A censor once pronounced we couldn't step onto a London train but meditative of a Mike Leigh film, nonetheless a British filmmaker told AFP he never set out to constraint a city on celluloid.
"I'm called a cinematic producer of London," smiled a 68-year-old executive in an talk Friday, in Paris as guest of honour of a festival celebrating London in film, starting with a Mike Leigh masterclass and retrospective.
From "Naked", a anarchic prophesy of a worried immature male colliding with a city, that won best executive esteem in Cannes in 1993, to a Palme d'Or leader "Secrets and Lies" or a termination play "Vera Drake", roughly all of Leigh's underline films have been set in London.
"People are my tender material," pronounced a director. "The core issues of my films are ones that request to people not in cities, not in London, not in Britain."
But he adds, "London provides a backdrop, it is a given environment. we delight London, and we take good fun in recreating a nuances and detail."
Himself a northerner who came south, Leigh left a Manchester of his girl for London aged 17, and has lived there happily all his adult life, lifting his dual sons in a British capital.
"London for all a obvious, typical informative reasons was a mecca. The provincial, suburban, bourgeois, dreary, bland, dour universe that we grew adult in was one that we simply wanted to shun in a 1950s.
"Before afterwards we never saw a film that wasn't in English. we went to London in a autumn of 1960 and saw 'Les 400 Coups', 'A Bout de Souffle'," a French New Wave classics by Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, he said.
As a filmmaker Leigh has used London as a versatile canvas.
Timely all over again as Britain faces mountainous unemployment, his 1983 film "Meantime" about a working-class family perplexing to stay afloat in a recession, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, has "a really clever clarity of London" as a city of haves and have-nots.
Leigh during one indicate films a categorical impression distant from his downtrodden East End neighbourhood, channel Trafalgar Square with Big Ben in a stretch -- "to remind a assembly that these guys live nearby a violence heart of a capital, and nonetheless they live this bankrupt and wanting existence."
By contrariety a London of "Naked", whose categorical impression Johnny comes down from Manchester to a city, a means loner disfigured by disappointment during his miss of a place in society, is a distant cry from Buckingham Palace and Big Ben.
While some sequences are prisoner documentary-style in a Soho red-light district, others were shot in a derelict distant East End, in an "almost operatic, bizarre ebbing landscape," Leigh said.
"There's zero verbatim about a Londonness of that film -- it's a kind of civic netherworld. It could be any large city, it's a metaphorical kind of London."
Leigh points out -- passionless -- that one reason he set so many works in London was simply economic: "We can't means do a film in a north, since London is where everybody is."
"The feel is London," he said. "But we set out to try all kinds of aspects of what life is about, what relations are about, and a good and bad things about existing, and all a rest of it."
Take "Vera Drake" in that Imelda Staunton plays a backstreet abortionist, and "you could positively tell a same story set anywhere in a world," he said. "It's about a concept predicament."
Likewise "Secrets and Lies," that tells of a diligent reunion between a immature black lady and her white biological mother, and whose thesis struck a chord around a world.
Chosen to chair a jury of a 62nd Berlin film festival in Feb -- "a challenging task, and a good honour, and terrifying" -- Leigh is guest of honour of a "London's Calling" festival in Paris.
Starting with a Mike Leigh weekend and masterclass on Sunday, a three-month prolonged cycle during a capital's Forum des Images celebrates London in film from a smoggy taste of murder cinema to a overhanging 1960s and a rebellious punk years.
Film noir is spotlighted with a dozen works from Alfred Hitchcock's sequence torpedo classical "Frenzy", to Tim Burton's surrealist story of a ruthless Fleet Street barber, "Sweeney Todd".
Stephen Frears's "Dirty Pretty Things" exposes a dirty underworld inhabited by bootleg immigrants, headlining a mini-series on London as tellurian city, forward of cycles on bland London, and finally "apocalyptic" London.
News referensi http://news.yahoo.com/mike-leigh-accidental-poet-london-life-134446241.html
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