carlise, England and lived in Nairobi, Kenya as an infant. The family moved back to England when Figgis was eight, settling in the tough northern town of Newcastle. Drawn to music from an early age, Figgis played trumpet and guitar in various bands including Gas Board, featuring future star Bryan Ferry (later of Roxy Music) on lead vocals. Figgis moved from music into theater upon joining England's avant-garde theater group The People Show. Figgis stayed with the group for 10 years, touring the world and developing his craft. In 1980, Figgis formed his own theater company, The Mike Figgis Group. He crafted multimedia productions that incorporated an extensive use of film. The work caught the eye of England's Channel Four, who financed Figgis' first feature, The House (1984) starring Stephen Rea. Figgis was put on the map by his next feature Stormy Monday (1988), a moody noirish thriller set in his hometown of Newcastle framed by his own moody jazz score. His American debut was with Internal Affairs (1989), starring Andy Garcia and Richard Gere, followed by the thriller Liebestraum (1990), Mr. Jones (1992), The Browning Version (1993), the sleeper hit Leaving Las Vegas (1994) which won an Oscar for Nic Cage and redefined Elizabeth Shue's career, and One Night Stand (1996), starring Wesley Snipes and Nastassia Kinski.
Figgis' latest is his finest film yet. The Loss of Sexual Innocence is the non-linear tale of a series of events in the life of a filmmaker (played as an adult by Julian Sands) and a series of events which shape his life, all of which is framed by a reinterpretation of the Adam & Eve story! While Loss is anything but commercial, it is a challenging, inventive, and often brilliant melding of images, sounds and ideas. The Sony Pictures Classics film is released on
Mike Figgis sat down recently in his hotel suite to discuss his career as an artist who always pushes the envelope.
I want to see The Loss of Sexual Innocence several more times. It was so rich, I felt like I missed a lot on just one viewing.
Mike Figgis: Yes, I suppose it is rather rich for just one viewing, if you liked it. In fact, I kept noticing little things that I had forgotten after watching it recently.
One thing I notice in a lot of your work is how understated and underplayed everything is. Does that stem from your performance art background?
I think so, yes. Definitely that, and music. I trained as a musician so I tend to compute musically, whatever I'm dealing with. The concept of orchestral writing is written in parallels. You've got your top line, your bottom line and everything in the middle. Once you've learned that system you apply it to everything, especially in filmmaking because you're writing a series of lines that holds everything together.
Tell us about the genesis of Loss.
It started out being called Short Stories. It was actually inspired by Hemingway's Nick Adams Stories. Hemingway's my favorite writer and was actually my sister's Godfather. My mother, who passed away a few weeks ago, was a very beautiful woman, and she worked in Nairobi. When Hemingway "died," (He went missing for a few weeks when his plane went down. His obituary was published, and it was assumed he was dead) he had burned his hands very badly when he had to punch his way out of the canvas fuselage. He couldn't type and had been commissioned by Look magazine to write an article about Africa. My mother was sent to do his typing for him and they had this mad...well, I don't know how far their relationship actually went, but he wrote really beautiful letters to her from Cuba after he'd left. My youngest sister had just been born, so there was always this 'Hemingway thing' in the house. And the Nick Adams stories really resonated with me. And I was thinking, why are all movies based on novels and not on short stories? I liked the idea of not having to worry about linear plot. I thought it would be interesting to do a performance art piece called Short Stories, done in a huge warehouse, where part of it would be done live, and part on film. Some of the stories would be on film and live, with the same actors. It would go on for eight or nine hours...then once I started making films, I stopped doing theater. So I had this script, or half-script for Short Stories, showed it to a few people, had a lot of false starts and finally got the financing for it. It took about 12 years. I got people really enthusiastic about it, then they'd change their minds at the last minute. I knew that if I didn't make it soon, it would cease to be a viable project in my head, the way things sometimes do.
What was your budget on Loss?
About $3 million. We shot it all on super 16mm.
Was Julian Sands' character of the filmmaker autobiographical at all?
Yeah, the childhood stories, especially, are as clinically accurate as I could get. I'm sure my memory has clouded them somewhat, but the scene in the grade school gym class, and the sequence with the teenager and his girlfriend, those were taken from my life. Also the dream that Julian Sands has is a dream that I had, that I sat down and wrote down in detail when I woke up.
I loved the Sandie Shaw music in that scene.
Yeah, so do I. I met her the other day. She told me that they're releasing an album with all her classic songs, re-mixed, which I think will be great. She has such a great voice, no vibrato. She just got stuck with a lot of bad material.
How did you throw the Adam & Eve story into the mix?
It actually started with that, when it was a performance art piece. I liked the idea of re-examining that parable, because it's the cornerstone of all our concepts about morality, in The Old Testament. It made me actually sit down and read The Bible. That story was pretty hard on women, actually. I mean, it ends by saying that childbirth is God's way of punishing women and basically says that woman is a whore and men are pure. The Bible is extremely misogynistic...It's also interesting because it's the first sexual story.
Another theme you explore in this, which you've explored in other films as well, is the seemingly perfect family on the outside, which in fact is very dysfunctional. Where does this come from?
The fascination with the internal workings of relationships, I suppose. You can never presume to understand the secrets of a marriage. Once that door closes, you don't know what really goes on. Also because I grew up in Africa, then moved back to a very working class area of England, where I promptly got the shit kicked out of me for the first two or three months until I learned how to "become one of the lads," though never really. So I always made a habit of watching people and observing them and noticing those moments that give them away. It's all about what's behind the façade.
Let's talk about your background.
I went to Kenya when I was six months old. My father was an Irish colonial who had been educated in England. He became a pilot during the war, and became an alcoholic during that point. He tried to pick up the pieces after the war, he was only 17 when he started flying, and to please his father, attempted to become a lawyer, like the rest of his family. He went back to Nairobi, where my grandparents were very prominent, and at that time Nairobi was this swinging city...there were a couple bars in Nairobi where Frank Sinatra would keep tabs on Ava Gardner...it was a 'happening' place. I grew up in this environment in this huge house, servants, a couple of cars...it was just one big party.
What was your father doing at the time?
Drinking. (laughs) If you were from the right family, you get could credit for anything. My grandfather founded the largest law practice in Nairobi, so dad got away with murder. He was sort of the black sheep of the family, occasionally worked as a jazz DJ, which is where I got my love of jazz. His record collection is amazing. I've still got it, all the old 78's. He had a very precise, amazing ear for music. He'd put on a record and say to me "Okay, just listen to what the bass player is doing. Cut everything else out." If you start at that age, you do develop an ear. Around the time I was 11, they had auditions for a band in school, and from there on I was a musician.
What made your family move back to England?
Debt. By then, dad couldn't hold them off any longer. I remember going to the airport saying "But why do we have to hide under a blanket?" (laughs) So we got in this twin engine plane, which almost crashed in Malta, and took about four days to fly to England. Then we arrived back in the north of England just before Christmas and I saw my first snow. It was quite remarkable. Newcastle was, and still is, a tough town with a warm heart, like all tough towns. But the only way you can get past the violence is to get to the heart of it.
Stormy Monday gave a very interesting portrait of Newcastle going through gentrification.
You should see it now. It looks exactly like it did in Stormy Monday, completely gentrified. When we shot the film, it wasn't like that at all, we just cleaned up the parts where we shot. Sting was so wonderful in that. He used to come see me play, you know, when he was in short pants. (laughs) Bryan Ferry was in that band, as well. I actually auditioned for Roxy Music, then decided that performance art was more interesting.
You're the only director I know of, other than John Carpenter, who also writes his own music.
I'm very lucky to be in the position to do that. When I first started doing films, it was a problem, however, except with Stormy Monday, which was so low budget, the producers were thrilled because they didn't have to pay me for it. (laughs) And everybody really liked the score, so when I went to do Internal Affairs at Paramount, I got huge resistance from the studio about doing the score. Then one night I was at this party, and Robert Towne was there. When I was introduced to him, in front of the producer, he said "I just temped the entire print of Tequila Sunrise with the Stormy Monday soundtrack!" (laughs) So they finally gave in and let me do the soundtrack on the condition that I did it along with another composer, which was fine because he was very good. From then on, with the rest of my studio films, they would always say 'yes' to my composing the score, then fire me because they just couldn't understand why I would want to do the score. It would be so much easier if I just shut up about the music, I suppose, since produces know so much more than directors do about music. (laughs) They've got all these deals going, with product placement and so on. The album is a big marketing tool.
Will you ever return to studio filmmaking?
Sure. The next one most likely will. It's a New York thriller. But I also want it to be down and dirty.
I heard that you were going to do the Chet Baker story.
Yeah, I was thinking about it. I get very nervous when I have to deal with real people, especially real people who were well-documented, filmed and videoed. People who were so much a part of the 20th century art scene, that everyone knows what they looked like, unlike Beethoven, Wagner, or even Robert Johnson because there's only something like four photographs of him. When you're talking about someone like Chet, you're always going to have a problem with a music, because no actor's ever going to be that good. Although I haven't seen Hilary and Jackie. I heard Emily Watson looked very convincing. But the best thing you can say about a musician...the best thing about Chet, or Miles Davis, or Louis Armstrong was watching them play. So I don't really know what would warrant making a film about these people once they're gone.
Internal Affairs was an unusual studio film. More European because of how understated it was.
Yeah, but it looks very American. It has the smell of the American movies that I like. L.A. photographs in a certain way. When you first get off the boat, so to speak, and look through that lens, it's a thrill! Our architecture doesn't stack up like yours does, so the light does different things. People don't look quite the same. It's fascinating.
I love the ambiguity in many of your stories, like the story of the twins in Loss.
If you don't know that you have an identical twin, you'd be fascinated by it. I had the experience on a boat once in Egypt. I was pretty sick with a stomach infection and had spent the first few days in my cabin. On the third day, I woke up, went out to the deck and bumped into myself! It was like looking into a mirror. We were just both like 'What?!' (laughs) I started to speak to him and he was Polish, didn't speak any English. It was mind-boggling: same hair, same mustache, same age, same size. He was married to a Canadian woman, who translated for us as we spoke. Then we took a photograph and ended up playing ping-pong together. Then I started thinking, 'Well, my dad was in Europe during the war. Could he be my brother?' Not my twin, but my older brother. We kept checking everything out, the eyes, the nose. He had a crooked nostril like me. (laughs) But it never crossed my mind that we really were related. But if someone had said to me, 'You've got a brother out there somewhere. We don't know what happened to him,' immediately I would've said 'Fuck! It's my brother!' Because I would've known.
I also loved the foreshadowing with the photo of the woman in the cobalt blue dress in the magazine. It reminded me a bit of Don't Look Now (1973), the Nicholas Roeg film, which used the image of the red raincoat.
What a movie! Everyone talks about the love scene in that, but I always thought that was least-interesting part of the movie. It wasn't very erotic. It was more clinical, as it should have been. There's a cross-cut at the beginning of The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) between Rip Torn having sex with a student and then to David Bowie that I think is far more erotic. I love Nic Roeg. What a cutter. And what a great eye.
How did you first become fascinated with film?
I think it was sound, to be honest. I really got off on film sound. Then I had my theater group, and I used to use a lot of tape and pre-record dialogue to make it sound like a cinema, like movie dialogue, to use it like a sort of thought process so the audience would be sitting in this sort of soundscape. I think Polanski's Repulsion (1965) was the first film that made me aware of how sound could be used in film. There's a little music in that, but not a lot. The sound of the dripping tap, the sound of the flies building up, then the way he used sound in the really frightening scenes was absolutely awesome. You'd hear the flies, but then you'd also hear the traffic outside. So it was very realistic. I hate dubbed sound. I hate manufactured sound. I like real sound. And it's so much more effective. Then Bonnie & Clyde (1967) really got me interested in making films. I just watched it the other day along with a documentary on the making of it. It's such a great film.
How did Leaving Las Vegas come about?
I was given the book and started reading it at a real low spot in my life film-wise. I just ate it up. It was a very European story, I thought. It was a contemporary existential novel, and it was perfect. What's perfect about it was that it'll so utterly marginalize how a film can be made, super 16/low budget, that no one will fucking like it, so it's great! (laughs) But I also knew that the people who would like it would like it for the right reasons, so it was the sort of film I wanted to do. I went in with a completely cavalier attitude as to how to do it. There were things I had wanted to do for five or six years in terms of technique that studios never let you do, like going to complete silence on the soundtrack. So I thought, 'Fuck it, I can do whatever I want.' Which is never really true, by the way. You're always going to have your fights using other people's money, but the fights are a bit different when you're up against a major studio as opposed to independent investors. It was a four week shoot with two really cracking actors, plus some brilliant cameos from Laurie Metcalf, Julian Sands, and others. I loved it.
You said you were going through a tough time before you made it. Were there any similarities between yourself then and the Nic Cage character?
No, no. I mean I was still in a very privileged position. I was still making movies. I certainly had empathy for the character. The story really just tied into my whole romantic literature history. I felt that it was very much like an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, and that his character was very Scott Fitzgerald: urbane, witty, alcoholic, charming. It was a very old fashioned character, which was perfect for Nic. And I'd always had a huge crush on Elizabeth Shue, ever since I auditioned her for a film that never got made. I just found her so moving. I think she gave the performance in that film. She gave Nic his Oscar. She framed everything for him. She allowed the audience to love him. She made him accessible through her vulnerability, through her dialogue with the audience, with her shrink. Just brilliant. I always found Elizabeth stunningly beautiful. And I remember when I first met her thinking 'Who does she remind me of?' Then it hit me that it was Liv Ullman. She's pure Bergman. So I photographed her like that, both on film and in stills. I've always been shocked by how she's been photographed since then: very cheesecake, very glamour girl. It kind of summed up to me why most people don't get who she is.
Were you surprised that Leaving Las Vegas was successful?
Completely! I thought it would bomb horribly and thought that One Night Stand would be a huge commercial hit! (laughs) I'm very glad Leaving Las Vegas did well, and still don't quite know what happened with One Night Stand.
As someone who has gone through frustration professionally, what advice would you give to others in the business in terms of holding on to hope?
Well, it's a tough business and the toughest thing about it is that, ultimately, it's got very little to do with anybody else. The definition of tough is that those who make it are so clinically determined to be successful, or they're incredibly talented. Sometimes they're both. But most people that I meet are not so talented, but have great heart and would love to be that. I wish it were that easy. I think it defines itself. So to anyone who is talented who is experiencing problems I would say look to the movie Celebration (1998), which has to be one of the best films ever made, was made for nothing...and proves the theory I've had all these years which is it's nothing to do with the project, it's nothing to do with the studio. It has to do with your vision and your ability to share that vision with your co-workers. That film should have won every Oscar, especially compared to some films which are so low-grade, so banal...
Any advice for first-time directors?
Make a list of obvious technical points and refer to it all the time. Because once you start directing there are too many reasons for you to be distracted. And they're to do with simple things like making shot lists. Make sure you've got all the coverage for the editor. Think like an editor, really, because you can never judge the footage while you're shooting it. You might have a beautiful take, but might find you're unable to use it because you don't have the coverage to get in and out of the take, so plan on things like cutaways. Make sure you've got enough in your shopping bag so the editor can get you out of trouble later on. That way you get to keep all the stuff that you love. Always do a wild track of some tricky dialogue if people are talking at the same time. Even if it's good to cut on overlaps, sometimes actors don't say it the same way, but if you have a clean track...just take ten minutes with the sound man. It's all real nuts and bolts stuff. Every time I seem to make the same stupid mistakes and I'm like 'Fuck! I told myself I wasn't going to do this again!' (laughs)
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