Get Carter director Mike Hodges came in from the cold with Croupier, and he's back on familiar ground with his latest film. He tells Donald Clarke about years in the wilderness and making the films he wants to make.
It's not hard to identify Mike Hodges amid the crisp, matt black lunchtime crowd at the Cigala restaurant. Older, messier and more sedate than most other customers in the central London eaterie, he is, as I enter, staring rather curiously across Lambs Conduit Street. "Do you think Joyce would have liked that?" he says, nodding at a funeral parlour, which, with salty irony, now finds itself positioned next to a store promoting positive living.
To endure a career such as Hodges's you probably need to acquire a dark sense of humour. His 1971 film, Get Carter, in which a vengeful Michael Caine coolly butchered various representatives of Newcastle's demi-monde, made his name on release and went on to become the most revered of British crime thrillers. Though he subsequently directed various interestingly eccentric pictures and got to play with a big budget on Dino De Laurentiis's 1980 remake of Flash Gordon, Hodges did not taste proper success again until 2001, when his characteristically grim drama, Croupier, first dumped by Film Four, then salvaged by the British Film Institute, established a strong following on re-release.
"Yes, it's a funny business," he says. "I would love to have been like Ken Loach and get a film made every year or so, but it never quite happened. But, you know, I never had problems being offered work. It was just that it was rarely work I wanted to do."
Croupier unlatched a career window which his new film, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead - fascinating, atmospheric, gloomy, pretentious, baffling - seems unlikely to open much wider. Clive Owen stars as a retired hard man who returns to London to discover that his brother has committed suicide after being brutally raped by a hoodlum played, as only he could, by Malcolm McDowell. Among the well-chosen locations is the sleek, woody Cigala restaurant, which, it transpires, is run by Hodges's son.
"Yes. I just liked the lines of it," he says, making directorly hand gestures.
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (the male rape aside) has virtually the same plot as Get Carter. Wasn't Hodges concerned that viewers would inevitably compare the two?
"It may sound naive, but I really didn't see any connection between the films at all. Maybe the time span between them is just too long. I suppose both are meditations on revenge. But, whereas the hero of I'll Sleep is desperately trying to escape the violence, Jack Carter is a real psychopath. He doesn't bat an eyelid when he kills somebody. Frankly, I think anyone who compares the two films is an idiot."
Well, excuse me. Nonetheless, Get Carter and I'll Sleep When I'm Dead - and Croupier for that matter - share a common tone: bleak, steadily paced works, they travel through the same existential fug that shrouds the gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville.
"Well, yes, it would be idiotic to say they are not influenced by Melville," he says.
"But my career has been so odd - I have been plagued by such distribution problems - that it is hard to discern any style. I am drawn to certain subject matter, of course. But the way I try to achieve my films is purely intuitive. If I have a style, then I am not conscious of it. I never went to university or film school. Frankly, it is astonishing that I ever got to make a film at all."
HODGES, WHO WAS born in Bristol in 1932, originally trained as an accountant and then, after national service in the Royal Navy, secured a job working as a teleprompter operator. "It was a useful job to do, because you could work for all the television stations: Granada, BBC. You really got to see how a studio worked and you worked 10 days on and had four days off. During those days I began to write."
After working on the World in Action documentary series and making two well-received films for Thames Television - Rumour and Suspect - he decided to use Ted Lewis's sinewy novel, Jack's Return Home, as the basis for his feature debut. The result was Get Carter. Barely a week goes by without some lads' magazine voting it the best British film of all time.
"Well, I think that is a little excessive," Hodges laughs. "In a sense, I was always slightly uncomfortable with Get Carter. There was a moralistic tone to what I had done previously. I had done World in Action and then Rumour, a film about freedom of the press. Then Carter was so amoral and nihilistic. But I always knew I could make a good film out of it."
Whether indulging in phone sex with Britt Ekland or flinging Alf Roberts from Coronation Street off a high building, Michael Caine remains terrifyingly coiled throughout the picture.
"It is strange, but up till that point I had been working with real actors. I am not being cruel to Michael - because he can be terrific - but he is a film star and that is something slightly different. It is to do with the creation of iconic images. I remember so clearly seeing the first close-up of him, filling up the whole screen, and realising this was a whole different ball game."
A myth has developed that Get Carter was not a great success on release, but the director remembers things differently. "The film hierarchy found it rather distasteful, it's true, and I remember taking my mother, who was a Catholic, to the premiere. She just said 'very interesting' at the end. 'Oh dear, that bad,' I thought. But there were queues around the block. Yes, I think it was a hit."
Despite this early success, Hodges seemed unable - or unwilling - to plunge into the mainstream. He followed Get Carter with Pulp, a bizarre black comedy starring Caine and, of all people, Mickey Rooney. Next came his poorly distributed adaptation of Michael Crichton's science fiction yarn, The Terminal Man. By the late 1970s, as the British film industry went into deep hibernation, he found himself increasingly short of funds. He was employed to direct Damien: Omen II, but, after a particularly fractious on-set dispute, during which a producer allegedly waved a loaded revolver, he decided to leave the project.
Meanwhile, Dino De Laurentiis was trying to find a director for Flash Gordon. Having fallen out with his first choice, Nicolas Roeg (director of Don't Look Now and Walkabout), the flamboyant Italian producer decided to offer the job to the equally unlikely Hodges.
"I didn't know anything about special effects or comics. It was madness really. But, once I worked out how to deal with Dino, the process of doing it was rather wonderful. I had absolutely no control over the picture. So I would turn up on the day and improvise. I just made it up as I went along. All the jokes were made-up. Somebody would get stabbed and I would think: why don't we have blue blood rather than red blood? To be honest, I never thought the film would see the light of day."
DESPITE FREDDIE MERCURY'S operatic assertions to the contrary, Flash Gordon did not save the universe and, shortly after its release, other parts of Hodges's life began to disintegrate. He has admitted in interviews that he somehow acquired an affluent lifestyle - private schools for the kids, a country house, two cars - which he had never really sought. By the mid-1980s all that was gone.
"It's weird. I think, in a sense, that it is almost impossible for that lifestyle not to creep up on you. You start with a small flat and a mini. You're on 60 quid a week and then suddenly that life creeps up. Anyway, I got divorced and gave what there was to my wife. I was grateful to be freed from all that, to be honest. Sadly, she died. The children were growing up anyway. I would never go back into that lifestyle. You just lose your freedom, because you need to earn money and, therefore, have to take on certain projects."
Hodges set up home in Dorset with the woman who remains his partner today. He played the clarinet, tended his vegetable garden and, every now and then, directedfilms that were subsequently buggered about by distributors, producers or both. (Seek out the underrated 1989 thriller, Black Rainbow. Avoid the 1987 IRA drama, A Prayer for the Dying.) Then, in 1998, just when it looked as if his career was going to potter on in this fashion forever, Croupier happened. This brilliantly sombre picture, starring a brooding Clive Owen as a writer who falls for the nocturnal life after taking a job in a casino, did not initially find favour with its producers.
"David Aukin from FilmFour looked at it and said: 'The only thing I like about this is the end credits.' Then the British Film Institute saved it. It would have gone straight to video without them. They were reissuing Get Carter and put together two prints of Croupier. It got terrific reviews and then just limped around the country for a while."
Hodges returned to his vegetables and his clarinet.
"Then the fax machine began chattering. Croupier was being distributed in America by this company called Shooting Gallery. And it just began to take off. And the fax machine kept chattering for another eight months. Now it made about $10 million, which is not huge, but it was very big in the industry. It made Clive a star. Eventually, FilmFour relented and they gave it a proper release. It was a great story really."
Sadly, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, though a worthy project, has not received quite as good notices as the earlier film. Nonetheless, Mike Hodges remains in favour. He is currently negotiating a deal for a picture with Warner Brothers and has written a radio play, King Trash, for the BBC. "It's a version of King Lear based on stories a barber of mine told me," he explains.
So did he really think his career was over when FilmFour tried to bury Croupier? "Oh, I had jacked it in altogether. I thought I am never going to be asked to direct another film, even if I wanted to. That's it, I thought. Never mind. I don't have much money, but I have enough to survive and I rent my house from the crown, so they can't get me out of it until . . ." And then, with eerily perfect timing, a hearse crawls past the undertakers. "That always happens on that line," he says.
They should perhaps take the coffin around the block a few times. It doesn't sound like he's ready for it yet. "Absolutely."
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead opens next Friday. King Trash will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Fri, Apr 29, at 9pm