Guardian August 31, 2003
Mike Hodges is 71, short, softly-spoken and lives in rural
England where he likes to grow vegetables in his spare time. So why does he keep
making movies about bloodthirsty loners out for revenge? Xan Brooks meets the
director who came back from the dead.
The man who steps into the office reception could have
staggered in from the desert. His hair is damp, his shirt sopping, and his eyes
look positively bleached. Mike Hodges has just arrived in London, having driven
up from his home in deepest Dorset, south-west England. "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 is soft-spoken, good-humored
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. 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 (who also starred in 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: honor, 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 knows that such behavior is often a sham. In
the 1960s Hodges worked as a documentary maker for British TV, at one stage
shooting a 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.
Whatever, 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. "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. But 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 crashes. Two of his
favorite films (The Terminal Man and Black Rainbow) were effectively killed off
by poor distribution, while he (unsuccessfully) tried 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 rumor that
relations on Damien grew so fractious that the producer even pulled a gun on
him. Surely that can't be true?
Hodges chuckles. "Well, 'pulled' isn't quite the right
word. 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
behavior 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."
After the interview I ring up Malcolm McDowell, who
has known Hodges since the 1960s. 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 realize 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 lumpen Sylvester Stallone in the Michael Caine role. Hodges still
hasn't seen the remake, although a friend told him that it was
"unspeakable".
Oh well, I say. At least the studio must have paid him a lot
of money for the rights. Hodges laughs at the suggestion. "I didn't get any
money at all," he says. "When I made Get Carter, I was paid a flat fee
of £7000 for writing and directing and that was that." He beams. "We
were very naive in those days."
© The Guardian 8/03
Archived 2003-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net