Mike Figgis

Started by ono, October 24, 2003, 09:47:55 AM

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ono

Well, well, well, there's no topic for this guy.  Shocking.  I was just randomly surfing IMDb.com, looking for nothing in particular, when I came across the page for Hotel.  I guess it was off of Lucy Liu's page that I got there, come to think of it.  Anyway, this guy interests me very much.  I watched Leaving Las Vegas before I became what you would call a "cineast," and was very intrigued by it to say the least.  Heh, come to think of it, I think I first saw Requiem for a Dream around that same time.  Now that was a depressing week.

Anyway, yes, Mike Figgis: Leaving Las Vegas, Timecode, the allegedly awful Cold Creek Manor, and well, now my newest curiosity is Hotel, because it's getting berated on IMDb, it was made in 2001 and just got its US release earlier this year, and it sounds like something Harmony Korine would dream up (though I haven't even seen Korine's features yet (only Kids), though that's beside the point).  So yeah, any news on a DVD release, or a wider US release, or has anyone actually seen this?  What do people think about other Figgis work?  Nothing else on his filmography seems that notable to me, but I was just skimming.

Ghostboy

I hear Hotel is just so over-the-top that it's hard to enjoy, but I want to see it. I decided to skip Cold Creek Manor. But I still am a fan of his work. I enjoyed One Night Stand up until the twist at the end, and I think The Loss Of Sexual Innocence is great.

mutinyco

He should have his camera taken away just for titling a movie The Loss of Sexual Innocence...
"I believe in this, and it's been tested by research: he who fucks nuns will later join the church."

-St. Joe

Find Your Magali

Quote from: mutinycoHe should have his camera taken away just for titling a movie The Loss of Sexual Innocence...

Yeah, that is godawful.

coffeebeetle

Thanks for creating a Figgis thread Ono!  The only movie of his that I really enjoyed (in fact, it's on my top five list for several years now) is Leaving Las Vegas.  One of the most honest, incredibly touching portrayals of love and devotion to grace the screen in many years.
more than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. the other, to total extinction. let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
woody allen (side effects - 1980)

aclockworkjj

Even though I don't think say, Timecode, is that great of a flick...I love the idea of him playing with digital video and such, in the way he does.  He is not using it cause he is broke, but rather cause he is dabbling in another median.  Vegas was great hands down, I am still waiting for the next great...

I picked up the soundtrack for Timecode, used for like $3.. I recommend it's jazzy sexy funk.

Here's an interview from KCRW

As well, as his guest DJ music...

(both are Real format)

MacGuffin



Mike Figgis is more than capable of directing a movie suited for all audiences -- like his latest, Cold Creek Manor, in which a family moves into an old farmhouse, only to face off against its mildly homicidal former owner -- but in general, he'd rather focus his audience than scale back his subject. Though he made his start crafting such well-honed thrillers as Stormy Monday and Internal Affairs, Figgis has since expanded (or narrowed, depending on how you look at it) his fascination with such personal themes as isolation, jealousy and deceit to increasingly challenging formats, culminating in the split-screen films Timecode and Hotel.

In 1996, he hit Hollywood with Leaving Las Vegas, the devastating swan song of two lonely losers (played by Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue), a burned-out movie exec and a Vegas call girl, who vow to drink themselves to death. The movie earned Figgis Oscar nominations for his writing and direction and gave him license to plunge even more deeply into the darker territory Hollywood movies don't normally show (in such films as One Night Stand and Loss of Sexual Innocence). Cold Creek Manor is something of a return to the ordinary for Figgis, and yet his fingerprints remain clear: there may be a killer in the house, but it is distrust and the threat of adultery that seem most threatening to the Tilson family. Now, before you watch Figgis' latest film, see which movies inspire the way he tells stories.
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The Hill
(1965, dir: Sidney Lumet, starring: Sean Connery, Harry Andrews)
The Hill is an extraordinarily underrated film, and I think it's Sean Connery's best performance. It's a very British film, but directed by an American, and a lot of it is shot rather like a play in a cell. It's very claustrophobic and very, very hot, and the use of camera is really outstanding. Sidney Lumet did it in black and white using a lot of wide angles, distorted angles and handheld shots with a camera moving in really close on a face as the pressure builds up. It all happens in the same confined spaces, the way Roman Polanski used the boat in Knife in the Water. Those two movies both influenced the work I've done on Timecode and the digital things I've done. It's a real object lesson on how to use a wide-angle lens in a psychological sense, not just for an effect. There's a real consistency of lenses, where there's never that sort of shallow focus in which everything drops away. Everything is pretty much shot in deep focus. Even if you're really up close on the face, you can still see people in the background. The more you work with actors, the more the camera becomes almost like a theatrical device. You're holding a lot of actors in the frame, but you're bringing some to the front and using the lens almost like a stage.

Bonnie & Clyde
(1967, dir: Arthur Penn, starring: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway)
Bonnie & Clyde is one of the best films ever made. The performances are superb, the script is great, and there are themes in it of immense poignancy. I think the use of humor and violence together, along with the music in the film, created a whole new style. It influenced so many films afterwards, almost as though it became the cliché. I remember seeing it when it came out and being completely shocked by it. I think it was the dramatic use of the way violence was filmed. The ending's really tough and very poetic, the way it was cut and the pause before they get shot. As in all great films, you have that sort of fatalistic sense that something is going to happen, and when things start to go better, you know they're doomed. You sense it in the use of cinematography to show stillness and the sound of birds taking off and things like that, followed by the gradual realization by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway that they're in a trap. There's a kind of frozen moment, and then all hell breaks loose. The shooting goes on for a very, very long time until they are literally riddled with bullets and the car is riddled with bullets. In all the violent scenes, the impact of bullets is something that is very graphically portrayed. It was just such a completely fresh way of filmmaking and a real breakthrough.

Weekend
(1967, dir: Jean-Luc Godard, starring: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne)
Jean-Luc Godard was the greatest of the independent filmmakers. With some artists, their value is not directly apparent in specific products -- in one film, one record or one book -- but in their overall attitude and as an example to other artists. Weekend, which may be my favorite film of all time, is very much Godard's film, where he's as outrageous and experimental as he needs to be. It has an incredibly erotic scene at the beginning, which is just someone talking, and very long -- some would say very boring -- stretches in it. It's a sort of seminal film, really. The images and the use of camera and his cinematic devices have been so ripped off -- one could say "homaged" -- in more mainstream films like Wild at Heart. I also admire Contempt (Le Mépris), where he was sort of a director for hire. He worked with Bridgitte Bardot this one time, and he photographed her in a way as a kind of sex symbol with the use of location, the cinematography and the use of one small piece of music which he repeats over and over again. I guess what I like about both films is that they're hard to define why you like them. He's toying with his audience. I'd have to say that he's a super-intellectual, which is not necessarily the norm in filmmaking. He's one of the great artists of the 20th century, and he's using cinema as a medium in a very experimental and bold way. Weekend sort of sums up a lot of things about that period, about the Nouvelle Vague and the way European cinema was feeding off of American cinema, but taking it and going in a completely different direction.

Celebration
(1998, dir: Thomas Vinterberg, starring: Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen)
One of the best films of the last 20 years and certainly my favorite one to come out of the Dogma 95 movement would be Celebration (Festen) in 1998, shot on mini-DV. It's not particularly beautiful to look at, but that's not really the point. Actually, the point of the film is that it's just an incredibly good story with an amazing ensemble of unknown actors who can hold it together on mini-DV or any format you want. Celebration ended up being a play at the National Theater in Sweden, proving my point that a good drama is a good drama, and often the debate about medium issues -- film vs. video -- is bullsh-- when it comes down to it. Personally, I think that Lars Von Trier and the gang were joking with the whole Dogma manifesto. It was kind of cocking its nose at Hollywood, and I was dismayed with the eagerness with which it was taken up by the younger film community, who in a way need to belong to a church of filmmaking. Every generation has its own little Dogma movement because every so often, you need to shake the carpet out and go back to basics. In America, it was Cassavetes and other experimental filmmakers. What Celebration falls into is the tradition of Scandinavian storytelling and drama, which goes through Ibsen, Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman. It's a very traditional story, about children gathering to pay respects to the head of the family, who is turning 60. Over the course of one night, a terrible abusive situation starts to be revealed involving the father, and we see how all of the extended family then react. It's like a great play.  

Show Me Love
(1998, dir: Lukas Moodysson, starring: Alexandra Dahlström, Rebecka Liljeberg)
Another Swedish movie I loved, this one made outside the Dogma movement, was Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love. It's a gay love story between two 15-year-old girls in an industrial town. Again, it's very, very simple, shot on 16mm. It's just a superb film, one of those incredibly touching straight-to-the-point movies. I've presented it on British television, and I actually wrote about it when it was released because I thought it was such a good film that it deserved to be a hit. In fact, I tried to convince Lukas Moodysson to let me reshoot it in the Midwest, pretty much sticking to his script and everything, but he didn't want to let it go, and I respect him for that. Anything with subtitles always has such a huge fight, but occasionally they break through. It just occurred to me that a really great psychological thriller (which, in a way, is my bag) that I think would be worth remaking in the English language is L'Enfer. It's a Claude Chabrol film about this guy who runs a hotel with Emmanuelle Béart, who is obviously very tasty anyway, and he starts to become very jealous of her. The jealousy becomes obsessive and actually drives him nuts to the extent that he becomes psychotic. In a way, it goes back to Internal Affairs and the Andy Garcia character, who is obsessive about his wife, and how he was corrupted by Richard Gere. That's the kind of theme I've always thought made for great cinema.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Gamblour.

Timecode is god awful, the digital looks like shit (I think I'll never get used to how it looks), my roommate forced me to turn it off after about 20 minutes, can't say I resisted really. The acting's so fucking bad, even for people I like (Xander Berkely for one).
WWPTAD?

MacGuffin

Stiles is GOING DOWN with Figgis
Source: Variety

Cold Creek Manor helmer Mike Figgis will be directing Going Down for Muse Prods. and is looking at Julia Stiles to star. The role will be a break from Stiles' norm as the pic centers around a drama student at NYU who, finding she's short of cash, decides to pay her way by finding a madam and becoming a prostitute.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

coffeebeetle

Hmm.  Sounds like this could be trite...hope he can pull it off well.
more than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. the other, to total extinction. let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
woody allen (side effects - 1980)

NEON MERCURY

damn,  cold creek manor to julia stiles..... :roll: .....it s  a long fall down....

mutinyco

I'm surprised he can still find financing.
"I believe in this, and it's been tested by research: he who fucks nuns will later join the church."

-St. Joe

Pubrick

Quote from: mutinycoI'm surprised he can still find financing.
he's not ken russell yet..
under the paving stones.

Ravi

http://movies.indiainfo.com/newsbytes/window_0524.html

A new WINDOW to Indian Cinema


Indian audiences will witness a unique experimental cinema never ventured before on the Bollywood screen. WINDOWS - THE QUADRANTS OF LIFE will be directed by New York based Manan Singh Kathora and co-written by Abhishek Kumar and Sameer Jain. The trait of the film that sets it apart is that the screen will be cleaved into four parts where the quadrants of the screen disclose four different movies running simultaneously. The film comprises four parallel stories independent of each other, but will merge into a single climax. The idea was inspired from Mike Figgis' TIME CODE, which was shot in a similar format. WINDOWS is a low budget, song-less, real-time thriller, set in Mumbai.

Manan has signed Vineesha Arora, who went unnoticed in her debut SUPARI opposite Rahul Dev. She plays a young blind software engineer, who is the focal point of all the events that takes place in the 75minute thriller. Amit Sarin (currently featuring Kkusum) is also signed to play one of the four male characters.

How the Indian Cine audience will take to this new wave of experimental cinema, only time will tell.

mutinyco

Quote from: Pubrick
he's not ken russell yet..

Who?  :roll:
"I believe in this, and it's been tested by research: he who fucks nuns will later join the church."

-St. Joe