Many times over the past decade and in the middle of making other films – All or Nothing, Happy-Go-Lucky, Another Year – Mike Leigh and his cinematographer, Dick Pope, would look at the sky and then at one another and say: “Oh God, we must make our Turner film.” A particular light, a moment’s radiance, a sunset – any of these might set them off. The idea of making a film about this country’s greatest painter, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), in his last quarter century came to Leigh at the end of the 1990s and would not let him go. The difficulty, as always, was finding the funding. “But then recently we decided we’d go all out for it, and so we did.”
Mr Turner is the outstanding result, a film that introduces the painter as a portly fellow with a top hat and a curmudgeonly expression in repose. Not that repose was Turner’s thing (there are more than 20,000 works in the Tate’s Clore collection alone). In the film, he travels the land and seashore, his painter’s kit slung over one shoulder. His is a solitary calling, and it is clear he needs the love of a good woman – anchorage. Turner is played by Timothy Spall, who has already received the Cannes best actor award for a tremendous and disconcerting performance.
For those who know little about Turner’s life, it’s a jolt to accept that the creator of paintings of genius was a faulty bloke with an intermittently uncivil tongue, a tendency to grunt and a contradictory attitude towards women. It is hard, on one level, to believe his sublime canvases come with a character attached at all. But the film tells the human story splendidly, and makes a companion piece to Tate Britain’s breathtaking exhibition, Late Turner: Painting Set Free.
I have not met Mike Leigh before, although we’ve spoken on the phone, yet it’s like encountering an old friend or a relative (he can be slightly avuncular). But the main reason for the sense of familiarity is that one picks up so many clues about him from his films and plays: his liberal intelligence, satirical edge, good heart. I had been given unusually detailed instructions about how to find him in his Soho offices – as if he were in hiding rather than at work: “It looks a little unlikely but don’t be deterred, you’re in the right place. Just follow the stairs up to the Life is Sweet poster and knock on the white door to the left… ” And once inside, life does seem fairly sweet. We are in a room with Georgian windows that face on to the street. The atmosphere is friendly rather than professional, as if a sitting room had been transported from Mike Leigh’s home and plonked down in Soho. It seems in keeping with his film-making style that there is no razzmatazz about Thin Man Films’s headquarters.
Leigh is not so much a thin man as koala-bearish. He is beady-eyed, bearded and has a robust laugh. By far the most striking thing about him is his curiosity. I do not think I’ve ever met anyone more watchful, interested or quicker to turn an answer into a question. And he is not at all self-involved – he prefers to focus outwards. His beginnings can be outlined at speed: he was born in 1943 into a Jewish immigrant family (Leigh was originally Lieberman), the son of a GP. He grew up in Manchester, and even by the age of 14 he was into art. Does he remember his first encounter with Turner’s painting?
“I had postcards of Picasso, the impressionists and even – dare I admit it – Salvador Dalí (I got over that). But Turner, Constable – I thought they were boring landscapes for chocolate boxes or biscuit-tin lids. I didn’t notice Turner until I was at Camberwell art school in the early 60s, when I started thinking about figurative painting. You couldn’t be a London art student and go around galleries without starting to ‘get’ Turner. But the scope, scale and remarkableness of his work has taken its time.” Later, he spells Turner’s importance out: ‘This guy was a revolutionary, anticipating the impressionists and 20th-century art – anticipating Rothko probably – and yet he was timeless.”
Leigh mentions Camberwell – had he wanted to be a painter himself? “No, I wanted to direct and make films and write. To do that I went to Rada, acted for a short while in films, went to Camberwell on the foundation course, then to the theatre design course at the Central and to the London Film School at the same time. I did all those things in order to do what I do.” It sounds intensive – was Camberwell useful? “Very. It was curious in that it was the only thing I was doing that was not directly related to theatre or film. You did painting, pottery, sculpture, lithography, lettering, art history and, above all, life drawing – which was immensely good news. I might have gone to art school and wound up an illustrator or painter; my son is an illustrator – Toby Leigh. I found art school immensely stimulating in contrast to Rada, which at that time – and I stress this is absolutely no longer the case – was dead. It was Rada at its most superficial and old-fashioned: you just learned the lines and tried not to fall over the furniture.”
Then he says: “I remember standing in a life-drawing class towards the end of the year, in the summer of 1964, in what had been a Peckham infant school now used as an annexe. It was a room with about 20 kids in it. There was a great working atmosphere, it was intense, there was a commitment, something going on… I remember looking around the room and thinking: we never experience this at drama school, for one second, because here everyone is looking at something real and finding a way of expressing it. And that meshed with thoughts I had on the go about the possibility of what actors could do, and film-making and making theatre in an organic way.”
It amounts almost to a manifesto: looking at something real and finding a way of expressing it. What Leigh is famous for is creating films that evolve through research, conversation and improvisation ranging from Beverly, the grotesque suburban diva (played by Alison Steadman, Leigh’s first wife), in Abigail’s Party to back-street abortionist Vera Drake (played by Imelda Staunton) or to Hortense in Secrets & Lies, a young adopted black woman (played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste) who goes in search of her birth mother. None of these films would have been possible without Leigh’s gift for scrutiny. It is the mix of watchfulness, dedication and unpredictability (the atmosphere of the art class) that informs his films and plays. But with the Turner film, wasn’t he in danger of being hobbled by art history? Or could he still approach the film in his usual way? Mr Turner is, after all, not Leigh’s first departure from fiction. In 1999 he made Topsy-Turvy, about Gilbert and Sullivan.
“Normally, everybody goes out and discovers from scratch what the film is, whereas here you start with a fixed set of premises.” They were assisted on the film by Jacqueline Riding, an art historian specialising in 18th- and 19th-century painting who has worked at the Tate and was, for two years, a paid member of the team. The cast read and researched as much as possible (Leigh singles out James Hamilton’s biography and Peter Ackroyd’s introduction to Turner as starting points). They were given talks at the Royal Academy and the Tate, where they went backstage and were granted free access to the Turner archive. But do not be misled: Leigh’s fidelity to historical fact has not watered down his methods: it has been showbusiness as usual.
“You can research and read for a million years and a zillion books, but it doesn’t make it happen in front of a camera. Everyone knows Turner went to the Royal Academy in 1832, on varnishing day [a sociable day just before the opening of a show to the public, which was a sort of unofficial private view, when artists gave their work a final lick and a promise, a coat of extra varnish at the very least], and put this red blob on a grey painting next to Constable’s, then turned it into a buoy and Constable said, ‘He has fired a gun’ and walked out. And that is fine, you can read that, but you’ve still got to make it happen and explore it on screen.” And Leigh does explore it as Turner shockingly adds his scarlet daub to the seascape Helvoetsluys as if he were vandalising his own work – until, with targeted panache, he turns the blob into a recognisable buoy. We see James Fleet’s dismayed Constable, fearing his own wings have been permanently clipped.
“We did a massive amount of improvisation informed by what we had read and what we knew had to be dramatised,” Leigh says, and adds that the actors were all painters themselves: “We went out of our way to say, ‘OK, where are the actors who can paint?’ There are quite a lot of them around. They didn’t all get into the film because some of them can’t act, but the ones that could act and paint were there.” Timothy Spall has “always had an amateur notion of doodling” and studied with Timothy Wright, a “very good teacher” whose portrait of Spall was in BP’s portrait exhibition this year.
But the image-making in the film was a challenge, not least because one of the oddities about Turner, as Leigh explains, is that if you compare portraits of him, he looks different in each one. I check online and it’s true: in John Linnell’s 1838 version, at the National Portrait Gallery, he has uncommonly hairy black eyebrows, a receding hairline and a beaky nose. The 1799 self-portrait is more comely, its features fair and balanced. The Wass portrait, after Henry Raeburn, shows a young man with blue, marble-like eyes. “And if you look at the statue in the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, it doesn’t look like anything you know.” In the Tate’s exhibition, an 1846 oil by William Parrott, Turner on Varnishing Day, shows a top-heavy man bristling with brushes, with grey sideburns and short legs. “He was a much smaller man than Tim Spall but I decided not to worry about that.”
Dick Pope was honoured at Cannes with a technical award for his cinematography for bringing the paintings to life: the film is filled with Turneresque colour: rose, amber, palest blue… “It’s interesting,” Leigh says, “that this is the first full-length film we have made with a digital camera. If you take this tool and embrace it rather than whinge, it’s amazing what you can do. And that includes what you can do in post-production. Do you like the concocted scene where you see The Fighting Temeraire?” I do, I reply. This was Turner’s 1838 painting of a gunship that fought boldly in the Battle of Trafalgar. In the film, Turner takes to the water to witness its destruction.
Watching the movie, one cannot help but wonder what other liberties might have been taken. I read aloud a list of suspect details: did Turner actually welcome patrons into a candlelit antechamber so that when they were released into his studio, the luminous canvases would seem more brilliant? Did he spy on patrons and watch their reactions through a peephole? And did he, as a dying man, say: “The sun is God”? To my surprise, the answer to all these is: yes. “I don’t know if I’m good enough to have invented such things,” Leigh says, as though to himself. And yes, Turner spat at his own canvases to enhance them: “He blew mysterious brown powder at them too.” Snuff? “Nobody knows… ”
There are three instances in the film where Leigh parts company with biographical fact or seeks imaginatively to extend it. “It is now disputed that Turner had himself strapped to the mast of a ship in order to paint a storm. He claimed he did, but people doubted it.” From Leigh’s point of view it was too dramatic to leave out: “We’re making a movie... ” And while Turner’s relationship with his father is known to have been close, there is no evidence that it was as demonstrative (lively kisses on the cheeks) as in the film. But the boldest dramatic licence is in proposing that Turner’s relationship with Hannah Danby, his housekeeper (played by Dorothy Atkinson) was sexual. It is possible but there is no firm evidence: “This grew organically out of rehearsal,” Leigh says. We watch Turner clawing at her, helping himself to her, as though a woman were necessary yet insignificant as a slice of bread. “Hannah stayed Turner and his father’s housekeeper for 40 years and was still there at the end.”
Turner also had an estranged mistress, Sarah Danby (Ruth Sheen) – Hannah’s aunt – with whom he had daughters, and who in the film “fumes with grievances against him”. Turner hasn’t much time for either of the Danbys. “He was an enigmatic character – conflicted. He had a great capacity for emotion, for warmth and compassion, but at the same time was so driven by his project. He never stopped. We know he went to brothels, had a dysfunctional relationship with Sarah Danby and was in denial about his daughters.” Leigh tries to let Turner off the hook. He says that while he and I would never dream of failing to acknowledge our own children, he believes Turner was too preoccupied to think about them.
It is a third woman, Mrs Booth, who is at the heart of the film. She was Turner’s Margate landlady, a widow who became his dearly beloved, and with whom he went to live, in secret, in Chelsea. The tender regard between Turner and Mrs Booth in the film is what has been missing from his other relationships with women. Their alliance is as heartwarming as the marriage between Jim Broadbent’s Tom and Ruth Sheen’s Gerri in Leigh’s Another Year (2010). One notes with surprised approval the cheery focus in Leigh’s recent work on the loving relationships of an older generation. There is a marvellous moment in the film when Turner looks directly at Mrs Booth and tells her: “You are a woman of profound beauty”, and you can see this makes her twice-married, 60-plus heart flutter, although she knows enough about the world to stay steady. She is superbly played with sparkling charm and warmth by Marion Bailey.
I raise the subject of Bailey, who has been in three Leigh movies: Meantime, All or Nothing and Vera Drake. I once met her and she told me she used jokingly to refer to Leigh’s narrative interventions as “acts of God”. But I had been planning to ask him about her for another reason. I remember him telling me, in 2010, that he regarded Bailey as an exceptional actress who had not been feted as she deserved. I remind him of this, and praise her performance as Mrs Booth. And I suddenly notice that he is unable to disguise his pleasure: “Well, of course, the truth is I’m very biased because she is my partner, in fact. I am very biased indeed about this.” And so he feels he cannot say anything about her brilliance? “No, no, no, I can say it, from the bottom of my heart, because it’s true, you know.”
Turner needed Mrs Booth’s sweetness in later life, when his work was subjected to mortifying hostility. “Some people are lucky enough to have someone to look after them,” Leigh broods. “Mrs Booth did not really know who Turner was, she knew nothing about painting.” And this must have been soothing for the great man. John Ruskin, who had championed Turner in his first book, Modern Painters, dismissed the late work – universally revered now – as proof of failing powers. In the film, there is a killingly funny vignette in which Joshua McGuire’s Ruskin, who cannot pronounce his Rs, purrs with self-satisfaction at his own ideas – the critic who got the cream. Leigh seems to be promoting the idea that criticism is generally irrelevant? He looks sheepish and laughs: “Look, were one to say Ruskin’s entire view were beside the point, it would be outrageous – ludicrous. However, we know he was a prude and I perceive him, to a certain degree, as a prick and smug and that is where we start. Look, we know Ruskin looked after Turner’s estate and is said – although it is now disputed by some academics – to have gone in and burnt erotic drawings he saw as pornography. Ruskin was raised by over-protective parents. He was encouraged to have pompous opinions at an early age; his mother actually went to Cambridge with him while he was at university. He was very cosseted, and that is what we captured. There are times when what he has to say is profound, but I thought: this is too good a trick to miss.”
Watching the film, it is impossible not to have a sneaking suspicion that Mr Turner is, at least in part, autobiographical, or, at the very least, that it involves sympathetic projection, that it reflects Leigh himself. A 71-year-old film-maker considering a 76-year-old painter. They are, after all, in love with the same woman. But would Leigh have got on with Turner? “It is a question with no answer except that in the course of one’s many years on this planet, I am sure I have known various kinds of bohemian people. And of artistic, creative outsiders, so I think that probably I would be capable of getting on with him, but no question is more academic than that one.” He is grumbling benignly, like Turner in the film. But I’m pleased with his answer, coming as it does as late Leigh and late Turner collide.
Peter Bradshaw on Mr Turner – Timothy Spall dazzles as JMW Turner
