(Note: This article was originally published in The Royal Gazette on Friday, 15 March 2019. Below is an extended version of that article.)
Director Mike Newell is our head judge this year at the Bermuda International Film Festival. He will give a Directing Master Class in Specialty Cinema on Friday 15 March at 10:00 a.m. He will also participate in the Talks With Film Professionals in the City Hall Lobby Lounge on Friday 15 March at 5.30 p.m. Lastly, he will receive the Prospero Award for Excellence in Film.
I’m stood with my Nokia cell phone and a voice recorder. The curtains are open. I look increasingly peculiar to the Cornish couple stood outside, smoking. Mike Newell calls me at noon. ‘How long do you have?’ I ask. ‘Let’s begin,’ he replies, ‘and I’ll tell you when I’ve had enough.’
There’s a fighting quality in every filmmaker. Terry Gilliam is certainly one example. ‘I think it’s a necessity,’ Mike says, “my Dad once said to me, ‘Why are you so angry all the time?’ I said, ‘Dad, you don’t have to deal with the arseholes that I have to deal with.’ You run your head into these people who don’t know what you do, or how you do it, but always feel that they could have done it better. That is always tricky. I’m sure that’s what Terry finds.”
Corriepedia says that Mike Newell’s directed 21 episodes of Coronation Street in 1966. Contrastingly, IMDB says that he’s only directed 8 episodes. (So many questions.) A prolific contributor to British television (apart from Corrie), I ask if the aforementioned anger helped him transition from television to film. ‘It was certainly ambition,’ he replies, finally, after a prolonged chuckle.
Television production was painful: you were stuck in the studio. Rain was out of the question. Moreover, there were no film schools. For many, Mike explains, the Vietnam War proved to be the best option. ‘It was very cool to go to Vietnam,’ he recalls of the documentary filmmakers from that time, ‘lots of my friends went,’ I hear an audible shudder on the other end, ‘not me…’
After this period of experimentation with the Éclair NPR 16mm Cine Camera in Vietnam, many of Newell’s peers returned to the U.K., thinking: ‘If you could do it in a jungle in South East Asia, then you could certainly do it on the streets of Manchester.’ And so it came to pass that 16mm film became a kind of filmmaking norm. Another light bulb moment, then: ‘If you can do it on 16mm, then what about making a Proper Big Movie?’ Indeed, the P.B.M. idea waistcoated the future: films like The Ploughman’s Lunch (Eyre, 1983) appeared; My Beautiful Launderette (Frears, 1985), and a Newell-directed comedy called Ready When You Are Mr. McGill (Newell, 1976).
Ambitions led to struggles, however. Mike directed a film called Soursweet (1988), adapted by Ian McEwan from a Timothy Mo novel. Written and filmed in English, the cast consisted of actors from Singapore, San Francisco, England, Beijing and Tai Pei. Among other linguistic issues (usually involving how Cultural Revolution-era China saw the use of English as an punishable offence) there was one Chinese actor, who was the son of China’s version (at that time) of Laurence Olivier. ‘[Chairman] Mao [Zedong]’s wife,’ Mike explains, ‘had been a second rate actress. And so, in the manner of actresses, she had been immensely jealous of those who had more power, possibly even more talent than she had.’ Persecution ensued. ‘We cast one of his [the actor’s] sons, who was a quite brilliant actor. But as soon as he had to speak English, he forgot his lines. And I’m quite certain that that was a psychological mechanism that materialized from having a tremendously hard time, like, 5 or 7 years in real tough jail.’
Further challenges were faced on the set of Into The West (1992). There were two Irish boys (one of whom was only 9 years old) and a big white horse, which turned out to be seven horses. Similar to how the Chihuahua in Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Gasnell, 2008) is portrayed by more than one Chihuahua. If you ever find yourself wondering about that, you can now stop wondering and get on with your life.
Then there was the expedition to Columbia for the making of Love in the Time of Cholera (2007). ‘I should have learned my lesson,’ Mike says, half-seriously, ‘I was translating across cultures from Spanish to English and working with a mixed bag of actors.’ Spaniards. Italians. Angelenos (L.A.). ‘I don’t think we ever got the writing right either,’ he considers, ‘although we had a brilliant writer [Ronald Harwood].’
Difficulties such as these are the meat and drink of any filmmaker, however. And the struggles are not always so easily attributed to individuals: ‘I remember being immensely impressed by Netflix at the beginning,’ examining how Netflix helped to distribute The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018), ‘and then, little, by little, by little, I sort of began to wonder […] there was, with us, a very slight divergence of definition of what the movie was. I don’t necessarily regret it, but I can see that there would be circumstances that might have hurt a film. I think one has to be very careful of those predictive things,’ referring here to Netflix’s recommendation algorithm.
(Note: Netflix uses a mixture of implicit and explicit data in its algorithms: implicit data refers to behavioral data e.g. binge-watching one program but never giving it a thumbs up; whereas explicit data would be the thumbs up itself. En masse, this enables Netflix to utilize and shatter viewers’ opinions, allowing viewers to discover material that they hitherto using Netflix would never have watched (Plummer, 2017)*. It’s more complicated than that, but those are the basics.)
“‘No no! Don’t you see? If we predict it this way—I know, yes, you predict it that way—but if we predict it this way, then we hit this audience!’ That’s their stock and trade, which is fine with me. I’m on Netflix and I get three emails a week saying, ‘Hi Mike! You’re gonna like this!’ Maybe,” indeterminate mumbling, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think the cat is out of the bag yet,’ in terms of Netflix being a beacon of hope for aspiring filmmakers. Although he does think, ironically (given his own experience in the 60s), that emerging filmmakers should go into television.
Mike is 76 years old. He shows no sign of retiring. But Quentin Tarantino, who is 21 years younger than Mr. Newell, continually announces his retirement. On the note of filmmakers having run their careers dry (apparently) by middle age: ‘Well,’ Mike is slightly baffled by this stuff, ‘I don’t believe it. [Steven] Soderbergh said that he was not going to make films anymore because he no longer received sustenance from storytelling.’
‘He wanted to do theatre,’ I add, ‘I remember that’s what he said in the beginning.’
‘Uh huh,’ unconvinced by Soderbergh’s vocational promise, ‘so storytelling on film wasn’t for him any longer. Well, he discovered that he couldn’t be without it. And there he is back again. And I think, as you say, we’re artists? Very, very, very few of us are artists. It’s possible that Pawel Pawlikowski,’ the director of Cold War (2018), ‘is an artist. It’s possible that Alfonso Cuarón,’ the director of Roma (2018), another Netflix film, ‘is an artist. If there’s one in a generation that’s batting pretty high.’
As a person who makes movies, what do you do? No. Seriously. What do you actually do? What is it that you cannot be without? Mike thinks it’s ‘the warm overcoat of making something,’ after which he relays a story that took place at a Screen Director’s Guild (S.D.G.) meeting on 22 October 1950*.
At a time when communists were believed to be infiltrating Hollywood (perverting the American public by covertly inserting Marxist-Leninist theory into movies), Cecil B. DeMille sought to oust S.D.G. president Joseph Mankiewicz after he refused to take an oath of loyalty to the union. During the rather heated meeting, John Ford (according to Mike Newell) stood up and said: “‘My name’s John Ford. I make westerns. You’re a great man, Cee Bee, but I don’t like you.’ And he went on from there,” Newell now returning to his point, ‘that business of ‘My name’s John Ford, I make Westerns,’ is saying exactly what you do, and how you do it. It’s much better to be a craftsman than to think of yourself as an artist. You don’t have the right to think of yourself as an artist. The world makes you an artist,’ and, as the poignant balloon in Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) points out, only then, can you truly say, The World Is Yours. ‘Just because you happen to think in those terms,’ Mike concludes, ‘doesn’t mean that you can claim it.’
‘What do you make?’ I reply. A long silence clogs the phone line. I hear his mouth open, and say, “I think I make humane dramas. Sometimes they’re funny. Sometimes they’re not. But they will always have; what I will always aim for is, ‘What’s the kind of humane kernel of the subject that is just under the surface?’” I thank him, wish him the best in Bermuda, and we hang up.
If you may forgive the following segue/summation: U.S. President Harry Truman once asked Winston Churchill to explain Labour Party and Opposition Leader Clement Attlee. Churchill grumbled, saying, ‘There is less there, than meets the eye.’ Truman, un-phased, replied, ‘He seems a modest sort of fellow.’ Churchill grumbled again, but this time, it was one of admiration: ‘He has a great deal to be modest about.’ Well. That’s Mike.
* Wired, ‘This is how Netflix’s top-secret recommendation system works’ (2017) <https://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-do-netflixs-algorithms-work-machine-learning-helps-to-predict-what-viewers-will-like> [accessed 13 March 2019].
*Cecil B. DeMille – Official Website, ‘The Truth About the 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting’ (2016), <https://www.cecilbdemille.com/the-truth-about-the-1950-screen-directors-guild-meeting/> [accessed 13 March 2019].
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