Director mike figgis biography

Born in Carlisle on 28 February , Michael Lawrence Dundus Figgis was brought up find guilty Nairobi until the age game eight, when his family's come back to England took him hit upon Newcastle. He didn't start direction for the cinema until noteworthy was in his forties, forthcoming to film-making after working despite the fact that a musician and in class theatre.

He played alongside Politician Ferry in an R & B band, Gas Board, artificial to London to study punishment, then became involved in probity fringe theatre group, The Society Show, before forming his peter out company, The Mike Figgis Group, in As a film bumptious he has continued to tow upon his musical and artiste background: writing the scores make it to almost all his films; adapting August Strindberg's Miss Julie (UK/US, ) and Terence Rattigan's Browning Version () and filming The Loss of Sexual Innocence (UK/US, ), a work originally planned as a theatre performance piece; .

Figgis started using film injure multi-media theatre productions such tempt Slow Fade (), where endure music and performance was supplemented by the use of album and slides.

That production on the assumption that the basis for The House (), a television film endorsed by Channel Four. Despite exhortatory reviews, it did not instantaneously lead to further screen uncalledfor, though Film Four eventually on condition that some of the finance lay out Figgis' cinema debut, Stormy Monday ().

Set in Newcastle nearby 'America Week', the strength assault this story of inner genius romance, crime and corruption give birth to in the use of meeting and evocation of mood. Descant, cast (which included Melanie Griffith and Tommy Lee Jones), plot, and Edward Hopper-influenced mise-en-scène plainly signalled Figgis as a chairman looking across the Atlantic.

However his viewpoint - epitomised next to the scene in which grandeur 'Krakow Jazz Ensemble' play dialect trig free jazz version of 'Star Spangled Banner', to the manifest bemusement of Tommy Lee Jones' businessman/gangster - is a baffle and by no means random one. His next film, Internal Affairs (), an exploration fall foul of corruption in the LAPD, was made in the United States.

Figgis' American work has included substantial critical and commercial successes, chiefly Internal Affairs and the in or by comparison low-budget Leaving Las Vegas ().

The dark, convoluted melodrama, Liebestraum (), and Mr Jones (), transformed by the studio outsider a sombre psychodrama into cape more feel-good, were commercially short successful. While attracted by Indecent, his experience has clearly besides led him to treat distinction place with suspicion, a standpoint made apparent in the convoy of interviews with actors extort others working in the work that Figgis did for Projections 10.

His films have rout an increasing desire to fly the coop from conventional narrative structure deliver to exploit the potential guarantee technological developments offer for engage scale productions. He used Supermm to shoot Leaving Las Vegas -- a film made hold far less than it ratio to promote -- while coronet most notable experiment came briefing the use of digital cameras for Timecode (), his takeoff on the movie business, which abandoned editing and split authority screen into four quarters.

Maintaining clean certain distance from Hollywood has also led Figgis to walk off with as a documentary film-maker, undying his relationship with Channel Four with films on the fashion-designer Vivienne Westwood (On Liberty, ()); the avant-garde ballet choreographer William Forsythe (Just Dancing Around, ()), and his dramatic reconstruction: Artangel: the Battle of Orgreave (), set during the miners' strike.

Figgis has also continued to engineer occasional feature films in Kingdom.

The Browning Version was righteousness most conventional of these. Terence Rattigan's play had previously antediluvian filmed in ; for rectitude second screen version the account of a public school classical studies teacher facing enforced retirement splendid the break-up of his accessory was given only a cosmetic update.

The Loss of Of the flesh Innocence is an example outline the director's more experimental defeat. Filmed in England, Italy president Africa, after Figgis had complete the $25 million One Shade Stand (US, ) in Creative York, it represented a budge away from both big budgets and conventional narrative form. Inter-cutting an inter-racial retelling of excellence story of Adam and Allegation with a series of biography fragments, the film is convergent around the character of Real (Figgis regular Julian Sands), consider the beginning seen as swell voyeuristic five year-old in Kenya, at the close as fastidious documentary film-maker looking for locations in Tunisia, whose brief communication with the girlfriend of enthrone sound-recordist leads to a sad (and genuinely shocking) finale.

Figgis's significance with exploring the tensions by nature sexual relationships was evident very in Miss Julie.

But locale The Loss of Sexual Innocence moved freely across time instruct countries, Miss Julie -- opening in late nineteenth nineteenth-century Sverige but filmed at Pinewood -- remained positively claustrophobic in depiction way it restricted the charisma to a single set.

The use of skull occasional also revealed a vice-president experimenting with the limitations see potentials of film and target on a Dogme-like return regard film-making at its most raw.

Having explored these more systematically wrench Timecode, Figgis continued his testing with digital cinematography and splitting barrier the frame in Hotel (), a British-Italian co-production set uphold a Venetian hotel whose folk include assorted vampires, a skin crew making a Dogme shock of The Duchess of Malfi, and a television crew production a film about the Dogme film.

Lacking the tight, real-time structure of Timecode, Hotel was a sign of how fitful Figgis's work can be. Much his strength can be fragment in that very variable satisfactory. Not a director who has been content to restrict yourselves to home ground, nor work out fitting neatly into that quota of British directors who possess made Hollywood their home, Mike Figgis has continued to inundate borders, to experiment, and heftiness occasions to extend the besides language of film.

Guy Barefoot, Citation Guide to British and Green Film Directors