'I think our narrative film style needs a shake-up'

A talk with Mike Figgis

Of all the words bandied about to describe Mike Figgis's work, "pretentious" is not the least used. So when, in Time Code, a black-clad Central European artiste pitches a breathless manifesto to an LA production company that cites Gropius, Eisenstein, and DeBord while describing the tenets of the very film she inhabits, it's hard to miss the irony. But the real joke is that, despite the hysterical laughter of the studio head at hearing her preposterous crap, Figgis believes in much of her spiel. Sitting in the Eliot Hotel, the director laughs as he describes the contradictions at work in the scene. The goal, he says, was to "reiterate to the audience what it is they're watching in such a pretentious way that you're pushing the envelope of credibility. Even though what she's saying is radically true."

Figgis was acutely aware of the fine line he walked between fulfilling his own complex vision and making a film that's palatable to John Q. Moviegoer. "The linear narrative had to be fairly straightforward and simple. The easiest thing in the world with a thing like this is do such an obscure kind of visual performance art that your snobbish and elite art group would take great joy in saying they understood it and other people would just walk out because it's too obscure for them."

Nonetheless, Figgis's need to hurl something radically new at the screen was real. And after toe-in-the-water dalliances with split screens and atypical film stock in Miss Julie and The Loss of Sexual Innocence, he dove headlong into this digital, four-screen, no-edit, all-improvised movie. "I think our narrative film style needs a shake-up. And one of the reasons I did this [without cuts] was that I dislike the fact that the editing process is very much the period where the film falls back into studio control and is basically bending over, asking to be assaulted."

At least in the early going of Time Code, it's the audience that feels assaulted. The film is a total sensory overload. Images and sounds duke it out for your attention. But Figgis is adept at manipulating the sound of each quadrant (at some early screenings he did it live in the theater; on DVD he wants it to be an interactive feature), and those modulations are what push and pull your eye from one corner to the next. Before long, it becomes second nature to keep tabs on the larger proceedings while winnowing in on individual scenes.

This "cinematic cubism" (Figgis's term) that fractures the screen into four parts obviously owes to the explosive abstractions of visual art. But Time Code's structure also arises from Figgis's own musical proclivities. He's renowned for composing his own scores; in this instance, however, his musical instincts play an even more encompassing role. "The first structured education I had was studying music. And I realize now that the way it has influenced everything else has really thrown open my structural understanding." Figgis even wrote the film's "script," such as it was, on music paper. "I immediately had a system . . . where each stave was a camera and each bar line represented one minute. I gave each character a color and was able to see, at a glance, when they moved from one camera to the other. It's much easier to write like a piece of music -- to write the melody line all the way through and then to start to fill in the harmonies. I realized I had such a real advantage that I'd never had before as a writer when doing scripts in conventional form."

-- Mike Miliard

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