Acclaimed '60s Brit director is hot again after Croupier, I'll
Sleep When I'm Dead
By Jim Slotek - Toronto Sun
Toronto - There's a simple reason the seething and unsettling British gangster
film I'll Sleep When I'm Dead sat as an unwanted script for four years. And after 40-plus years in the business, director Mike Hodges
(Get Carter) is frank about what that reason was. "I was at a point in my career where I couldn't get
arrested," he says simply. "You're still only as good as your last
film."
His last film, as it turns out, was Croupier -- an acclaimed
and profitable caper movie released three years ago with Clive Owen as a
writer-turned-casino-worker who is seduced into joining a scheme to rob his
employer. At age 70, Hodges was the hot kid in town again. And the
gritty I'll
Sleep When I'm Dead - about a feared prodigal gangster who shows up
asking questions about his brother's suicide -- suddenly was no longer
un-filmable. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead again stars Owen, with Jonathan Rhys
Myers as the drug-dealing brother who is raped by a criminal car-dealer (Malcolm
McDowell).
Hodges is fairly sanguine about such professional heat.
"In a sense, the first three films I made were a meteoric beginning,"
he says. "I got Get Carter (a classic revenge flick with Michael Caine),
then Pulp (also with Caine) and then The Terminal Man (with George Segal, an
adaptation of an early Michael Crichton book).
And then came a six-year lull before Dino De Laurentiis
called him to direct the cartoony Flash Gordon, with Sam Jones and a legendary
soundtrack by Queen.
"I have no idea why Dino hired me, except that Nicolas
Roeg was going to do it and they parted company. It was a very light-hearted
experience. I couldn't do anything else but make it up as I went along, because
I had this massive Italian art department that couldn't speak English. I'd come
in every day, see what they'd made and try to figure out what to do with it.
"I'm lucky to have made any films at all," he says
philosophically. "My beginnings seem to make it unlikely that I'd become a
film director. I was brought up in a small country town in England, and my
parents wanted me to get a qualification, so I became a chartered
accountant."
It was an expat Canadian from London, Ont., named Lloyd
Shirley who steered him to TV and then to film. Sadly, Hodges returns next week
to deliver a speech at a memorial for Shirley, the producer of such shows as
Sweeney, Minder and The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, who died of cancer in March
at age 71.
"When commercial television started in Britain in 1957,
they imported enormous numbers of Canadians, like Ted Kotcheff. Lloyd hired me
as a teleprompter operator and became my mentor. He was an amazing man and he
died totally unsung. It makes me angry."
Of I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, Hodges says "I think if I'd
sat to write a script I wouldn't necessarily have written one about male
rape." That impetus came from writer Trevor Preston, who "lived on the
fringes of criminality before his life was salvaged by writing. People who come
from that kind of world, a male rape truly undermines the whole of their
personality. It is the most dreadful ignominy.
"But revenge begets revenge. Curiously, the pattern is
very similar to my own country, with Dr. Kelly (the BBC government informant
whose whistle-blowing on Britain's involvement in Iraq preceded his suicide).
"There, a real suicide has sort of unhinged everything.
It creates a curious comparison with this film."
© 2003 Toronto Sun
Archived 2003-08 by Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net