Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake) is a remarkable director whose moving character studies of the working classes are, in my opinion, among the best films of the last twenty years.
Mike Leigh is also an arrogant old fart, and after my recent encounter with him, he can get stuffed. I'll soon tell you why.
For many weeks I've been planning to write more on the set-jetting phenomenon. Just to recap, set-jetting is the recently coined term that describes the activity of visiting movie filming locations. The present Ground Zero for set-jetters might be New Zealand, where fans of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings epic can tour Middle Earth. As previously blogged, I set out from Australia on this trip to do a little set-jetting myself, albeit on a much smaller scale. The places that interest me are smaller, quirkier, more personal locations, like Michael Caine's town house in Dressed To Kill, the elusive Ambrose Chapel from The Man Who Knew Too Much, or the New York City skytram that featured in Spiderman and Nighthawks.
Not every film is filmed on location of course, so the first job of the set-jetter is to separate the real from the fictional locations. Then there is the task of locating the real locations. These tasks aren't as difficult as they may seem because of the internet, that sanctuary for the obsessive, and home to the compulsive. Film freaks everywhere have compiled a wealth of information on film locations, all a quick googling from your fingertips. These websites range from spartan lists to rich multimedia experiences that compare movie stills with contemporary photographs of the actual location. For a film nut, researching locations can be addictive. Think of it as location porn. I lost many hours in Australia satisfying the urge. So much so, that by the time I actually visit these locations, the whole exercise is a fait accompli.
Most of the fun of set-jetting is usually in finding the place, if it still exists of course. Some locations are demolished, buildings are altered, or redecorated in such a way as to make them hard to find. And even when the location is left untouched, it still might appear quite different to the human eye for any number of reasons: set-dressing, camera lens, lighting, matte paintings, the position of the camera, or through the use of post-production visual effects. Sometimes a location hunt is like trying to solve a thirty year old jigsaw puzzle, that I know is missing pieces.
When I arrive at a location, I have a tingling sensation of discovery. I might see hundreds of people walk past, oblivious to the place's history. For me, it's like opening a Faberge egg, hidden in plain view. Temporarily transported into a film world, I spend a few moments comparing the location to my memory, then snap a quick photo, before moving on. After all, what else is there to do? With few notable exceptions, Himeji Castle (Ran, You Only Live Twice) being one, most film locations are not open to the public. So to the people who aren't film buffs, set-jetting must seem pretty strange. This is anorak territory. After all, the film's stories are usually fictional, the characters don't exist, in many cases the working function of the actual location is quite removed from its fictional role, and quite often, I've made a hell-of-a-detour to get there. So, you may ask, what's the attraction?
I think the answer lies with good storytelling. When I read a novel or watch a movie, I feel drawn into a parallel world, which might look very much like our own, but is still a world of fantasy. Gangsters run riot, conspiracies are real, and true love is just a corner-turn away. And whether the protagonists are heroes or anti-heroes, we identify with their motivations, their history, and their desires. For me, the sign of a good book or film is the sense of dread that overwhelms me when I finish the last page, or watch the closing credit crawl. It's a dread borne from the realization that something I have immensely enjoyed is now finished, never to be continued, nothing before, nothing after, "THE END". Until, that is, I decide to re-enter the finite confines of that world by starting at the beginning. And with a good film or book, it might only take a few seconds to slip back into that richly drawn world. Surely this is the magic of storytelling?
Some years back I was stuck in an unfortunate rot of desperately wanting to travel overseas, but being unable to do so, for a variety of reasons. A film freak for longer than I care to recall, I turned to the cinema as a form of escape. Watching a movie wasn't just about enjoying the story and appreciating the art, but also about appreciating the artifice of film production . Movies filmed on location suddenly gave me a portal that spanned the seas and offered an up-close view of foreign lands. It was irrelevant whether the fictional location corresponded with its actual location, because the film making process, the art of artifice, is half the fun of it. For example, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy and his father journey into the Turkish desert to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, where the Holy Grail has been safeguarded for a millennium. A moon-shaped canyon doesn't really exist, but there is a canyon, at Petra in Jordan, where one can see the ruins of an ancient civilisation that carved extravagant buildings directly into the rock face.
In the same way, we can watch To Catch a Thief or Dirty Rotten Scoundrels to enjoy Riviera glamour (at a fraction of the price), or travel to the suburbs of Los Angeles by slipping in a disc of E.T., Back To The Future, or Halloween. Even a futuristic sci-fi film like Blade Runner offers little treats. It depicts Los Angeles in 2019, wet and grim, no longer sunny, but still the home city of the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Ennis-Brown House, just as it is now. And to those who might question my ability to differentiate between art and real life, I can merely offer the simple suggestion, tired as it may be, that life informs art, and in turn informs life. Consider the spectacle of September 11, playing live on our televisions like a Jerry Bruckheimer / Irwin Allen co-production.
So what is the relationship between story and location? Many filmed stories are universally themed. A simple love story, for example, might be set in Darwin or Dallas, with little difference to the end result. Some other films, I reason, need to be set in a specific location. No amount of skill and know-how is going to make a Godfather-style mafia epic work when it is set in Brisbane. (Which incidentally, is the problem inherent in so many Australian films, slavishly produced in the American style, but without the budget, the production values, or the locations).
Then there are other films, I'd argue, like Frenzy, that are inextricably bound to their setting. The location informs the story by providing a context for the action (like all films), but goes further than that, because that particular story simply could not be told by that director without that specific location, without it's colour, light, or atmosphere. With Frenzy, Hitchcock made a film about the rough hustle and bustle of blue-collar life in Covent Garden's fruit and vegetable market. It's a world which weaves together the certainties of life (food, sex, and death) with a world he knew, being the Covent Garden markets attended by his father, a greengrocer. Hitch paints the picture, we enter the dream world, soak up its atmosphere, and are readied for the sex, violence, and serial killer melodrama that unfolds.
Several times already I've blogged my thoughts of my time in New York, and specifically feeling tha I was trapped in a movie, 24/7. I think there is a very good reason for that. Storytellers use locations like shorthand, drawing on cliches (in turn, hyper-realities) to paint the background with a few quick brushstrokes. This is the trick of the establishing shot, those few seconds of long-distance photography that tell us where we are before we see what we're doing. But until this trip I had never considered the importance of location to good storytelling. Of those films which I describe as being bound to a location, it always seemed to me that the location was a character, alongside the actors. But now I'm beginning to think the relationship is deeper than that. Stories come from experience, and experience relates to character within an environment. Put simply, to tell a story well, it needs to be influenced by the very place where it is told. The character need to be influenced by their environment, otherwise they aren't of that environment. The longer I spend in London, the more I recognise the subtleties that differentiate character traits here, compared to those back home in Australia. Neither is better than the other; just different.
In New York, I found a non-fiction text called Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, by James Sanders, which attempts to address this phenomenon by taking New York City as a case study. The book's premise is that there are two cities of New York: one being the real city, home to millions, the other being the mythic city that is represented in the movies. More than a "mere mirror", Sanders writes, the mythic version is an "adjunct or underside or dream version" of the real city. This duality is shared by the other "storied" or "fabled" cities like London, Paris, Venice, and Rome. But today, Sanders writes, "we tell our fables with celluloid", and there is no better place to do that than New York, the very place where cinema was invented. The book provides a lengthy quote from Jean Baudrillard (whoever he might be) which sums it all up for me:
"[There is a] feeling that you get when you step out of an Italian or Dutch gallery into a city that seems the very reflection of the paintings you have just seen, as if the city had come out of the paintings and not the other way around. An American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move inward toward the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outward toward the city."
And that's exactly how I felt when I was in New York. Sure, there are actual film locations to visit. But just by being in New York, one gets the sense of having seen it all somewhere before.
One of London's little surprises for me was the belated realisation of just how much of this city has entered the public consciousness of popular culture, be it through cinema, music, performance, and literature. Through a mixture of plan or chance, the last five books that I have read have featured locations that are within a half-mile from my flat in Covent Garden. It's a weird thrill to read about Tom Ripley visiting Bedfordbury Street, mere metres from the Tesco supermarket that I visit every other day. Or reading about late-night cabarets at the Cafe de Paris, where the Salvation parties are held. Not long after moving into the area, I took a detour off the Strand, and happened upon a little Roman bath, hidden in an alley running through King's College. The heritage plaque disputed the antiquity of the baths, but noted that Dickens refers to them when writing as David Copperfield. I think that's wonderful.
We have this in Brisbane, of course, although to a much, much lesser degree. Books like The Mayne Inheritance, Johnno, and Nick Earls' work do very well because of the accessibility of the locations to the local readers. It's simply easier to imagine a place that you know, and much more fun. It makes books accessible, and easier to read. That's how I got myself to read the early Agatha Christie thriller The Seven Dials Mystery. It's definitely lesser Christie, but made all the more tangible by its setting around the Seven Dials intersection in Covent Garden.
For twenty years, Helene Hanff corresponded with the staff of Marks & Co., a little bookshop at, and featured in, 84 Charing Cross Road. I pass the address every time I walk up to Soho, and never fail to think of this charming story of loss, and lost opportunity. The bookshop is long gone, now replaced by a franchised bar, but the book and its sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbury, remain with us. Reading both books, back-to-back, was a delight. When Hanff finally visits London, she does exactly what I did when I got here... she set-jets, albeit exclusively to locations of a literary kind. While her first visit to London, the landscape is familiar, having discovered London long before through literature. And now, in turn, I had the opportunity to do the same with her book.
The loss of the little bookstore at 84 Charing Cross Road brings me to my final point tying story to location. Once again I return to Frenzy, and its setting in the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market where little had changed since the turn of the twentieth century. Hitchcock learned that the market was soon to move to Nine Elms, forever vanishing from central London's landscape. Distraught at the potential loss of a part of his personal history, and with a career in tailspin, Hitch set about making a film on location in Covent Garden (even though he detested location filming), so that history would have a record of something that held sentimental value for him, and presumably others. And there it is, Covent Garden frozen in time, perpetually stuck in 1972, in a film which, I believe, is the master's last great film. A final gift, if you will, for the fans of traditional Hitchcockian cinema.
One of my favourite exhibits at the Museum of London is the on-line archive of turn-of-the-century film footage where I saw Queen Victoria at St Paul's, streets filled with hansom cabs, and other Victorian delights. According to Mike Leigh, the British Film Institute holds three hours of 19th century footage, which was a useful reference for his period film Topsy Turvy, concerning the first production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. I learned this at one of two film chats last night, both held at the National Film Theatre as part of the London Film Festival.
Both events concerned the relationship between London and film-making. The first was an opportunity to view some experimental films inspired by London life. The second chat was chaired by Time Out, to coincide with their recent article surveying the 50 greatest films set in London, as chosen by Time Out writers and film-makers alike. Mike Leigh was on this second panel, along with Sue Hayes (Film Commissioner at Film London), and Stephen Woolley (producer of Scandal, Absolute Beginners, and The Crying Game, and now a director himself with Stoned). Given my recent pre-occupation with London locations, the chat was an engaging exploration of the relationship between story and location.
The film-makers mentioned the various period films they had made, from Vera Drake to Scandal, that recreated parts of London now lost to time. Their comments were interesting, especially as they described the ease or difficulty, as the case may be, to recreate London's past. The audience was invited to ask questions of the panel. I thought I was on to a winner when I asked the filmmakers if they felt it incumbent on directors to make films that capture a snapshot of contemporary London life , for the benefit of future generations, just as Hitchcock did with Frenzy. For reasons unknown, my question must have offended Mr Leigh. Missing the point completely, Leigh launched into a bombastic tirade shouting at me, although I sat only a few metres away, "Frenzy is a horrible film. It's sloppy. It's superficial. It says nothing about London life, and it shouldn't be in the Time Out list. I hope to never make a film like Frenzy. I'd be very happy if none of my films ever stoop to the levels of Frenzy."
"Hey Mike", I screamed, "at least Hitch's film tells us the world isn't a shitty hole of despair. At least I can watch his films without wanting to slit my wrists by the third act. Unlike your stuff..."
Well, actually, I didn't say that.
The audience seemed to be waiting all night for a classic ouburst from the easily irritable Leigh, and with my question they got it. Their cackles of laughter grew to howls, as I tried to shrink into my seat and disappear. It wasn't his criticism that bothered me, it was the tone of his accusatory tirade. At somewhat of a disadvantage, I felt helpless to respond. I just smiled meekly and pretended to laugh along with the audience, all the time praying his outburst, and my restraint, was definitive of our respective characters.
And then, from my extreme left, I heard someone interrupt the director's ranting. This lady informed the audience that she had once met Hitchcock, and even interviewed him. She tried to elicit more information from Leigh, informing both him and the audience, that the British press slated Hitchcock over Frenzy, feeling it was not representative of 1970s London. Sadly, that line of attack didn't succeed in furthering a constructive exchange. Leigh grumbled along the same line, the laughter slowly subsided, and the "chat" eventually got going again, on a different topic.
At the conclusion of the event, I had a brief conversation with the lady who interruped Leigh. She mentioned that the Brits, in her experience, are very sensitive of how foreigners perceive London, which might explain (i) the British press' condemnation of Frenzy as old and tired, and to a lesser extent (ii) Leigh's outburst. In her words, Londoners don't want to be reminded of "Jack the Ripper" London. And with that, I was reminded of something I read in Anthony Shaffer's autobiography (he being the screenwriter of Frenzy, playwright of Sleuth, and third husband to Diane Cilento).
Shaffer wrote that tourists comes to London with an expectation that the streets are shrouded in fog, and the alleyways are littered with ripped whores. This is the mythic city of London. A fictional mirror to its real twin. Art informed by life. It's the very city that the tourist read about in books, or watch on the screen at the cinema. And whether motivated by film, literature, or pop culture lore, these tourists are set-jetting. Hitch knew this, being more astute than some of his contemporaries, or even some contemporary film snobs, will acknowledge.
There is a dual irony to the Leigh fiasco. Apart from completely missing the point of my question, the panellists did eventually answer it, although in response to another. The subject of the chat had returned to "disappearing London". We heard sentimental stories from Leigh and Woolley, both lamenting the closure of favourite cafes and the redevelopment of railyards etc etc, but the consensus was that these things are on their way out, going or gone, and the filmmakers are powerless to do anything about it. While this is partly true, as very little gets in the way of "progress", let's not forget the source of London's rich record of its own history. That "source" being the decision by many people, from Samuel Pepys to Chris Petit, to record the city they know.
Oscar-nominated or not, I wondered, have these filmmakers learnt nothing from their work's potential, from a man like Hitchcock, or their city's own history?
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