CHAPTER 12
FILM AND PHILOSOPHY: AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKE FIGGIS
Clive Myer
Clive Myer: Having explained the premise of the BEYOND: The Theory of Practice conference I’d be very interested to know your thoughts on the relationship between theory and practice for filmmaking students and, if you like, the impact of philosophy on film practice.
Mike Figgis: On one level I have a big problem with film theory and the kind of focus on film theory in that at the end of the day filmmaking is a very practical business and in fact I remember at one point being rather insulted when someone said to me ‘Mike you’re not an intellectual, you’re a filmmaker’ or ‘you’re an artist but you’re not an intellectual’. I was annoyed at the time, although I understood it. My observation as I’ve grown up and worked in music and then in theatre – experimental theatre and experimental music and then in film, initially fairly experimentally and then as soon as you get into the mainstream you realise that you can’t really function experimentally within the mainstream, so you have to bite the bullet and actually get down to the very time consuming and energy consuming business of practically making a film. As you progress obviously you’re going through a period of education, every time you make a film you absorb things yourself, you also watch films and so you are constantly trying to answer questions for yourself, but questions that in my case always come from a practical necessity of I want to do something and say something in a different way, I don’t want to repeat an idea, although the central image or the philosophical idea behind the image may remain within a very small group – as Louis Bunuel said, three or four ideas may occupy most of your life in terms of your obsession. In general though it’s interesting to me when you mentioned in your introduction that at one stage Britain took over from France as the leading theoretical platform for thinking about film in a theoretical way; unfortunately Britain didn’t take over as the leading filmmaking community, which I think is a somewhat telling point.
CM: But could it ever have done that, because of the strictures on production and economics and cinema ownership and distribution, exhibition and so on. France and New York had lots of independent cinemas, was Britain ever in a position to be able to do that?
MF: I think so, yes. Britain, like every country in the West or let’s say outside of the third world, had as much of an opportunity to become the leading base for film production as anywhere else. It’s not an economic problem and it’s not particularly a structural problem, although tangentially it is because filmmaking is complex but simple – you need a structure which contains filmmaking, film distribution and film criticism as being an homogeneous body that works together, because once that happens the ability to find or create an independent cinema and screen things is relatively simple because there’s a lot of energy going in one direction and if you need an independent cinema, you’re making great films and want somewhere just to show them, if they’re good films then the place you get to show them will soon be full of people, but that being the very sort of basic law of supply and demand and as with many other things within British culture during the 1960s and early 1970s and so on, and certainly the music scene, that did happen. Of course much simpler; you don’t need such big sort of structures – you just need a record player or recording studio or whatever and some venues for bands to play and I’ve always felt that an inherent problem in British culture to do with its postcolonial intellectual basis was that intellectually we always seem smugly happy to talk endlessly in a very rarified and kind of elitist language about culture and art, very aloof, very Europeanist in a sense that whilst there were very interesting things happening in France certainly, look at the reaction amongst a large number of critics to the Nouvelle Vague and to the work of Jean Luc Godard – fairly contemptuous, fairly dismissive, as if just the French somehow weren’t good enough, they didn’t cut it for a lot of critics here. As someone who cut my teeth on experimental theatre and performance art, I know from experience that the process of going through British cultural criticism through the magazines, newspapers or whatever the venues would be, was pretty much negative all the time and had I not been in the fortunate position of being able to work in Holland, France, Italy and America most importantly, and in all of those countries to get a very positive, high energy feedback from critics. So working within a group where the feedback was so strong that like a lot of British artists you come to just accept the negativity that comes from British cultural quarters, because you are being sustained in New York, Amsterdam, Paris and Rome and so on.
CM: That’s very interesting because you mentioned music and theatre and I suppose we’re talking about the late 1960s, early 1970s as the genesis of it. We tried in film and we had the London Filmmakers Co-op, we had Co-ops around the country here, the British Film Institute Production Board was developing and was quite radical though had very little money but the Arts Council were giving out some, yet it happened in music and it happened in fringe theatre. I remember seeing many different productions of fringe theatres, way outstripping the number of possibilities and venues and work coming out of film. Actually I don’t understand why it was possible in theatre and music and why wasn’t it possible in film do you think?
MF: Because of what I touched on before. Film has a unique position in that it structurally is more lumbering, or it was then, it’s no longer but there’s interestingly the same problem in theatre, which is that the amount of equipment you need to make a film and project a film and post-produce a film at that time, even if you were shooting on Super16mm or on 16mm, was still a fairly daunting prospect. You needed a budget that would be more than the budget of a theatre and organisationally you needed more. Therefore it required the unification of a certain number of key elements; production, post-production, criticism and it seemed that we had a problem unifying those things outside of a kind of elitist kind of ghetto, like the London Filmmakers Co-op or elements of the old Arts Lab and as you pointed out, certain kinds of places such as Amber Films in Newcastle. Films were produced that were of interest and of note, but we never managed to get together something like the Nouvelle Vague or Dogme now. I still think that the problem is a problem of criticism and of the way things are talked about, but if those factions persevere in maintaining the sort intellectual elitism and snobbery and insist on using the kind of language which when you read about film theory, unless you are a really dedicated intellectual, that sort of idea of a sort of artistic, philosophical, intellectual debate, which to a person who I would call a filmmaking beast, is of no interest really. The energy is completely different; the practical ability of the one person versus the other is completely different. Unless you can find some kind of marriage between those factions, it’s never going to be possible to create a vibrant film industry that is an alternative to just importing American films and making clones of them within our own culture.
CM: Apart from the London Filmmakers Co-op, a few film groups and the single filmmaker doing his or her work, which still exists to a certain extent, there are a couple of feature filmmakers who came out of that period – say for example Sally Potter and I suppose Peter Greenaway – I can’t historically put Mike Figgis there because you weren’t a filmmaker then, but you came out of that period not coming from films, which is very interesting.
MF: I came into film not through a theoretical love of film, in fact I really was much more interested in sound and the use of sound in film and using film as a platform for and I still believe that – the phenomenon of contemporary film is more of a sound environment than necessarily a purely pictorial environment. It’s the combination obviously of those elements that make it interesting and unique. When I first came in to film I was working with Diane Tammes who was very closely involved with Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, so I was aware of the early Greenaway kind of work, I wasn’t really interested in it – I certainly listened and I observed, I didn’t find it exciting in any way, whereas I did find Godard exciting and I also found a film like Bonny and Clyde (1967) to be very radical and exciting, a film like In Cold Blood (1967) had far more influence on me than say Riddles of the Sphinx (1977).
CM: The films that came out of that period in the UK have hardly been seen or written about, giving the impression that there was almost no indigenous cinema at all during that period other than a reflection on the European or New York films that were around.
MF: And also there wasn’t and there still isn’t to me a magazine that wrote about film that satisfied me. There was nothing, and I still feel that way – there isn’t a newspaper that I turn to with a sense of enjoyment or I wonder what he or she is going to write about this week that I can engage in – I mean nothing and I find that in general about the way films are written about and certainly, although I faithfully get Sight and Sound, I haven’t read Sight and Sound for a couple of years now. I used to read it more – when I first started making films, to me it was more interesting than all the other magazines that to dealt with film, Film Premiere and all those sorts of things, they just seem dreadful. So I really feel there’s a huge gap in the market for intelligent conversation about film that isn’t so elite it stands to be disconnected.
CM: Where I want to take this is really not to talk about art at all, actually the reasons we were all involved in doing it at that time, which, and tell me immediately if you disagree, but it was actually to do with a political consciousness more than it was to do with actually producing a piece of artwork. The two compounded in some way with an attempt to actually examine art politically.
MF: I think probably the collective philosophy of that period was obviously far more politically radical and open. The result of that was a climate, an atmosphere of genuine interest in the way things functioned and a very healthy idea that questioning was a good thing to do and that process of using whatever it was – film, theatre or music as an extension of one’s own desire to look at the world.
CM: And change it?
MF: Not necessarily change it as a kind of goal, in fact that would be the result if you were healthily interested and I would actually make a huge differentiation between those who thought what they were doing was going to change something, which I would never subscribe to, I always found that naïve because after all its art. Art to me can signify change and in some cases can actually be very instrumental and be part of a change, but the function of it really is to ask the question in the first place within the license of art, which is considerable and a privilege and luxury to be part of and I would say the second group were the people who were just genuinely inquisitive and full of a love of life, which automatically made them ask questions and through that energy automatically make changes or open the way to a wider consciousness of wanting change. That to me was very healthy, I was always very wary of the so-called artists who saw themselves as politically significant, because I think that nothing dates a piece of art more than either flared trousers or the awareness of one’s own political significance.
CM: Yet you are an admirer of Godard.
MF: Yes, but Godard specifically I think – I just watched Weekend (1967) again, projected at the Godard season. I introduced it at the French Institute and thought I’d stay and watch the first twenty minutes, but ended up watching the whole film again. What really struck me about that film and it is my favourite Godard film, although it’s not generally thought of as being his best, but it contains so much humour and his view of political change. I think it is exquisitely judged and he never to me has both his feet in the mud – he’s always dancing on those things and to me all signifying that he has the right to change his mind a week later if he wants to. So he’s never coming in there with this kind of slightly more Germanic kind of force of ‘this is what I believe and I will be counted for this’. And he remains an artist.
CM: Except for the period in his life and certain musician’s lives where Maoism played a very important part and he made films like Sympathy for the Devil (1968).
MF: Sure and even those films remain absurdist in a way, so that to me he’s never saying you must take this absolutely seriously, these are ideas that are going through my mind right now and I’m expressing them and I think that’s the genius of Godard and I think that is the thing that separates him from all other filmmakers – his ability to keep, even now when we look forty years later, to me he’s still dancing on those issues, he’s not drilling.
CM: In music some people dealing with those issues went on complete journeys of change and never came back, I’m thinking of Cornelius Cardew for example and the Scratch Orchestra, the Portsmouth Symphonium and the sort of radical, post-John Cage movement.
MF: Again, the problem I have with all of that post Cage radical work is that they started off married to a premise. I mean the group I played with, The People Band, which was a radical avant-garde free jazz group, completely open to any possibility every time they performed, although very quickly like all human groups, it creates a sort of house style and you become aware that certain personalities become alpha and beta and so on. But initially what drew me to them and got me into the People Show and then got me into filmmaking was the openness, conceptually the openness of the possibility rather than to me the leaden British cliché of with trepidation walking into a preconceived intellectual plot, which to me characterises intellectual British life in all walks and I find it deadening, boring, limiting and one of the reasons why the beast doesn’t move forward at any speed – it always limits itself before it even gets anywhere by somehow desperately needing the endorsement of an intellectual concept.
CM: You see it’s had a big impact on education in as much that’s there’s now a big subject field called Cultural Studies and that subject field has not only produced theory, it’s producing practices within universities, art colleges, film schools and so on, which contributed to the UK Film Council decision to set up the Screen Academies to try to separate out where is the practice and where is the theory. But not to dismiss that, from my perspective because there are some very fundamental interesting issues, alliances and contexts that are outside of the cinematic, shall we say, and in the world of other problems, the world of the subject that you are filming. In the last thirty years because of globalisation in particular and because of how postmodernism recuperates all the radical looking work, then a certain essence from then might remain important rather than dismiss it and say it was useless to us, because how do you counter, an unfashionable word, but how do you set up against an ongoing development which almost isn’t possible to mitigate against. For example, I think you personally, if I may say so, handle it in a very interesting schizophrenic way by having one foot in Hollywood and one foot in experimental filmmaking. Other people find it very difficult – I was talking with Noel Burch about George Monbiot who is a Guardian writer and part of the Green movement and wrote a book about globalisation, The Age of Consent (2004) on the basis that they’ve taken everything from us really except our consent, they didn’t ask us if they could take everything from us and in some ways Hollywood cinema, ‘dollars’ cinema and television have not only taken the pound out of our pockets, they’ve also taken the spirit out of our lives. It’s like the Native American idea of not wanting to be photographed because of losing your soul and a certain philosophical level I think that’s what film does, inadvertently on one hand, but also with the acquiescent consent of the people on the other hand.
MF: Well it’s a strange form of consent because it’s a consent that comes from giving people a very limited choice, knowing that there is a desire for the product, it’s what I used to call the Marks and Spencer principle where everyone seems very happy with those designs on sweaters with little insignias on. I used to say clothes are much nicer if they don’t have insignias on them and somebody said everyone seems to like them and everyone is wearing them and I said they’re wearing them because that’s the only thing – if they go to British Home Stores or Marks and Spencer’s that’s all that’s available and I feel that way about films. Therefore my point has always been that any kind of radical change in cinema has always got to be the result of the coming together politically if you like of what I said before, the factions of production, post production, distribution. Because unless you strive harder in the more unfashionable areas of cinema, which is distribution and projection and so on and unless someone says I will dedicate myself to that element of future cinema, unless that happens we’ll just continue bitching about how Hollywood is stealing from us and so on. The fact is they are doing it quite openly, it’s not a secret and it is, particularly now more than ever, within the power of people to really easily create their own cinema and their own ways of projecting films. One also has to take into account, and I had a very interesting discussion with Jeff Wall about this a couple of weeks ago, the world has changed considerably, we have become used to the way films are edited now – they’re much quicker, the editing processes, much quicker, than they used to be and its no longer good enough in my opinion to make a slow film and call it an ‘arthouse film’ and say its deep and meaningful, but of course its not for the mainstream, another form of elitism, if its not for the mainstream then quite frankly its not really for anyone anymore because you’re making a film that is kind of an homage to a style of filmmaking that no longer exists. It’s fine if that’s what you call it, but if you’re actually hoping to engage with a tricky subject and with some slightly more profound concepts within a film than as a mainstream Hollywood film, and you’d like it to be seen by as many people as possible, certainly a wider audience than just an elitist gallery audience, then you have to also take into account technically the way you’re making the film and it brings up the whole issue of ‘is style within itself aesthetically, intellectually a good enough thing or is it merely the thing that services an idea?’ and if it’s the thing that services the idea then we can’t really afford to be so precious about the style elements and then it asks a wider question of the art community in general, the way in which art is developed and presented and iconised very quickly to an elitist audience is surely a kind of rather negative hangover from a time when art patronage, economics, capitalism were functioning in a way that we had very little control over, so we weren’t able to influence it in that way. However, that has completely changed to the idea of the single object versus the multiple image and mass reproduction of images, which is a far healthier concept and a logical extension of the printing press and all the other ideas gives us a certain freedom and yet artistically we seem to want to cling on to the idea of elitism, the single image, the iconisation of things, with the idea that the fewer people see it, quantifiably its probably a better thing, it’s somehow a more pure object or a more pure art object. So as a filmmaker I come up against these ideas all of the time, one of the most frustrating thing as a filmmaker and as an artist-I really see myself as an artist who makes films or makes music or whatever and I don’t feel that’s something I really want to spend hours and hours having to justify and yet within the art community the subject of filmmaking is very loaded. They somehow find it very difficult to come to terms with – to me Bonny and Clyde is an art movie, it had a huge influence culturally at the time, and it influenced all the films that followed it. It had artistic moments that were more profound than most art films and so on, so to me, although it’s a mainstream film, it functions really as a sort of seminal piece of filmmaking and there are other mainstream films one could argue, like The Godfather (1972) or whatever, that occupy that same sort of area and yet it’s a tricky area and at the end of the day I don’t know how important it is that one should care one way or the other, whether it is seen as a piece of art or seen as a functional piece of entertainment and why do we get so concerned about this and why is it so important to us. But it is important because at the end of the day art is important and it matters how work is classified. But all these issues seem to relate to each other.
CM: But as some radical filmmakers and theorists have moved towards content and away from form, you seem to be moving more toward form, not away from content necessarily but more towards form.
MF: Because I think that unless you are aware of form - that the function of form is to reframe ideas on a regular basis, so that you are in the best position to stimulate your audience. An audience that is seeing something that is using form in a newer way will look at that idea in a fresh way. If you constantly repeat the same form, which is the problem of cinema, I mean it’s repeated itself to death; you have very little chance of communicating a genuine idea because it’s too familiar.
CM: You see Noel Burch, who did used to encourage students in a way to make unreadable films, to deconstruct the codes of Hollywood cinema within our films, has done a volte face and gone completely the other way now and is very against any films that are difficult to read, any film that can’t get through to the masses and so on, and he loves Michael Moore and that’s fine – everyone loves Michael Moore to an extent…
MF: Not this person!
CM: …but when I went to see Fahrenheit 911 (2004) the most exciting part to me - and I’ve seen his live performance on stage and his other films and agree with you in the sense that, well, weren’t we doing that in Agit-prop films in the 1960s and 1970s and what’s the difference except that he’s a personality and he can use his presence in his own films – my point is that there’s one scene in Fahrenheit 911, the Twin Towers attack, where he’s not showing the planes going into the buildings and actually there’s no image, he’s just got a black screen and you’re hearing the sounds instead. So in terms of it being a straight-forward documentary really, there was a moment where suddenly form is intervening and actually saying that if you use form then its dynamics, the dialectic that come out of that for a viewer, actually gives you an attentiveness which allows and encourages you to participate in the work of the film.
MF: I would agree with what you said earlier, that not being a huge fan of a film where form is something that is stopping you allowing the audience to connect with the film and I would say that is quite true of many art house films. However I think there’s a way of using form where you can create a freshness. In Time Code (2000) for example, people’s first reaction before they see the film is that it sounds like it’s too much work. Inevitably they say after twenty minutes it was very easy to watch and I knew it would be, but I did know that it would also make them very attentive because I just know scientifically that the way the eye-brain relationship works if you present people with more than one image, they are bound to scan all the time, if you present them with four images then they’re scanning relatively simple tasks for the brain and the eye, and it’s all in one square anyway. But they are scanning four images all the time, that’s four times more work than they normally do with the single screen. They might scan a single screen but basically they’re looking at a composite image, so they’re never thinking I might be missing something and so I knew theoretically initially and then as soon as I started screening it, I proved it to myself, that the result being an attentive audience that are sitting on the front of their chairs not slouching backwards already meant you were getting more focus than normally you would get in a conventional single screen and that was the purpose of the exercise for me initially and then having set off with that technical exercise in mind I then, as a filmmaker realised it was my duty to tray and make what was going on as interesting as possible as well. So it was for me a healthy combination of an experiment in form and a convention of still telling a linear narrative – running on four screens, but it was still the same issue, it was a film with a start, a middle and an end.
CM: I was asked to do a presentation about Time Code at Chapter Cinema in Wales two or three years ago and it was great, but I did need to point out to them that there was a filmmaker called Abel Gance who in 1927 made Napoleon with four or eight screens.
MF: They varied didn’t they?
CM: I think the difficulty with film and the reception of film is that people have more of a sense of history of art, painting say, and feel they understand some things about it because they’ve seen a Renaissance painting, so they can relate even to conceptual art, but in terms of film - maybe it’s a school education problem that film isn’t taught well enough if at all in school - people don’t grow up with a historical understanding of the medium and therefore Time Code looks completely innovative to them, when it’s a very interesting film but its not a new technique.
MF: Well it is and it isn’t. There was never a claim that splitting a screen was an original idea, Erwin Piscator did it in a live theatre environment in 1925 and in the 1960s a number of filmmakers such as Andy Warhol did it. So anybody who has a vague understanding of the history of film would know that there have been these periods where more than one image has been projected.
CM: But that’s an elite understanding because most people don’t.
MF: Yes OK, but all things will function. A book will function on the basis of does it work now for someone reading it who knows little about the subject and does it also function for someone who will have a wider intellectual, historical understanding of the context of the book? The fact remains that what was unique about the film was that it was in real time on four screens, which had never been done before. So, in fact as an exercise it was a real time film. As a filmmaker, when I set out to make a real time film I thought, going back to what I said before, audiences are now much more aware of editing and the need to move forward with narrative in terms of visual change, so if I make a real time film, which I now can because video will allow me to do that. In order to maintain visual interest, single screen isn’t going to do it, they’re going to get bored by single screen and the camera is going to have to gyrate to such an extent to find new and interesting images, that actually splitting the screen is going to be an interesting alternative. So they are getting information, only they’re not getting it in cuts, they’re getting it in sound edits in a way and so on and then I went to four screens. So it was never a film that was going to claim that splitting the screen was an original idea, however it was a film that was going to claim that splitting a screen in real time was an original idea.
CM: Within the context of that, is what the film is about important, or not?
MF: It’s as important as in any film that’s ever been made. For example take a musical analogy – if you say I’ve come up with a new chord sequence using the whole tone series and I want to change the time signature. So the audience who hear this in a concert hall are going to be alerted because the time signature is going to be odd and changing and their ears aren’t quite used to this kind of harmonic progression – that’s the context of what I’m going to attempt to do, it’s a forty minute piece of music. Now I’m going to start writing the music, within that I still want moments when I touch them emotionally and other times when I stimulate and excite them in a different way as I would with any film, to me its just by changing the form it gives you a kind of a fresh pallet. But once you start making the film, as a filmmaking animal you’re going to be very quickly saying to yourself okay I know the theory of what I’m doing, I’m actually now bored by that theory in the sense of that is no longer enough to sustain me as a filmmaker, now my challenge, as with any film I’ve ever made, is to try to make an interesting film with interesting characters, with humour, with some tragedy.
CM: So what exactly did you feel you were losing interest with and for what reason?
MF: Technically you mean?
CM: Yes, that’s what you were saying.
MF: Because form is only form, that’s what it is and it’s not enough. It’s your duty to try for yourself to reinvent form all the time. It’s a limited choice; there aren’t so many things you can do. Because the minute you write a piece of music or you make a film you know you’re dealing with certain limitations that aren’t really that negotiable – how a camera functions, how a microphone functions, how light functions, how those things function together and so you just try think of ways of combining them in an interesting alternative and then once in a while when a new piece of equipment turns up, for example a camera that will record more than 90 minutes without stopping, which was entirely the basis for Time Code. Just the realisation that now there is a piece of equipment that is technically able to do something that filmmakers have wanted to do for a long time, which is to keep running for the convention of the length of a feature film, let’s say 96 minutes. So sometimes a piece of equipment will inspire you – the size of the cameras is inspiring in the sense that you can get into areas that you couldn’t before and their auto abilities that will let you auto-focus and auto-record sound and in a reasonably sophisticated way allows you to work without a crew. So again in terms of the form and the way you make the film is quite radical and offers you a very exciting scenario as a filmmaker. But once you’ve had those ideas, which are the ‘what if’ and ‘if I did it like this’ and ‘if I didn’t use any lights and shot the whole thing in three days’, you’ve still got exactly the same problem you’ve always had if you’re doing a 3 month shoot for Disney, which is - what is the content and how can the content be strong enough to transcend the form so that you’re not looking at an exercise in form, even though if you do something radical enough people will still come out and say yes but the amazing thing was it was all shot upside down in a barrel of oil.
CM: You mostly write your own film work?
MF: Yes, you have to.
CM: Otherwise it’s not your own work?
MF: No, not just that, really it’s a necessity that if you’re interested in working with form in as radical a way as you can, then really the only person who is going to know what to write for that format is yourself. Otherwise you end up spending a huge amount of time trying to explain your ideas to somebody else, when really if you’re able to write, the easiest thing to do would be either to write it yourself or create, as with Hotel (2001), enough of a template so that once you’ve explained it to the actors, what their technical world is going to be and then say we’re going to improvise around these structures and you choose actors who can do that, then those improvisations would be improvisations on a theme. So in a sense you’ve written a structure and now you’re using their talent to improvise. It’s pretty much like taking a piece of improvised jazz in whatever form that would be.
CM: Would you see content as something that is a theme about the world as opposed to the traditional idea of telling a story?
MF: Again telling a story is a very convenient way of discussing themes about the world and it’s really a priority issue. I would say in Hollywood the problem is that the elements that are ruling the production of Hollywood films are technical innovation and the stranglehold that technicians have over the filmmaking process. It’s very hard to block that. And secondly the cliché of a small number of stories that seem financially to function well within the Hollywood system, but that’s a self fulfilling prophecy and I don’t believe it, but its enough of a self-fulfilling prophecy to convince the executives who hold the purse strings. So therefore you have a pretty unhappy marriage between story repetition and technical stranglehold – it’s very hard to get beyond that within that industry.
CM: Otherwise what you have personally is a strategy to approach that, like in Leaving Las Vegas (1995)?
MF: Well it was made entirely outside of the system, it was French money, it was Super 16mm, it was shot in three weeks on location as a kind of completely independent film and nothing to do other than the fact that it was American in subject and was shot in America with American actors. Aside from that it had nothing to do with the studio system. It was then bought by a studio and distributed by a studio and got nominated and ended up smelling like a Hollywood film, but it entirely wasn’t.
CM: It was an accidental strategy then and that’s very interesting to me because at that time I didn’t know it was your film and had hired it from a video shop, probably because of Nicholas Cage after seeing him in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) and I watched it and thought, this is not an ordinary film, this is the most interesting drunken scene I have ever seen in a film and whoever has made this film really knows how to work cinema. So it was like a Hollywood film, I was looking at the box thinking what is this! But I think that’s great, you really entered the system and twisted something in there.
MF: Having worked in the system for three or four films before that, Leaving Las Vegas was quite clearly to me the film I needed to make in that environment, but entirely outside of the environment as well in terms of the industry, to prove something or to satisfy something within myself that I’d been completely denied and also to either prove or disprove something to myself. I kept looking at the way I was being expected to work within that system and being deeply unhappy with it and having just one confrontation after another with executives and producers in the process of getting a reputation as a troublemaker and as someone who would not bite the bullet and I wasn’t doing it for that reason, I didn’t want to be a rebel, I was just trying to make films and I was trying to make interesting films and working on the basis of that really the biggest plus you have if you’re a filmmaker is your own instinct and if that instinct is constantly being asked to go to sleep while you have a consultation with a technician or executive, its not going to lead to anything creative, so it was important to me to make the film in that way.
CM: Would you agree with me when I say that I get really fed up with people who oppose any new ideas by saying ‘look its all about telling the story, filmmaking is only ever about telling a story’, to which I always reply ‘no, it’s not about telling a story, it’s about how you tell a story’?
MF: Yes but it’s about story telling. For me Hotel for example, having made Time Code and in the process of making Time Code I asked a lot of unanswered questions of myself, like how interesting - if you use these cameras you can do this, if you don’t use a crew you can do this, if you don’t need to light it that means you can go anywhere and use the actors if they want to suddenly go into a room that’s dark you can do that too, I see. Instead of thinking well I need to now make a film that has all those possibilities as possibles, not as givens, and in that case the story that’s important in Hotel is the story of Hotel, it’s the story of the film and what’s very interesting to me about the film is it’s a film about filmmaking. That happens to be the most interesting story that’s going on, that’s the most consistent story that’s going on within that film. So sometimes, as with Godard when he’s really on form, the film itself is the story, Godard is the story and within that there may be little bits of stories. I personally, in terms of my appetite, don’t need a three-course meal, sometimes I quite like a bit of this and a bit of that and some water and I don’t mind falling asleep in it either, I really don’t.
CM: Do you think you’ve come to that view, if that’s a general statement in a sense about all of your most interesting films, that they are films about filmmaking. Do you feel you’ve come in a sort of circle – a bit like Sartre did when he started off as a Marxist, got into Existentialism and just by the end of his life came back to being a Marxist and that’s what I meant earlier about whether you’re finding something now that people found thirty years ago but nothing happened and you’re coming to that conclusion.
MF: Yes I would say that to paraphrase a friend of mine Billy Forsythe who runs the Frankfurt Ballet that I think has just folded now. He’s about to run another company and he’s a very interesting man, we’re the same age, I think we probably culturally come from, although he’s American and I’m British, the influences from spending a lot time there are consistent and he said a very nice thing when I was interviewing him. He said ‘As a Choreographer I quite like to watch the way rain falls and hits leaves and then drips off leaves onto other leaves and you get these kinds of rhythms that are not in time to a metre but within themselves as a phenomenon are really interesting’. So I’m fascinated by natural phenomena and the way it falls. Other people are much more interested in control phenomena, they like it to be in time signatures and they like it to loop very quickly almost. I would agree with Billy in a sense that I would say that in all aspects of life and culture, I am very interested in natural phenomena; therefore I try to resist the clichés of falling into the storytelling trap. There are moments when elements of stories in themselves are just amazing. For example Paul Auster’s book Oracle Night (2004) he is very interesting as a novelist. He’s writing 3 stories at the same time and one of the stories he just abandons, it’s just never resolved, it’s a story within a story within a story. The character is a novelist who is writing a story and then he abandons the story, but the story in itself is interesting and you want to know, then you think that’s fine because I can sort of see where he was going with it, he didn’t know how to resolve it, but that in itself is fine as an image, I like that.
CM: John Fowles was my favourite novelist and in his work it’s the space between fact and fiction that is challenged.
MF: Of course. Right now what obsesses me is this: let us take the phrase ‘the suspension of disbelief’, which is the basis of our relationship with theatre and therefore it’s also the basis of our relationship with cinema. We make a pact with ourselves to go into a dark space – a theatre or a cinema, and watch a drama where we know for the most part that there are people pretending to be people that they’re not, in situations that aren’t real, but are parallels to situations that have some reality to them. So we’re watching some kind of parallel life drama that maybe is going to inform us in a good way about ourselves. You know that works quite well I think as an intellectual human contract. However, if you make a contract and after all these things have births as ideas, they’re not natural phenomenon. At some point the Greeks said how about if we have this contract and then you have a proscenium arch and so on and then at certain points you are going to go say fuck the proscenium arch, let’s go with theatre in the round, let’s do street theatre. Now when you do that you kind of call into question the suspension of disbelief contract and you say OK I’m not going to directly ask you, but what I’m saying is can we renegotiate this contract and can it now work for you 360 degrees rather than en face and a hip audience will kind of go ‘yeah that’s cool and we’ll go along with that, in fact this works better for us because it’s fresh’ – going back to my idea about the need to change form. If you just assume that it’s a given, that you have the privilege of this contract and you never bother to ask the audience ever again if its okay with them and you have an industry that’s developing the hi-tech potential of a camera, the hi-tech potential of recording Dolby sound, a huge screen and so almost like a pure Christian would say ‘is it time to kick the money changers out of the temple, and are our churches now too full of images of God, do we now need to go to a plain room again and just sit and close our eyes and think about the meaning of our relationship with God?’ and there is a parallel there. I hate to make it sound pompous, but if you just keep putting more and more images into the temple and never bother to ask the population whether that’s okay with them, then I think you have a problem and therefore it’s time to renegotiate that contract of the suspension of disbelief. Going back to what you said about the relationship between the story and so on and whatever form cinema is now going to come up with, it has to have that dialogue with the audience as part of its honeymoon period. It doesn’t have to be a direct question, but if the question is at least posed in one’s head it will, all be it abstractedly, answered by the audience. But if you’re not thinking about it and you just assume that it is your right to have that relationship with an audience I think you’re in trouble, really in trouble now and what’s interesting now about the new digital technology and shooting films on cameras like this is that it is a good time to do that because all the rules of cinema are crying out to be broken because of the equipment, because they were created because of the equipment in the first place. So to me the next period has to be about that question and the relationship between documentary feature filmmaking, independent filmmaking and distribution, the multiplicity and availability of imagery, the fact that on one level – on a banal level, the audience is very educated, on another level they’re very ignorant. In order to move forward into the new era of multiple imagery, and that’s what I meant by multiple imagery – I didn’t mean on the screen, I literally meant if you wanted to you could make a thousand copies of this fairly easily and relatively inexpensively and distribute them. That’s what I meant by multiple images, as opposed to a limited number of prints if you like, one negative and so on. Cloning is not a possibility; it’s a fact of life now.
CM: That brings us round in a circle. I think we’ve come to the crux of the matter, where we are and how film works on consciousness. It’s certainly an area that I’m looking into with my own research and it’s to do with collective consciousness and we’ve touched upon it. You also touched upon it at your Royal College of Art talk a few months ago, when you talked about your interest in dream. But I see a slight contradiction, very interesting and exciting what you’ve just said, but there’s a slight contradiction and difficulty with your interest in natural phenomena – what is natural, but presumably in society, not just rain falling on a leaf, but actually from a filmmaker’s perspective and interaction with people.
MF: Let me put that into a frame in itself – rain falls gently and hits a leaf and starts to cascade in a sort of natural way from one leaf to another making a sound and making a visual image. I can stand forty feet away and frame a wide shot of this whole event or I can choose to come in fairly close and look at a section of the tree and the leaves of the bush and go ‘oh that’s particularly interesting there’, that one section of it because aesthetically this informs me in a certain way – I frame up, I’ve now made a choice, I’ve now changed it by specifically choosing that part of the image and the minute I do that I’ve turned it into something else and I think in the same way as if I’m making a drama, I try to find natural phenomenon and then I focus on it. The minute I do that I’ve changed everything, of course at least I’ve started from something that doesn’t look fake and I have some chance of engaging with it in a way that to me is fresh and that my actors maybe are in an environment which is non-artificial to them. So therefore me, them, the situation and the relationship of suspension of disbelief, at least to me has a freshness and is asking a question of that contract.
CM: How do you do that with actors in a bare room, no windows?
MF: I do it by trying to take away as much of the kind of ritual of filmmaking, rather than worrying about the room itself. So if you think about the conventional ways of shooting a dramatic scene, the preparation, the build up, the tension, the ‘are you ready, the lights are on’, the this and that, that everyone is focused in a certain way, stand by, ready steady, clack, go, action – you know all the things that build up to that - to create an artificiality in terms of an over-hyped, overcooked environment where its very theatrical, its very old-fashioned in a way. The camera is like this. If you can sort of get rid of as much of that as possible and take away as many people from the room as possible, then the room at least resembles a bare room.
CM: Almost Grotowskian theatrically?
MF: Yes.
CM: My favorite Derek Jarman film is Edward II (1991), where there’s almost no set really. I think he handled that incredibly well in the way you’re describing.
MF: Interestingly in a Godard book that came out, The Future(s) of Film: Three Interviews 2000/01 created in Switzerland by journalists from Cahiers du Cinéma. It’s a very short, small book and in that Godard is asked about digital technology and he’s very negative about it. I think because here’s the man who developed, if you like, the use of video almost single-handedly within that context and I think that’s his domain and now there’s this interesting idea that actually millions of these cameras are now available, the very thing he always wanted and he doesn’t really want it now because its too out there, its not specific enough somehow.
CM: So he’s gone back to 35mm film?
MF: He’s almost being a Luddite in the sense that he says there’s no depth-of-field and that’s absolute bullshit; if you want depth-of-field you create depth-of-field as you would in a film camera. However I do understand where he’s coming from and he talks about the fact that it’s impossible to make a film with one person, you do need the crew and he’s now going against so many of the ideas of the Nouvelle Vague and his own ideas. I understand why, but at the same time I say he’s wrong. In fact it is possible, it’s entirely possible.
CM: Just to continue that question of the example of the natural. You’ve also talked about a parallel world in a way which connects to your dream theories about consciousness. The parallel world involves the world that is being filmed and then the world that’s on the camera as two different things, seeming to be corresponding, but in fact they’re miles apart.
MF: Well they’re miles apart because the minute you start controlling the camera, and that after all is your pallet and is your voice, particularly a camera like the one you are using now that is recording the sound as well, the minute you start making decisions about where the microphone is, how far your zoom is, the speed of your zoom, the type of movement of the camera, whether it’s the deliberate kind of jerkiness of Dogme or the controllable fluidity of something that’s a bit less obvious in that sense in terms of the filmmakers hand and how you choose to expose - black and white, slow shutter speed, even the corny things like old movie effects or negative or solarisation, they’re all rather wonderful, quite stunning as visual tools if used in a certain way, like anything else the minute you make those decisions, you know what you have on the camera even though you’re in the same room as the subject, it’s a completely different world.
CM: What concerns me mostly is that the viewer, the subject in the world, I fear no longer quite knows which of those dimensions they’re in – the live world or the lived world of cinema and they relive their lives through television and film.
MF: That’s entirely my point when I say the need to re-examine the contract of the suspension of disbelief, it in a way is your duty to inform the audience as much as possible of what you’re doing stylistically in order for them to be able to interpret and understand what it is they are watching and the problem with reality and the fact that these cameras approximate reality rather well and relate to the so-called cheap TV shows about reality and so on, is that that line is now so blurred and that becomes the model for most people when they’re growing up, the model of their experience and they will impersonate elements in these visual documents as part of their life experience as we always did with film. But film before was so clearly a theatrically different world with a certain look and sound to it, that one always knew the cliché of coming out of a cowboy film and feeling like you’re a cowboy and all of that, your relationship with unreality is very clear and that’s why in a way I favour a kind of return to it, almost like a Brechtian drama where props are minimal, stylistic elements of clothing and visual elements are clearly theatrical and the only thing that is of concern for the moment is the power of the drama. But the context of it, the frame in which it lives should be seen clearly as theatrical, not realistic, particularly never be realistic. However, as a poem it can function really well.
CM: As a poem?
MF: A poem, which is what film is it’s a poetic visualisation isn’t it?
CM: Yes absolutely.
MF: I mean, you know, you film your loved one. It can never be a substitute for your loved one. It can merely be a poem about your loved one or something that you love. It cannot replace that thing.
CM: That’s a deep one, taking a photograph of your loved one into war, powerful.
MF: The poignancy of that is so strong so powerful, however it is not a replacement, it is merely a reminder.
CM: It’s interesting though because you take the still image with you and you only remember that person through that still image in the end, and that again is the same thing about film and OK you could say it’s a pleasure but it’s a very dangerous pleasure, it could be a very dangerous plank to be walking on, to not really know who we are, let alone who we’re talking to anymore, through our own kind of make-up and that’s my problem with the natural elements. I understand what you’re saying about framing and re-composing the world and being very open about it and that we must be very open about it, and we’ve always said that from our perspective of whatever you call radical filmmaking.
MF: I suppose to bring those two ideas together, you need to make a balance. Natural film is so seductive that the minute you use a very evolved eye and a brain, which after making films for a while you should have, the ability to get in and seduce with imagery is very tempting, it’s very powerful and needs constantly to be tempered and again I would go back to Godard and people say well he’s boring and I say yes he’s boring in sections and then he will give you an absolute gem of an image or an idea and you walk away with a very clear idea of the context of those gems, rather than the kind of obsessive goal of most filmmakers now, which is to give you a hundred minute seduction experience where you’re never let off the seductive hook and that ultimately is an entirely frustrating experience because you come out with your brain having been, up to a point, fooled into the idea that it’s had an experience when it hasn’t had an experience, it’s merely watched a film. Therefore it’s very important dynamically, I would say, to filmmakers and students ‘wow I read your script that’s an amazing first ten minutes, it’s simply in the wrong position’. You could afford to have a dull first ten minutes, an audience will forgive you for that, but you really have nowhere to go after that and you’re trying to be Spielbergian and of course what he’s very good at is maintaining this sort of opening for the entire film by this sort of excessive and very expensive use of filmmaking elements. It’s perfectly all right to be quiet and a little bit sleepy for ten minutes and really the challenge for any artist and certainly a filmmaker is where you put those moments. So a successful film could be regarded in one way as one that has a satisfying ending but somehow in the last ten minutes there was a degree of engagement that really allowed the audience to leave the cinema in a kind of fulfilled way and there were three or four moments in the film that really were very poignant and moving or frightening or whatever and they were connected by other quiet scenes which clearly allowed the audience to back off from the experience in a certain way and remind them that they were in a film and then take them out of that and then you are playing with those elements in a way that results, I think, in a healthy perspective of what the experience has been. Because as I said, one of the worst things about film is the temptation to seduce, it is the most seductive genre that we as a race have ever been able to come up with to satisfy the greatest number of people in the largest dark space possible – more than opera I would say and more than theatre, other than certain tribal events where everybody joins in and chants in the same rhythm. Cinema isn’t like that.
CM: It’s a sort of fulfilment of narcissism, you see yourself up there and you’re very pleased to see that.
MF: Absolutely and I would go back to the kind of biblical analogy, which is - it is also dangerously the worship of the false God. It has always been the sinner’s cinema as well and maybe a kind of combination of a sort of protestant ethic and a catholic indulgence is somewhere where cinema interestingly can sit. If you look at Bergman and Bunuel, the icons of cinema, they seem to have been able to produce interesting mixtures of these elements, so that you know what it is, you know you’re watching a film but you are able to carry it with you for quite a long time.
 
London, July 2004
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Auster, P. (2004) Oracle Night. London: Faber and Faber.
Cahiers du Cinéma, available online in English at http://www.cahiersducinema.com/rubrique84.html (accessed 9 November 2008)
Godard, J-L, (2004) The Future(s) of Film: Three Interviews 2000/01. Bern: Gachnang and Springer.
Monbiot, G. (2003) The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order. London: Flamingo.
Sight and Sound: BFI Publishing.
FILMOGRAPHY
Bonny and Clyde (1967) Directed by Arthur Penn [DVD]. Amazon: Warner Brothers/Seven Arts.
Edward 11 (1991) Directed by Derek Jarman [DVD]. Amazon: S.A.V.
Fahrenheit 911 (2004) Directed by Michael Moore [DVD]. Amazon: Ufa.
Godfather, The (1972) Directed by Francis Ford Coppola [DVD]. Amazon: Paramount.
In Cold Blood (1967) Directed by Richard Brooks [DVD]. Amazon: Columbia Pictures.
Leaving Las Vegas (1995) Directed by Mike Figgis [DVD]. Amazon: MGM.
Napoleon (1927) Directed by Abel Gance [DVD]. Amazon: Universal.
Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) Directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen [DVD]. London: Mulvey.
Sympathy for the Devil (1968) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard [DVD]. Amazon: Abkco.
Time Code (2000) Directed by Mike Figgis [DVD]. Amazon: Columbia/TriStar.
Weekend (1967) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard [DVD]. Amazon: New Yorker Video.
Wild at Heart (1990) Directed by David Lynch [DVD]. Amazon: MGM.