The Carlisle-born film-maker delighted the crowd with some frank tales about how
– and how not – to make it in Hollywood.

On Saturday night at the Guardian’s Open Weekend, film-maker Mike Figgis
promised he was going to name names – and he duly did. Figgis gave a brilliant
insight into the ups and downs of being a Hollywood director; in his case, more downs than ups. Figgis was born in Carlisle and grew up in Kenya (his father was a
frustrated musician and DJ, his mother secretary to Ernest Hemingway, who may or
may not have had a passion for her), and in the 1990s looked as if he could become
one of Hollywood’s top directors, with films such as Internal Affairs and Leaving Las
Vegas. But, as he explained to a captivated audience, every time he got within sight of
the pinnacle, he blew it.

Direct guv … film-maker Mike Figgis.

The trouble is, Figgis said, he has never known when to keep his gob shut. Or rather,
he has known but been unwilling or unable to do so. Could we have some examples, I
asked. Sure, he said. He told us the story of the making of the 1993 film Mr Jones,
about the relationship between a man with bipolar disorder (played by Richard Gere)
and his doctor. The executive producer was the legendary Ray Stark, whose
Wikipedia entry starts “Ray Stark (3 October 1915–17 January 2004) was an
American film producer and powerbroker known for his Machiavellian ways”. He
interfered with everything Figgis was doing. Eventually Figgis told him to fuck off.
“Did you just tell Ray to fuck off?” asked a shocked colleague on set. “You’ll pay for
that. However long it takes him, he’ll get his revenge.”

And Stark did. After the film’s first preview, Stark called him into his office. “Well,
I’ve seen your film, Mike,” he said, “and it’s a piece of shit. Now you have two choices.
You fix it or we fix it for you.” Figgis left it to them. When he saw the final film, it
bore no resemblance to the one he had made – test audiences stated that they liked
Gere when he was manic but not when he was depressed, so the studio simply got rid
of his depression. Figgis said he sneaked into a final preview with Gere (the director
had been banned from the lot by then) and they watched the film. At the end an
expectant Gere turned round to him and said: “What do you think, Mike?” Figgis said
it was awful, and Gere was devastated.

Figgis said it was important to understand that when you work in Hollywood, there’s
a social contract and you have to sign up to it if you want to succeed. He didn’t sign
up to it. There are a number of unwritten rules and regulations, including not
shitbagging the producers of your movie. (At the time he was told: “It’s not the movie
that you’re making now you should worry about Mike, it’s your next movie.” He said
it took him a long time to realise what was meant by this.) Another of the unwritten

rules is that you have to live in Hollywood while working there; Figgis was
commuting, which was regarded as an act of blasphemy.

Figgis did make a comeback with Leaving Las Vegas, which was nominated for four
Oscars despite having an unremittingly bleak story about alcoholism, and having
been made largely with handheld cameras on the cheap. He said that once this film
had been a success, the major players in Hollywood who had blanked him in the
intervening years were once again eager to charm him. “A few years later, I met Ray
again and he treated me like a long-lost son – but I had made Leaving Las Vegas by
then.”

In terms of money, Figgis said he was paid around £50,000 for his first film (Stormy
Monday, a clubland thriller set in Newcastle). It went up to around $1m for Mr
Jones, quickly dropped, then, after the success of Leaving Las Vegas, it shot up again
to $2m for One Night Stand. This film, one of his favourites, was a failure. The movie
had been going to star Nicolas Cage, but Cage had just got married and didn’t want to
make a film about infidelity. So Figgis cast Wesley Snipes instead, who he thinks did
a brilliant job. Some time later he met Cage’s agent, who told him, as Figgis relates:
“‘You know the trouble with that movie, Mike? Snipes is too cocky in it.’ But this was
exactly the same character I had written for Cage. What he meant was he was too
cocky for a black man!”

After One Night Stand flopped Figgis was back down among the minions. At this
point, though, he had grown bored and disenchanted with conventional Hollywood
films and their rigid three-act structures and simplistic narratives. He wanted to
explore and experiment with form, which eventually led to the radical Timecode in
2000 – a movie about Hollywood in which four inter-related stories are
simultaneously told on four split screens. Figgis said he wrote it all out as a music
composition, and explained its timings to the cast (which included Salma Hayek,
Jeanne Tripplehorn and his then girlfriend Saffron Burrows) by teaching them how
to read music.

As with many of his films, he wrote, directed, produced and composed the music for
Timecode. I asked him if he was a megalomaniac. “Do you mean, am I a control
freak?” he replied. “If you’re asking that, yes, I am.” He compared making a film to a
painting, and asked what artist would want to hand over control of his painting to a
technician or an executive producer. It was apparent that many people in the
audience would have been happy to talk about Timecode, a movie they regarded as
having reinvented cinema, for the whole hour.

In the 1990s, Figgis was incredibly prolific as a film-maker, but there have been few
conventional movies from him over the past 10 years. He looked peeved when I said
this, and told me he’d been working his “ass off” throughout this time, pointing me to
the numerous short films he’s made, the photographs he’s taken, the advertising
campaigns with Kate Moss, the episode of The Sopranos he directed,

his professorship of film studies at the European Graduate School in Switzerland and
the no-budget movie he’s currently completing.

Yes, he said, it’s true he’s fallen out of love with conventional cinema – but he’s not
fallen out of love with film, and hopes to continue experiment with form and
storytelling. One member of the audience asked which current film-makers he
admired. Silence. He really did struggle for an answer before naming Harmony
Korine, and conceding that he was still a fan of Ken Loach. But on the whole, he said,
the traditional movie was moribund if not already dead.

Figgis told us he had spent all the money he earned when he was paid big bucks. Yes,
it was nice when he had it, but no, he doesn’t mind not having it. He loves being in
complete control of his destiny, answerable only to himself, and has never been so
happy.

Simon Hattenstone – Tuesday 27 March 2012 BSTguardian.co.uk