Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner, with Timothy Spall, is a fine artist’s portrait

BRITISH director Mike Leigh paints a personal portrait of a great artist in Mr Turner.

Timothy Spall, from the film Mr. Turner.

IT’S a rainy morning in Soho, central London, and upstairs in the offices of a film agency I’m shown into a small dark room with two white chairs and told to wait for Mike Leigh. “We’ve been recording a TV interview,” says an assistant, and my eyes are still adjusting to the gloom when he’s back again. The room next door is free, and lighter; 71-year-old Leigh, probably the most gifted living writer-director in British cinema, would prefer to meet in there.

There are standout scenes aplenty in Leigh’s latest film, Mr Turner, a glorious biopic of the great English painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) that brought Timothy Spall the best actor gong at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival. But the scene that springs to mind right now is the one in which Turner welcomes prospective buyers into a candlelit antechamber before sending them to his viewing room, so that his vivid canvases would appear extra brilliant.

“It’s completely true,” says Leigh, sitting by a window next to a pale grey sky and looking even more beady-eyed and gnome-like than usual. “Turner built his gallery at the side of the house and people had to stand in the dark before looking at his paintings, and he spied on them through a peephole in the wall.” He stares at me levelly. “I don’t think I could have made any of that up.”

Basing a movie on a historical character is a departure for the seven-time Oscar nominee, whose cross-genre films tend to be concerned with instantly recognisable reality, with modern, warts-and-all British life. Leigh famously begins his projects without written scripts, kicking them off with an idea or simply a feeling. Ensemble casts then develop their characters — braying yuppies and weary single mothers, mixed-up drifters and monstrous suburban divas — through discussion, research and a shedload of improvisation.

“What I do is what other artists do, painters, novelists, people who make music, poets, sculptors, you name it,” he has said. “For me making a film is a journey of discovery as to what that film is.” His work is issues-based, sometimes bleak and bracing, often heartwarming and funny. From the middle-class twits of the 1977 television play Abigail’s Party (from which the Australian TV sitcom Kath & Kim arguably took inspiration) to Life is Sweet, his 1990 portrait of a working-class London family; from 1996’s ­Secrets & Lies, about an adopted black woman’s search for her birth mother, to 2010’s Another Year, a paean to the trials and pleasures of growing old, Leigh explores social relationships and skewers their nuances. He makes the ordinary seem fascinating.

“[Leigh’s] area is the glory of everyday nothingness, which he elevates into great drama,” says Spall, who spent two years learning to paint in preparation for his role as Turner, a revolutionary artist whose ability to capture light, colour and atmosphere made him one of the best landscape painters. That Turner also happened to be gruff, eccentric, passionate, conflicted and at worst an arsehole meant he was ripe for portrayal in a Leigh movie.

“I felt there was scope for a film that examined the tension between this very mortal, flawed individual and the spiritual way he had of distilling the world,” Leigh says.

Turner bequeathed the contents of his studio, a cache numbering in the tens of thousands, to the British nation. (Last year more than 100 of these works featured in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the first major Australian showing of Turner’s work in nearly 20 years.) Several famous pieces — including The Fighting Temeraire, his 1839 painting of a veteran warship — are re-created in the film; Leigh gives us a scene where Turner watches a steam-tug towing the ship up the Thames on its way to being destroyed.

Mr Turner covers the latter half of Turner’s life, beginning with his 1825 visit to The Netherlands and finishing with his death, aged 76. “If you drop anchor when he’s up and running then you can feed in any part of the backstory, which I do,” Leigh says. “It also meant that I could look at the relationship and death of his father, which is profound, and most importantly at the more radical work that happened at the back end of his life, which many people didn’t understand.”

Mr Turner, the first full-length film Leigh has made with a digital camera, is a genuine, sumptuous pleasure to watch, evoking the light that moved Turner to paint the way he did, letting us see vistas and vantage points through his eyes.

Cinematographer and long-time collaborator Dick Pope mimics the painter’s unusual colour palette: gold, rose, palest blue. Sunsets on canvas and in real life blur with a sort of art-life lyricism. What is really a series of vignettes set in Georgian and Victorian Britain has a Dickensian, even Hogarthian feel; here are feasts, cats, wives, mistresses, estranged daughters, bad Purcell arias and teary visits to brothels. Here, too, are sea journeys (Turner is strapped to the mast of a ship in a storm to soak up the atmosphere) and great marshy landscapes.

It’s no wonder, really, why Mr Turner is being hailed as Leigh’s magnum opus. The director is having none of it: “This film, like any film I make, is the fruits of the collaboration of a lot of extremely talented people on both sides of the camera.”

People such as Spall, who has appeared in four other Leigh films including Topsy-Turvy, the upbeat 1999 musical drama about operatic composers WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, and Leigh’s only other departure from fiction. Wheezing, grunting and harrumphing, Spall’s portly, mutton-chopped Turner attacks his canvases with brutish gusto. Colours are mixed with spit, sweat and gobs of phlegm. Snuff is blown on to canvases. Fingers and claws work as well as brushes.

Another memorable scene takes us to the Royal Academy exhibition on varnishing day, a kind of unofficial private view where artists give their paintings a final going over. Turner puts a red blob on to his Dutch seascape Helvoetsluys as if he is vandalising his own work, before returning to transform it into a bobbing buoy, in the process insulting a nearby John Constable (James Fleet), who has been applying flecks of vermilion to his painting of Waterloo Bridge.

“Everybody knows that this incident really happened,” says Leigh with a shrug. “So you ­research, study and absorb and assimilate the background, and then you get out and make the piece.”

He nonetheless relied on his usual method of allowing actors to improvise without a script. Fixed plot points such as Turner’s final, tender relationship with the widowed Mrs Booth (Mar­ion Bailey, Leigh’s real-life partner), his landlady in coastal Margate, had plenty of wiggle room. Only very occasionally were facts bent; the idea that Turner’s relationship with his long-suffering, long-term housekeeper Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson) was sexual — Turner paws at her oafishly, reflexively — grew organically out of rehearsal.

Actors prepared by reading and researching and taking guidance from art experts. They per­used the Turner archive at the Tate Britain, whose stunning exhibition Late Turner: Painting Set Free coincided with the film’s British release at the start of November. After that it was business as usual, with droll humour replacing biting satire — although a comical portrayal of the great art critic John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) as an effete mummy’s boy who can’t pronounce his Rs has raised a few hackles.

“Apparently some guy wants to sue me for defamation of Ruskin!” Leigh says, barking a laugh. “It’s not an arbitrary caricature; Ruskin was a cosseted prig with precocious opinions. Of course he is to be taken seriously in the grander span of his life achievements, but if one were ever to have met him I don’t think he’d be a million miles from our expression of the essence of something.

“But that is not a statement about critics,” he adds in response to a question. “It never occurred to me. A good critic is a good critic and a bad critic is a bad critic, and there are plenty of them.” He folds his hands over his paunch. “Next question,” he says.

LEIGH isn’t the easiest of interviewees. Long used to spending weeks or months in one-to-one improvisations with actors before pulling various strands together for filming, his mind is as focused as his appearance first seemed when I walked in. If he veers off the track at any point during his long, thoughtful answers, he comes back to it eventually (“Let me finish,” he says when I glance at my notes). Any vagueness on my part, any stating of the bleeding obvious, is pounced on, read as an invitation to be benignly mocked.

I wonder about the film’s final scene, why he chose to finish on this emotion instead of another, reassuring him that I won’t be giving the ending away. “Not when you can read about it in books,” he quips.

His earthy, no-nonsense demeanour probably has much to do with his northern English roots. Born in industrial Manchester, the son of a doctor from a Jewish immigrant family (whose surname was originally Lieberman), he attended an all-boys grammar school with a strong tradition of drama, and spent free time watching movies in his local fleapit: “I’d sit there thinking wouldn’t it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real ­people instead of being like actors.”

It wasn’t until Leigh moved to London to take up a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (“to my utter astonishment”) that he discovered such films: the so-called British new wave spearheaded by the likes of Tony Richardson; Shadows, an improvised film by US director John Cassavetes; and the street-smart French films of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and the nouvelle vague school, which proved the biggest influence: “The real, fundamental, anarchic, status quo-challenging, breathing-real-air aspect of it,” he has said.

Leigh honed his directing skills at East 15 Acting School in Essex, where he met actress Alison Steadman, to whom he was married from 1973 until 2001; their sons Toby, 36, and Leo, 32, are an illustrator and filmmaker respectively. (The latter’s documentary about the making of Mr Turner is out in the new year.) He would go on to direct plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company and devise projects at Manchester Youth Theatre; in the 1970s he made nine TV plays including Abigail’s Party, featuring a pregnant Steadman.

Before any of this, there was art: “By the time I was 14 I could tell you about Picasso and the impressionists and Dali and the surrealists and all sorts.” Not Turner? “I thought his stuff was for chocolate boxes or biscuit tin lids. I wasn’t interested in landscapes, although I was an avid camper and hiker. I used to be sent to stay with my grandparents in the Hertfordshire countryside — that rural unsullied world that Turner painted before all the hedges got pulled up.”

He pauses, smiles. “It wasn’t until I went to the Camberwell School of Arts in 1963 [a year-long foundation course before a stint at the London Film School] that I started thinking about figurative painting. You couldn’t be a London art student without starting to twig Turner and the way he anticipated the impressionists and 20th-century art, even artists like Rothko. Slowly, he just sort of grew on me.”

Leigh was as inspired by Camberwell as he was disappointed by RADA (“which was very superficial and old-fashioned back then”), largely thanks to the life drawing classes he attended. He calls them a revelation: “They made me think about the creative process, of the possibilities of what actors could do, only because everyone was standing around a [life] model, looking at something real and trying to find a way of expressing it. My thoughts were, ‘We have not found a way of expressing this at RADA, ever.’ ”

Looking at something real, trying to find a way of expressing it — isn’t this a sort of manifesto for his films? Leigh eyes me beadily. “Manifesto? If you say so,” he grumbles.

“I was just formulating notions of what I went on to do, really.”

He says that his biggest influence is people, since he finds people endlessly fascinating. Everybody matters. Everybody is the potential central character in a story. Not everybody has to be British, either; while Leigh has famously refused to move to Hollywood (“I’d rather poke steel pins in my eyes”), in 1989 he devised the acclaimed play Greek Tragedy with an ensemble cast of Greek-Australian actors including Zoe Carides and Nicholas Papademetriou at Company B, now Belvoir, in Sydney.

We talk about Australia, about the people and the space and the outback. About the time he took the Ghan from Adelaide to Alice, then drove on up to Darwin by himself: “My friends in Melbourne and Sydney said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t leave the road and go for a walk.’ A bit different to driving around England.”

Interview over, Leigh pulls the strands together.

“I think Turner would have been more than inspired by the Australian landscape,” he says with a smile. “And the light.

“He really would have loved that light.”

Mr Turner opens nationally on December 26.

THE BEST OF BOXING DAY

BOXING Day is the biggest cinema-going day of the year and, once again, Australians have diverse choices, even if much of the better-quality offerings await later in January. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies brings Peter Jackson’s interminable Tolkien adaptations to a close with fitting sound and fury.

For scale and a little more subtlety and serenity, Russell Crowe’s The Water Diviner is a Gallipoli tale with emotion, shot handsomely by Lord of the Rings’ Oscar winner Andrew Lesnie.

The art houses will be full with audiences revelling in another grumpy and endearing performance from Bill Murray, this time in the thin but fun adult comedy St Vincent. There’s less humour in Timothy Spall’s interpretation of the grand British painter in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner, although he will win an Academy award nomination.

For the kids, the Disney and Marvel hybrid Big Hero 6 is the pick of the season along with the holdover Paddington, ahead of another Night at the Museum (3) starring Ben Stiller and Dr Proctor’s Fart Powder, which is self-explanatory.

Michael Bodey

In Arts on Friday, David Stratton on the best and worst films of 2014