Mercury News Interview with Mike Hodges for I'll Sleep When I'm Dead 7/4/04

No Longer 'Retired,' Director Explores Vengeance Again
By Bruce Newman - Mercury News 7/4/04

    In the British thriller I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, which opens Friday, the first shot we see of Will Graham is the same as the last shot: a handsome, well-dressed murderer standing at the seashore, watching as something is dropped into the water. Between those two identical images, director Mike Hodges makes us feel what life is like for people in the film who keep turning up dead at the sight of Will.
    Just like Michael Caine's gimlet-eyed gangster in Hodges' first film, Get Carter, Will is willing to do whatever it takes - and whomever it takes - to avenge the death of his younger brother. The difference between Will (played by Croupier star Clive Owen) and Caine's Jack Carter is that when Carter dropped a body into the ocean in that film's final scene, he was enjoying his work. Will can't enjoy anything.
    "I think what the ending is trying to say is that revenge is circular,'' says Hodges, who will turn 72 later this month. `"The idea I wanted to leave is that revenge just wreaks more revenge, as we are now discovering in the Middle East.''
    It took Hodges six years to get I'll Sleep When I'm Dead' into theaters, following the completion of Croupier in 1998, a comparative lightning turnaround for him. The gap between Croupier and his previous film, Black Rainbow, had been nine years.
    In fact, after he and Owen attempted to shop the script for I'll Sleep after Croupier, they found no takers. So Hodges returned to his home in the English countryside, busied himself with gardening and painting, and considered himself retired from directing. "At 65 or 66, I was well past my apparent sell-by date.''
    The British production company that financed Croupier disliked what Hodges had done so much that it buried the film. "The person who commissioned the script saw the film and said the only thing he liked about it was the end credits. In other words, he was glad when it was over.''
    Two years after Croupier was dumped in Britain's video bin, it was given a limited release in the United States as part of a program by the now-defunct distributor the Shooting Gallery to call attention to small, overlooked films. "I was back in England thinking my career was at an end. Then this process began, and when it was over I was once again considered a proper filmmaker.''
    Croupier became such a critical hit in the United States that it eventually appeared on nearly 170 screens. That gave it new life in Britain, where it was a commercial success the second time around. "We had to wait for Croupier to be resuscitated and dragged off the operating table,'' Hodges says. Suddenly, people were interested in anything Hodges and Owen wanted to make together.
    "If I hadn't made Croupier, I think I'd have been pretty bitter because my career would have had no finish to it. I'd have just faded out.''
    Actually, his career has been fading in and out almost since it began. Get Carter was such a stunningly brutal recalculation of the film noir formula that it led the way to the modern neo-noir interpretation of the gangster film. Younger directors have been influenced by Hodges' work in Get Carter for decades, and now Hodges himself has taken another crack at it.
    He had stumbled badly, twice, after making The Terminal Man in 1974. Hired to direct the horror film Damien: The Omen II in 1978, he had creative differences with one of the picture's producers, who pulled out a gun and laid it on his desk during their final meeting. "He put the gun down to make a point," says Hodges, a man not entirely immune to the charm of such a gesture. "But it was a sort of strange thing to do."
    That disaster was followed by an even bigger one in 1980 when he took the reins of Flash Gordon. The movie that Hughes made - mixing intentionally cheesy special effects with camp acting and a cast that featured Max Von Sydow and musical theater star Topol - wasn't for kids, it wasn't for teenagers, it wasn't for anybody. He was ecstatic. "I like making the audience work because I think they enjoy the process,'' he says. But it turned out to be one of the least commercially viable movies ever made about a beloved comic-book hero.
    Hodges turned against the system that had created him when he finally realized he was making movies he didn't like (who can forget ``Morons From Outer Space''?) to support a lifestyle he didn't enjoy. Like Will Graham, who gives up a life of crime in `'ll Sleep When I'm Dead and goes off to live in the woods, Hodges started to withdraw from the business for long periods.
    He had to overcome a scorched-earth divorce and serious surgery in the early 1980s. "I've been in situations several times in my life when I literally had nothing. I remember around 1982, I could put everything I had in one room. Which I did.''
    Will is similarly indisposed in Hodges' current film, living out of a van when he learns that his brother has died in London. To prepare for his confrontation with a car dealer named Boad (played by Malcolm McDowell) who may have had something to do with the death, Will shaves off his bushy beard and gets fitted for new clothes.
    "Will has to dress up to frighten Boad, to leave a deposit of fear with this man. He not only looks like a gangster, he looks like a businessman. I think business is the jungle now. It's replaced the western.''
    The film intentionally undermines the audience's assumptions about its characters, another Hodges trademark. "It's very interesting to see all the conclusions people jump to,'' he says. Some audiences in cities where the film has opened have mistaken Will's ex-lover (played by Charlotte Rampling) for his mother. "Because she's obviously older than Will, she has to be his mother,'' Hodges says, still amused by confusion he is sure never would arise if it were an older man and a younger woman.
    The film's title comes from a song of the same name by Warren Zevon, who died of lung cancer days before I'll Sleep When I'm Dead premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year. Hodges has compared his films to autopsies, and himself to a pathologist, but gives no indication that he is ready to accept this latest uncompromising look at the hard life as his last. He expects to have his big finish ready to go before he's 80.