Leigh Wants To Make Turner Movie
Mike Leigh’s current film, “Another Year,” has some fervent fans. (I’m not one of them, but there are other of the director’s films I’m nuts about.) Anyway, Leigh has a dream project: “I want to make a film about Turner, the painter.” (Whose work, “The Fighting Temeraire,” is above.) “I think it is a wonderful subject for a film but there’s a difference between ‘Topsy-Turvy'” (Leigh’s movie about Gilbert & Sullivan) “and the new film. ‘Topsy-Turvy’ had an ever-shrinking budget, and we got away with it by dumping all the exteriors. But Turner, as you know, is one of the great landscape painters ever—a man who strapped himself to the mast of a ship to paint a storm. You can’t scrap all the exteriors and tell his stories. So we are trying to raise money, but it is difficult.â€
