Mr Turner: The unvarnished truth

Timothy Spall takes the title role in Mr Turner, directed by Mike Leigh.

Film-maker Mike Leigh's latest is a film about J.M.W. Turner and stars Timothy Spall as the great British landscape painter. The director talks to Peter Calder.

No matter when you saw it, the first Mike Leigh film you saw changed everything. Forever. When his first, Bleak Moments, was released in 1971, the influential American critic Roger Ebert hailed it as a new kind of movie, one "that considers, with almost frightening perceptiveness, the ways people really behave toward each other".

Yet it wasn't until the 1980s that his work jumped off the small screen and started being seen in cinemas: in such films as Secrets and Lies, Life is Sweet and All or Nothing, he explored the lives of fictional characters who were more real than real people. In the process, he became the uncrowned film-maker laureate of London in the same way as Woody Allen owns New York or Fellini owned Rome.

Three times though, he has turned his attention to Londoners of the past: 1999's Topsy Turvy focused on the relationship between the comic opera collaborators Gilbert and Sullivan; in 2004, Vera Drake told the story of an illegal abortionist in working-class London in 1950; and his newest film, Mr Turner, brings to life J.M.W. Turner, the English landscape painter who upended the romantic conventions of his day with a vigorous style that anticipated the Impressionists and even the abstractions of 20th century painting.

Timothy Spall, in his fifth Leigh film, learned to paint for the role giving us a real sense of the passion of creation, which is so often fatally absent from chocolate-box artist biopics.

Leigh says the idea of a film about Turner had been simmering ever since he encountered the artist's work when he was at art school in the 1960s.

"I fell in love with him, of course," he says, speaking from his flat in central London. "He's very exciting to explore and you can never get your head round the whole of Turner no matter how much you pay attention because he was so prolific. [The artist's will left more than 19,000 works to the nation]. "After we had made Topsy Turvy, I had this notion that maybe there was a film in him and once I started to investigate the character, the personality, I realised the extraordinary tension that existed between this very vulnerable, complicated guy and this extraordinary epic work. That's where the film was."

Crucially, Leigh eschewed the whole-of-life biography, concentrating on the artist's last quarter-century when he was already famous.

"Dragging through all the details of his life would have diluted things," he says. "It was in the last period of his life that his painting became the most radical and interesting and so did his life: his father died, he began the relationship with [Mrs Booth] his landlady."

The effect is to evoke Turner as much as to doggedly document him: "There's a fluidity in the paintings that I hope is in the story. I didn't want to put labels all over it saying 'four years later' and so on. Not doing so enabled me to be a little bit cavalier with chronology to make it coherent and get to the essence.

"You realise he's got older or she's here now without it being explained. You don't have to explain everything to a modern audience. People get it. They understand things without their being spelled out."

A Mike Leigh film famously doesn't start with a script. It emerges from long periods of rehearsal and improvisation in which characters reveal themselves to the actors playing them. In Vera Drake, only Imelda Staunton, who was playing the title character, knew what her illicit profession was; her arrest came as a surprise to everyone (including her), except the actors playing the police.

Leigh says that bringing that modus operandi to bear on historical figures is no harder than when the characters are fictional.

"In the end there's no difference if you have researched the people. You can research for a million years and have them in your head, but that doesn't make them happen in the flesh, in three dimensions, in front of the camera. You still have to bring the thing to life.

"So we still do all the workshopping and improvisations. It's not more difficult or less difficult, really. It's just a different proposition. The excitement is bringing to life people that you've read about."

He refers to a key scene in the film in which the future seems to land in the present. Turner appears to deface his own painting and then, with a supremely dramatic gesture, turns the act of vandalism into a magnificent flourish. Even John Constable, his great rival, remarks that Turner has "fired a shot".

"Everyone knows," says Leigh, "that Turner went to the Royal Academy in 1832 on varnishing day [the day before the opening of a show when artists often touched up their work], and they know what he did because so many people witnessed it. But you've still got to make it happen."

The choice of Spall for the title role ("I never thought of anyone else," says Leigh) puzzled some who said the actor looked very little like Turner. But Turner didn't often look like Turner. A self-portrait done when the artist was 20 was rather self-flattering, Leigh suspects, and an 1846 oil by William Parrott, called Turner on Varnishing Day, shows a chap much like Spall's Turner: stout and short-legged, with bushy sideburns.

"If you google images of Turner," Leigh says, "you'll find a whole bunch of images and none of them looks anything any of the others. And the image that looks least like any of them is the self-portrait."

Asked to name films about artists that he admires, he singles out Alexander Korda's 1936 Rembrandt with Charles Laughton, which also introduces an artist at the peak of his powers; and two films about Vincent van Gogh - Maurice Pialat's sublime 1991 Van Gogh and, from a year earlier, Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo. "They are all films that treat the artists as real people and not just idealised aesthetes," he says, which seems a pretty fair summary of Mr Turner.

What: Mr Turner, Mike Leigh's film on British painter J.M.W. Turner starring Timothy Spall
When: Opens Boxing Day Timothy Spall takes the title role in Mr Turner, directed by Mike Leigh.

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