Friday August 15, 2003
The Guardian
Photo: Sarah Lee |
The man who steps into the
office reception could have staggered in from the desert. His hair is
damp, his shirt sopping. His eyes look positively bleached, as if he has
been staring for too long at the sun. Mike Hodges has just this moment
arrived in London, having driven up from his home in deepest Dorset. "It's
about 10 degrees hotter here. My God," he says, flopping into a chair.
"How does anybody cope?" Actually, he couldn't have arranged a neater entrance. By a happy coincidence, Hodges' latest film - the portentously titled I'll Sleep When I'm Dead - also features a rural recluse who finds himself lured back to the mean streets of London. Forget the incidental details: the fact that Hodges' hero is a notorious hard man, whereas the director himself is soft-spoken, good-humoured and 71 as of last birthday. Both of these men have come out of the wilderness to reclaim their respective kingdoms. For Hodges, this is the bonus round. When his previous picture - 1999's Croupier - died a quick, lonely death at the box office, he assumed his career was over. He had made a peerless writer-director debut with 1971's Get Carter, plus a bunch of other films he was proud of (Pulp, The Terminal Man, Black Rainbow). He insists that he wasn't bitter about anything. His time up, he would retire to Dorset and grow vegetables. Then something strange occurred. Croupier was rescued in the US, opening on 17 screens to rave reviews before expanding to a healthy 150 cinemas. In the end its Stateside success convinced backers FilmFour to give it another, proper release in the UK. "You think your film is going down the toilet," he reflects ruefully. "And then it gets stuck. And then it comes back up again." Which is why he's here today: braving the heatwave and with a fresh movie to discuss. Flushed, but unflushable. |
Fingers crossed, I'll Sleep should keep him buoyant for a
while longer. Scripted by Trevor Preston (a long-time friend), it stars Clive
Owen (previously of Croupier) as a former gangster who returns to his south
London manor to investigate his brother's suicide. The film was produced by
Mike Kaplan (another friend) and showcases a splendidly diseased supporting
turn from Malcolm McDowell (yet another friend). But don't be lulled by this
snug, matey pedigree. On screen, Hodges' film is startlingly bleak; a no-frills
existential gangster tale that, at its best, exudes the same reptilian menace
he showed on Get Carter. Certainly it touches on similar themes: honour, revenge,
male violence.
Hodges admits to a fascination. "As you can see, I'm a small man. I don't
get into fights. I don't have any macho side to me at all. But I am interested
in these characters and where they come from. Now, whether I ever wanted to
be one of those men, I really can't say. I think that as a young man I probably
did."
These days he's smart enough to know that such behaviour is often a sham,
a cover-up. In the 1960s Hodges worked as a documentary maker for British
TV, at one stage shooting a World in Action report on the Vietnam war. "I
was able to study these supposed hard men at close quarters. And one suspects
- well, indeed, one knows - that an enormous number of them are homosexual.
An awful lot of the Hollywood western stars were gay, incidentally. And, sad
to admit, the facades of those kind of men do interest me."
Hodges describes I'll Sleep as a samurai film. By contrast, his writer likens
it to Greek myth. Personally, I saw it more in terms of a cowboy picture,
where the loner hero rides into town to kill the evil sheriff. But whatever
slot you put it in, there's no denying it's as dry and dangerous as gunpowder.
Ultimately, it seems to offer its hero a stark set of options: either stay
within the system and get eaten up, or get out and live like a hermit.
Hodges says he can relate to that. "I can understand that kind of rejection.
And in a sense I've done that myself. I live in pretty comfortable circumstances,
but I've rejected materialism in any excessive form. I don't own any home.
I drive a very simple car. The only things I'm interested in buying are books
and CDs. I eat well and I drink well, but that is my life. I decided about
20 years ago that I didn't want to embrace anything beyond that."
Was there a catalyst for this? "Well, there was a whole change in my
life. There was a divorce, and the divorce partly came from struggling to
keep up a style of living for the family. There were four of us, my wife and
two children, and it just became a treadmill, and I found myself doing all
the things I swore I would never do. The kids were going to private school,
and we had the country house and the town flat and two cars and God knows
how many television sets in every room. And when Jean and I divorced, I just
had nothing left; I was at rock bottom. This was in about 1980. And then I
became seriously ill and had to have an operation, and it might have been
malignant but fortunately it wasn't."
He pauses to take a gulp of tea, then switches to the third person. "But
once you remove all the pressures and the money worries, you immediately feel
freer. And then you can start making the films you really want to make."
After all this, it would be nice to report that life became plain sailing
for Hodges. Not so, however. If the 1970s were a decade of struggle, he freely
admits the 1980s were "a terrible time" too, and the 1990s not much
better. Clearly, the director seems to have suffered more than most. Reading
back through his cuttings is like revisiting a series of car accidents. Two
of his favourite films (The Terminal Man and Black Rainbow) were effectively
killed off by poor distribution, while he (unsuccessfully) lobbied to get
his name taken off the 1987 IRA thriller A Prayer for the Dying. Then there
is the story of Damien: Omen 2, which he fled after only three weeks on set.
There is a rumour that relations on Damien grew so fractious that the producer
even pulled a gun on him. But surely that can't be true ...
Hodges chuckles at the memory. "Well, 'pulled' isn't quite the right
word," he says. "I was having a discussion with the producer, who
was slightly neurotic, to say the least, and he got very angry. We were sitting
in an office and he suddenly rummaged in his bag and put this handgun on the
table. And I said, 'Is that loaded?' And he said, 'Yes.' And then we just
looked at each other for a bit."
Was there the suggestion that he was going to use it? "Well, I don't
know," laughs Hodges. "But it's the perfect symbol of the macho
behaviour we've been talking about. I think I must have got under his skin.
We were arguing about the design budget and I said, 'Calm down' and he didn't.
But I found it very scary, I have to confess. The whole film was very threatening."
Yet it wasn't the gun that made him leave the production? "No, no, no.
I should never have taken that film on in the first place. I needed the money,
and the whole thing was a disaster. The gun was incidental."
After the interview I ring up Malcolm McDowell, who has known Hodges since
the 1960s. Our conversation verges on the surreal. It's late evening in London
but lunchtime in Los Angeles, and when McDowell picks up the phone he's riding
a buggy down the fairway of his local golf course. This strikes me as a bizarre
place to find the satanic majesty of If... and A Clockwork Orange, but there
it is. Possibly it's all part of some subversive protest; perhaps with hand
grenades for golf balls and a Droog caddie riding shotgun.
Barrelling down the fairway, McDowell admits Hodges has had a choppier, more
troubled career than most. "Mike doesn't like compromising very much,"
he explains. "Now that's a great strength as I see it, but it doesn't
help when you're trying to work within the studio system." That said,
he feels the director has weathered the storms and has finally started to
get the acclaim he deserves. "He's a rare bird in British cinema, and
I'm just pleased he's getting some recognition. I'm pissed off that it's taken
35 years, but that's typical of England. We never realise what we've got until
it's almost too bloody late."
As for Hodges, he feels he's arrived at a place where he's comfortable; making
low-budget films with a gang of old friends. "To find this out at 70
is pretty ridiculous," he says. "But I'm there now."
In the meantime, his reputation continues to grow. He regards the success
of Croupier as a vindication of the sort of movies he wants to make, and a
sort of "gentle revenge" on both Hollywood and the British film
industry. Then there is the ongoing renaissance of Get Carter, which was regarded
with general distaste on first release and yet is now seen as horribly prescient,
and one of the great British gangster films of all time.
A few years back, Get Carter even gave rise to a fumbled Hollywood remake,
which relocated the action from Newcastle to Seattle and installed a leaden
Sylvester Stallone in the Michael Caine role. Hodges still hasn't seen the
remake, although a friend rang to inform him that it was "unspeakable".
Actually, he adds, his son brought him the DVD back from Hong Kong last Christmas.
One night Hodges got drunk and tried to watch it. But the system wasn't compatible
and the disc wouldn't play: "So we put it in the dustbin."
Oh well, I say. At least the studio must have paid him a lot of money for
the rights. Hodges guffaws at my ignorance. "I didn't get any money at
all," he says. "When I made Get Carter, I was paid a flat fee of
£7,000 for writing and directing and that was that." He beams happily.
"We were very naive in those days."
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
"Hodges isnt
interested in happy endings
Hes interested in re-invigorating your soul and spirit .
- John Patterson, 'MIKE H0DGES: BEYOND GET CARTER' BBC
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