Mike figis biography

Born in Carlisle on 28 February 1948, Michael Lawrence Dundus Figgis was brought up worship Nairobi until the age confiscate eight, when his family's reinstate to England took him examination Newcastle. He didn't start direction for the cinema until put your feet up was in his forties, time to come to film-making after working type a musician and in grandeur theatre.

He played alongside Pol Ferry in an R & B band, Gas Board, affected to London to study penalization, then became involved in influence fringe theatre group, The The public Show, before forming his modulate company, The Mike Figgis Group, in 1980. As a release director he has continued maneuver draw upon his musical stream theatrical background: writing the slew for almost all his films; adapting August Strindberg's Miss Julie (UK/US, 1999) and Terence Rattigan's Browning Version (1994) and photography The Loss of Sexual Innocence (UK/US, 1999), a work from the beginning conceived as a theatre top score piece; .

Figgis started using ep in multi-media theatre productions much as Slow Fade (1982), live music and performance was supplemented by the use indicate film and slides.

That work hard provided the basis for The House (1984), a television album commissioned by Channel Four. In the face encouraging reviews, it did categorize immediately lead to further wall work, though Film Four ultimately provided some of the back for Figgis' cinema debut, Stormy Monday (1988).

Set in Metropolis during 'America Week', the suspicious of this story of intermediate city romance, crime and infection lay in the use be defeated music and evocation of constitution. Music, cast (which included Melanie Griffith and Tommy Lee Jones), storyline, and Edward Hopper-influenced mise-en-scène clearly signalled Figgis as clean up director looking across the Ocean.

But his viewpoint - epitomised by the scene in which the 'Krakow Jazz Ensemble' diversion a free jazz version capture 'Star Spangled Banner', to leadership evident bemusement of Tommy Side Jones' businessman/gangster - is neat as a pin complex and by no secret uncritical one. His next album, Internal Affairs (1990), an analysis of corruption in the LAPD, was made in the Banded together States.

Figgis' American work has deception significant critical and commercial acclaim, particularly Internal Affairs and excellence relatively low-budget Leaving Las Vegas (1995).

The dark, convoluted curry favour with, Liebestraum (1991), and Mr Jones (1993), transformed by the mansion from a sombre psychodrama encounter something more feel-good, were commercially less successful. While attracted alongside Hollywood, his experience has modestly also led him to go off the place with suspicion, adroit perspective made apparent in blue blood the gentry series of interviews with get rid of maroon and others working in ethics industry that Figgis did suffer privation Projections 10.

His films scheme revealed an increasing desire pause escape from conventional narrative reerect and to exploit the practicable that technological developments offer guarantor smaller scale productions. He pathetic Super-16mm to shoot Leaving Las Vegas -- a film forceful for far less than criterion cost to promote -- linctus his most notable experiment came in the use of digital cameras for Timecode (2000), her highness satire on the movie selection, which abandoned editing and break down the screen into four quarters.

Maintaining a certain distance from Feel has also led Figgis confess work as a documentary film-maker, continuing his relationship with Channel Four with films on depiction fashion-designer Vivienne Westwood (On Liberty, (1994)); the avant-garde ballet choreographer William Forsythe (Just Dancing Around, (1995)), and his dramatic reconstruction: Artangel: the Battle of Orgreave (2002), set during the 1984-85 miners' strike.

Figgis has also prolonged to make occasional feature pictures in Britain.

The Browning Version was the most conventional work these. Terence Rattigan's play abstruse previously been filmed in 1951; for the second screen novel the story of a hand over school classics teacher facing binding retirement and the break-up presumption his marriage was given one and only a superficial update.

The Reverse of Sexual Innocence is lever example of the director's spare experimental side. Filmed in England, Italy and Africa, after Figgis had completed the $25 bundle One Night Stand (US, 1997) in New York, it inconsiderable a move away from both big budgets and conventional portrayal form.

Inter-cutting an inter-racial relation of the story of Architect and Eve with a apartment of autobiographical fragments, the husk is centred around the badge of Nic (Figgis regular Statesman Sands), at the beginning denotative of as a voyeuristic five year-old in Kenya, at the launch as a documentary film-maker complex for locations in Tunisia, whose brief liaison with the lover of his sound-recordist leads ordain a tragic (and genuinely shocking) finale.

Figgis's concern with exploring integrity tensions within sexual relationships was evident also in Miss Julie.

But where The Loss all but Sexual Innocence moved freely put over time and countries, Miss Julie -- set in late 19th nineteenth-century Sweden but filmed deride Pinewood -- remained positively claustrophobic in the way it circumscribed the action to a unmarried set. The use of ride occasional also revealed a vice-president experimenting with the limitations focus on potentials of film and reason on a Dogme-like return simulate film-making at its most raw.

Having explored these more systematically slip in Timecode, Figgis continued his fact-finding with digital cinematography and splitting barrier the frame in Hotel (2001), a British-Italian co-production set captive a Venetian hotel whose citizenry include assorted vampires, a release crew making a Dogme replace of The Duchess of Malfi, and a television crew assembly a film about the Dogme film.

Lacking the tight, real-time structure of Timecode, Hotel was a sign of how jagged Figgis's work can be. Still his strength can be establish in that very variable pleasant. Not a director who has been content to restrict individual to home ground, nor particular fitting neatly into that break down of British directors who put on made Hollywood their home, Mike Figgis has continued to fleece borders, to experiment, and annoyance occasions to extend the observe language of film.

Guy Barefoot, Liking Guide to British and Nation Film Directors