Mike Figgis: ‘Why I don’t do porn’

A conversation with Mike Figgis can lead you into unexpected places — such as why a Gypsy once steered him to swim around the reeds, in what way he might be a Geordie Buddhist and the impossibility of making porn sexy. For someone who is associated with rather brooding, intense films, he has a lightness about him that extends to his humour. His favourite joke, for instance, is this (prompted by him extending bags of sugary offerings across his desk): [An elderly lady’s voice, with an extreme Scottish accent] “Vicar, would you like a cup of tea or a meringue?” “No, you’re right — I would love a cup of tea.”

We are talking in the office of his Red Mullet company — two floors of studio space where he takes photographs, one of his many interests. At the top of the stairs is a big sexy photograph of Eva Green, scantily clad in a black body, smoking a cigarette. He mentions the campaign (a series of short films and photographs) that he did for Agent Provocateur some years back, featuring Kate Moss in lacy knickers and high heels — which must have been a chore for him. “Yes, terrible. Bloody hell,” he says, deadpan. Is she fun? “Yes, of course she is. That’s what she is, she’s fun.”

The usual rigmarole for him when he is being snapped is that the photographer (invariably male) turns up with at least three cameras and huge lenses “and then sometimes they lie on the floor and you think, ‘Oh-oh, the beached-whale look . . .’” He’s referring to the unflattering angle of the jawline when you’re photographed from below. He is tall and skinny in person, in his black jeans, his halo of curls slightly damp in the heat and a surprising pair of fluorescent punk yachting shoes.

As the chairman of the fundraising committee for the Photographers’ Gallery in London Figgis puts on events all over the world to raise awareness of the space. He shows me a book of the Hong Kong pop-up exhibition, “and it’s great, it’s like speed dating: you have 15 minutes per sitter, print immediately and put the photos on the wall.”

Figgis is keen on the pop-up idea per se, particularly for his films, since he appears to be going through one of his hacked-off-with-Hollywood phases. After his movie debut in 1988, Stormy Monday, a noirish thriller, came his first Hollywood film, Internal Affairs, a crime thriller that was widely considered to have relaunched Richard Gere’s career.

Leaving Las Vegas, in 1995, was made like an arthouse film (low budget, Super 16mm, shot in four weeks) and was a form of V-sign to the big studios after he had been mucked about on his previous film, Mr Jones. Despite Leaving Las Vegas being phenomenally depressing — about an alcoholic screenwriter who goes to the city to drink himself to death — it was a commercial and critical success, garnering half-a-dozen Oscar nominations (including one for Figgis) and the big gong for the lead, Nicolas Cage.

There was a Disney thriller, Cold Creek Manor, in 2003 — and now that Figgis, at 63, is ready to make another feature film “having not bothered for quite a while”, Hollywood does not seem interested. The new film will be called Suspension of Disbelief, about a writer and the film business. Autobiographical? “Philosophically for sure, but it would also be a philosophical discourse, it could be a thriller, it could be sexy, a page-turner and so on.” Figgis called a distribution company and spoke to a “guy who I’ve known for a long time and he kept saying, ‘We love it, we just love it’, rah-rah-rah, and I said, ‘So are you interested in coming in with some dosh?’ There was a pause and he said, ‘Mike, unfortunately [the American film critic] Pauline Kael is dead and with her, her audience’. And I went, ‘Wow! That’s such a f***ing pessimistic thing to say and I don’t agree. In fact, I think there is a massively bored audience out there who are dying to be given something slightly different from the bland films they are being offered’.”SPONSOREDThe secret of the SMEs that are emerging stronger than everThe artificial intelligence start-up that thrived throughout crisis

His answer will be to show his film in a pop-up cinema: “I’m gonna make this film one way or another, if I have to do it with favours from actors, or whatever, and I’ll open it like a play … find a space that’s empty, put a time limit on it of, say, three months, and people are really interested in an event space that’s partly a club, partly a cinema, a bar, a restaurant … where you can sit around afterwards in fairly comfy seats and talk. I would like to curate that.”

In the meantime, Figgis is curating a wild-sounding weekend festival at the Royal Opera House — in the anarchic spirit, perhaps, of his years as a performer and musician (he plays trumpet, piano and guitar, as well as scoring his films and plays) in the experimental performance group The People Show. Writers, artists, film-makers and broadcasters — including Jon Snow, Peter Blake, Jeanette Winterson, John Berger, Paul Auster and David Lynch — have been asked to respond to Figgis’s chosen theme: Just Tell the Truth.

At the time that Figgis was approached, the WikiLeaks drama was unfolding and he was also struck by Ricky Gervais’ provocative performance at the Golden Globes; he thought “there’s something wonderful about aggressive truth. So you know — what is truth for an artist or an actor or a politician or a newsreader?”

What about his own relationship with the truth? How often does Mike Figgis lie? “I find it almost impossible to tell lies. It’s more a question with me of avoiding the truth; avoiding truthful confrontation.” You seem very gentle now but can you be a bit of a shit? “I’ve learnt that if you want to get something done, I’ll go in for confrontation and I can be nasty. My voice becomes very authoritarian, like a schoolmaster’s voice.” Was your father like that? “A little bit, yeah.”

When I say that I am riveted by his parents, Figgis grins and says: “Me, too.” After his father, Larry, left Haileybury, he joined the RAF as a pilot at the age of 18 and survived the Second World War despite being shot down five times. After the war, Larry Figgis had made his way to Nairobi with his wife, Kit — a beautiful young woman from a working-class family in Carlisle — and their five children. Mike’s grandfather owned a law practice, Daly & Figgis, set up in 1899. There was a large mansion, plenty of servants, glamorous connections and a lot of drinking. Mike’s father knew S. J. Perelman; and his mother worked for Ernest Hemingway who wrote her a series of letters. Larry got into debt and the family left Nairobi under a cloud, returning to Carlisle and eventually settling for a rather different life on a council estate in Newcastle upon Tyne. “We were very much thrown into learning to be incredibly watchful about where trouble was going to come from next because you’re a posh kid on a council estate, you don’t speak Geordie so you don’t know what people are saying,” he says. “But you learn very quickly and you learn that humour can be very useful and it sets off a real interest in the way that people behave.”

In the introduction to his book of interviews with Hollywood film-makers on film-making, published in 1999, there is an hilariously woeful account of Figgis’s first forays into Hollywood: the accretion of humiliation, the loneliness, the long waiting game. Since then Figgis has experienced very public rejections — both professional and personal — but he seems utterly positive and sanguine about the way that his life has turned out.

He is as interested in the dynamics of the male gaze on women’s bodies as he is on the effect that has on women; but the two narratives seem to co-exist rather uneasily in him. He worries a lot about the impact that some of his scenes may have on both sexes, such as the rape scene in Leaving Las Vegas, for which he conducted his own ad hoc research to satisfy himself that men were not turned on by it and that women did not find it gratuitous. I read out a quote — “Film doesn’t tend to recognise the sexual hunger of women” — and he says: “Who said that?” You said that, I say, and he exclaims: “Oh, I did? I was going to say, ‘What a good quote’!”

He elaborates: “Film is a visual medium and it’s predominantly made by men, distributed by men and therefore it’s a male-gaze venue. And because women work so well visually, it’s such an easy route and you go down that route over and over again. I do.” Why does he think that men are so turned on by lesbianism in films? “It’s two for the price of one and also you don’t have the embarrassment of having to see [a version of] yourself. Spit-roasting, for instance, where there’s a woman between a whole team of footballers where they’re hanging out watching each other, which seems very gay — because the woman is really a device for men to watch other men.”

He has been asked “many, many times”, he says, to make a porn film (the short films he made for his first opera, Lucrezia Borgia, staged at the ENO this year, were described by several critics as “soft porn”). “I think I wouldn’t do it because it’s a mistake to separate the sex from a story, and if you reduce sex just to a physical process then you’re just touching the surface.”

Moving to the personal, I ask him whether it made any difference to him whether Saffron Burrows, with whom he had a five-year relationship, left him for a woman (speculated at the time to be her fellow actress Fiona Shaw) or a man, and he says: “No difference at all. We’re still friends and your relationship is hopefully based on the feelings at that time. You take from it what was good and move on.”

Even when he was in Hollywood having a hard time, he says: “I was learning like crazy. You can waste so much time being offended or hurt but I get up in the morning and I can’t wait to get on with the day. I can’t believe that I’m still here, my brain’s still working, I still have ideas and the energy to do something with them. Rather than being miserable, I really don’t mind what happens economically — as long as you still have an environment in which you can do something creative, it’s all good news.”

He owes this healthy attitude to a Gypsy, who was telling fortunes at a church fête in Devon: “I went into the tent and she looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Ah, you’re a fish. [He’s a Piscean.] Yes, your problem is when you come to the reeds you just ram into them. You need to learn to swim around the reeds’. And for the past 20 years that’s what I’ve been doing … swimming around the reeds.”

The Times