Mike Figgis really belongs to the new wave, but he had the misfortune to be born several decades too late, writes Will Hodgkinson
The walls of Mike Figgis's basement are lined with stacks of his own photographic prints. Naked women feature heavily. "I've had a lot of conversations about the role of pornography and eroticism in film and photography, and most of it is absolute shite," says the director, who divides his time between shooting mainstream Hollywood movies and experimental films, staging art installations, playing musical instruments and developing filing systems for storing everything he ever did.
"But there is a short that comes with the British DVD release of The Beast that is genuinely erotic, because it allows you into this world that questions the object of eroticism. Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida is the same: it has a weight of tragedy running through it. With both of those films you cannot separate the eroticism from the narrative and turn it into a commodity."
The Beast, by the Czech director Walerian Borowcyck, is a surreal update of the Beauty and the Beast story in which the beast rapes the beauty, who accordingly falls for his primitive charms. Ai No Corrida is one of the most erotic films ever made, not least because the acts its lovers participate in are genuine in every sense of the word. Both came from the late 1960s to mid-1970s, when many countries were offering their versions of the French new wave, producing impressionistic, direct films that reflected the personality of their directors.
Figgis really belongs to the new wave, but he had the misfortune to be born a couple of decades too late. Since his 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas he has made a quadruple screen drama (Timecode) and a film within a film within a film (Hotel). Presumably it is his Hollywood blockbusters, such as last year's Cold Creek Manor, that pay the rent.
"Films like Weekend by Jean-Luc Godard affected me hugely when I was growing up," says Figgis, who has used digital video cameras to liberate himself from traditional film-making constraints, just as nouvelle-vague directors such as Godard and François Truffaut liberated themselves in the 1960s by doing away with sets, costumes and huge casts. "Once you know enough about film-making, however, it becomes very difficult to watch films in a pure way, because you know all the tricks that have gone into making them. There have been European films like Festen and Man Bites Dog that smash through the bubble of knowledge that you build up, but it's very rare."
"Harmony Korine is doing interesting things on DV, but the problem is that people don't have a relationship with digital equipment, because they don't consider it special. Godard said that you should own your own equipment, and he was accused of stealing from his budgets to do so, but his attitude was that if he didn't love his equipment he wasn't going to use it in the best way."
The film that, for Figgis, sets the high-water mark of artistic perfection is Pierre Granier-Deferre's 1973 Holocaust-era romance The Last Train. "I was in Rome over Christmas, and I caught the last 40 minutes of this film I had seen 30 years previously. Within the first 10 seconds I knew what it was. It stars Romy Schneider and Jean-Louis Trintignant, and it's the story of two people leaving Nazi Germany on the last train out. He has been separated from his family and he's trying to get back to La Rochelle; she's a Jewish German woman escaping the Nazis. They're thrown together and have this very intense two-day affair.
"I remembered that it had a great ending, but I wasn't prepared for how great it was. Everyone should watch this film before trying to make one themselves. You know, f**k your conjuring tricks: be honest and direct - and brave in how you allow your actors to work."
There are many CDs in Figgis's tidy office, and they cover the ground from avant-garde jazz to pop to classical. Music was his first career of choice: after leaving school he played alongside Bryan Ferry in the R&B covers band The Gas Board, and he studied music in London before going into theatre. Also in the collection are soundtracks, among them Bernard Herrmann's scores for Psycho and Taxi Driver. Music is, Figgis claims, "the whore of the film industry", but prostitution has its rewards.
"The history of cinema is really the history of music," says Figgis. "If you look at Hitchcock and see what Bernard Herrmann is doing you become aware that the whole European avant-garde had made its way, through the refugee movement, from Europe to America and from America to Hollywood. You will hear an atonal piece of music in a thriller that is highly effective because it bypasses a clichéd romanticism of conventional harmony You listen to Bartók's Music For Percussion, Strings And Celeste, which Kubrick used, and it's frightening and powerfully eerie. A mainstream audience will be enthralled and happy to be listening to this avant-garde music, but they wouldn't dream of buying a piece of music by, say, Charles Ives. That is one of the more interesting subversive possibilities of film."
Should there be any time left at the end of the working day, it seems Figgis might indulge in a spot of filing. "Billy Forsyth said to me: 'Everything we do now is about highly advanced filing-clerk techniques.' He's right: if you don't develop your own filing system you can't function in the digital world, and now I have an arranged marriage between my computer and a stock of high-quality notebooks. You've got to catalogue your ideas. We're all librarians at heart, aren't we?".
