Mike Leigh (Contemporary Film Directors)
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Devised and Directed by Mike Leigh
The uncle of Oliver Reed and sometime lover of Daphne du Maurier made more than 30 pictures, but his enduring popularity rests entirely on the magnificent trio of films he made from Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol both feature towering central performances from James Mason and Ralph Richardson and see shadowy nightmares flourish in Belfast streets and plush domestic settings alike.
The Third Man, though, betters both: Graham Greene's depiction of post-war, black-market-ridden Vienna inspired Reed to new heights, and saw him generate a noirish urban atmosphere whose intensity remains unmatched on celluloid. An easy name to overlook, the visionary Boorman flits uneasily between genres, and seems to view new film ventures as experiments - some of which fail, both commercially and artistically.
Still, his gems vindicate his method. His best work has been on American soil, with the noirish masterpiece Point Blank , a relentless, visually startling mob thriller, and the jolting Deliverance , in which backwoodsmen terrorise four businessmen on a weekend canoe trip. In Britain, Boorman triumphed with the affectionate Hope and Glory , based on his not unhappy childhood adventures in the London blitz. A true British auteur, Davies is the poet of the everyday.
With a painter's sensibility, he finds beauty and meaning in rain on the streets, a face glimpsed through a window, an old song sung in a pub. The uniqueness of his vision shines through every film he makes, even the American-based The Neon Bible and his Edith Wharton adaptation The House of Mirth - but in semi-autobiographical works such as Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes he captures with uncanny precision the sensations, textures and glances that are the stuff of life itself.
H is films being showcased at the BFI from Monday until April 30 are bleak but never joyless, slow but never dull, full of sudden epiphanies and strange revelations. That this cinematic master struggles to find funding is nothing short of scandalous. Sweet Smell of Success was a commercial disaster in its day, scuttling the Scotsman's Hollywood career, but it is now hailed as one of the great American movies.
E very time a Stephen Frears film comes out, there seems to be a mild collective gasp of surprise at how good it is. This is at once an understandable consequence of the variety in his oeuvre and also plain bonkers: A grudging interviewee, he's effortlessly articulate from the director's chair, with a keen eye for character, drama and comedy that have enabled him to wring sublime entertainment from milieux as disparate as aristocratic 18th-century France Dangerous Liaisons, , US-style Nick Hornby nerdery High Fidelity, , contemporary London's underclass Dirty Pretty Things, , and the trials of our very own monarch The Queen, Born and raised in South Shields, and indelibly impressed by the billowing Redcar steelworks that he passed every day on the way to art college, Scott has made some of the most exciting, influential and visually astonishing films of the modern age.
Alien , Blade Runner and Thelma and Louise are all cornerstones of popular culture, and the epic Gladiator may yet join them.
Mike Leigh | British writer and director | www.farmersmarketmusic.com
I n contrast to many directors on this list, Winterbottom is dauntlessly prolific. He moves with consummate ease from literary adaptation Jude, to pop-culture follies 24 Hour Party People, and excoriating social drama In This World, , and then back to the Eng Lit canon with his cunningly postmodern take on Tristram Shandy A Cock and Bull Story, Schlesinger shot up through the ranks of British directors with the iconic Billy Liar and Darling , before turning a gaze both lewd and compassionate on America in his astonishing Midnight Cowboy His splendid thrillers, too, were about class, money and morals.
T he hyperkinetic opening credits of Shallow Grave were enough to announce the arrival of a thrilling new talent. Boyle's follow-up, Trainspotting , came to define an era, and although he had an expensive blip with The Beach , he rallied superbly with the white-knuckle horror of 28 Days Later and now the magisterial Sunshine.
Anderson was the angry young and old man of English cinema. Distinguished for his film criticism, theatre work and shorts, his select five features include an icon of s rebellion If, and Britannia Hospital , a withering satire which dared to mock the nation at the height of the Falklands War.
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Scotland's lost poet, Douglas directed just three bleak, fiercely lyrical shorts based on his working-class childhood, and a single feature: Comrades , an ambitious, unjustly neglected epic about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and how cinema represents and distorts history. His slow output and death in , aged 54, curtailed a trailblazing career.
How art inspires film directors Christopher Nolan, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach
Loach may have been making headlines for more than 40 years - ever since the terrible poverty of Cathy Come Home shocked BBC viewers in - but is no mere controversialist. His best films are more than polemics: D ickinson, unlucky but touched with genius, is even today relatively neglected, though admirers of this superb stylist, with two or three masterpieces to his name, include Martin Scorsese and the film critic David Thomson.
The dark Gaslight and The Queen of Spades , and the delightful comedy thriller The Arsenal Stadium Mystery all reveal his exceptional cinematic fluency. The beauty of Leigh's films is their lack of beauty. He takes the actors whose distinctive faces don't fit elsewhere and casts them as characters of awkward, dysfunctional, full-bodied humanness. Although we may not covet their shabby English homes or their shambolic lives, it's very, very hard not to love them. W orking with small budgets and mostly male ensembles, the Nottingham-based Meadows has been steadily making his mark since Small Time Funny, gritty and deceptively casual, his films know the troubled Northern soul like the back of their hand, not least the acclaimed s skinhead saga This Is England out Apr His play Bleak Moments , about a woman grappling with the demands of everyday life, evolved from this process, and he adapted the script a year later for his first feature film.
In he returned to the cinema with High Hopes , which sheds light on social distinctions among ordinary modern Britons. He explored similar slice-of-life themes in the poignant comedy Life Is Sweet , about the ordeals of a suburban London family. It was followed by Naked , a stark portrait of a disaffected loner that earned Leigh the best director prize at the Cannes film festival.
After Career Girls , which affectionately depicts a reunion between two former roommates, Leigh wrote and directed Topsy-Turvy In a departure from his work to that point, which typically followed wholly fictional characters in present-day contexts , the film centres on the famous 19th-century partnership of light-opera librettist W. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan ; it earned him another Oscar screenplay nomination.
Leigh returned to a contemporary setting with All or Nothing , which focuses on the residents of a public housing estate. He captured Oscar nominations for best director and best original screenplay for Vera Drake , about a kindhearted woman in early s England who clandestinely performs abortions.
In his next two films Leigh explored relationships between characters with disparate emotional attitudes. Happy-Go-Lucky presents the story of a free-spirited woman navigating the world around her, while Another Year follows a happily married couple and their less-sanguine family and friends.
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Both films earned Academy Award nominations for best original screenplay. In Leigh directed the Royal National Theatre debut of his play Grief , about the cloistered existence of a family still struggling with the loss of its patriarch in World War II a decade after the end of the conflict. Turner was an acerbic examination of the life of painter J. Turner played by Timothy Spall.
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Gilbert began to write in an age of rhymed couplets, puns, and travesty;….