Mike Hodges

Mike Hodges

Mike Hodges was interviewed at the National Film Theatre on 22 March 2004 by Geoff Andrew.

Arguably a crime movie even darker and tougher than his classic Get Carter, Mike Hodges' I'll Sleep When I'm Dead charts the chain of events that leads Will Graham - an ex-gangster now choosing to live in anonymous obscurity in Wales - to return to his former London haunts in search of those responsible for his brother's death. A bluesy, Melvillian study in the murky gangland ethics of shame, status, punishment and vengeance, it boasts a wonderfully expressive, taciturn performance from Clive Owen.

Read the Sight & Sound review

Following a screening of I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, we were delighted to welcome director Mike Hodges to the NFT stage to discuss the film and his career.

Interview © BFI 2004

From the top

Geoff Andrew : I must first ask you please to turn off all mobile phones, and remind you that no audio or video recording is allowed during the interview. Apart from that, I think it's all fairly straightforward, we're going to start with a clip and then there will be two more clips during the interview, and we're going to start, rather obviously I'm afraid - it was my idea - with something from Get Carter [1971].

[Clip: Get Carter]

Mike Hodges: Is there anybody here who hadn't seen that before?

GA: We're going to, really, be talking about I'll Sleep When I'm Dead [2003] , but with reference to some of Mike's other crime movies, which is why I've chosen some of the clips that you're going to see tonight, and one thing that occurred to me about I'll Sleep is that like Get Carter and indeed Croupier [1998] to some extent, it's about someone returning to a milieu, a world he thought he'd left behind, and I just wondered - is this just me being a mad auteurist critic or something, or is it a theme that does appeal to you in some way?

MH: Ooh, it certainly appeals to me. The problem with answering questions like that is you tend to drift into psychobabble. So I'm not sure I can answer it actually, Geoff. I have experienced loneliness a lot, I think. I was an only child - here we go, here's the psychobabble [laughter] - it's very difficult, isn't it, to answer these questions... I was an only child, and I think that that does have an effect upon you, in terms of the solitary quality of one's existence. I was also sent to a boarding school very early.. are you ready for all of this? [laughter]

GA: This is where I have to look at my watch..

MH: I was also brought up as a Roman Catholic.. not doing badly so far [laughter] ... a faith which I lost at the age of 15, so the sense of the solitary quality in my life may come out in my films. Certainly being left at seven years old at a boarding school was pretty traumatic, and you certainly had to fend for yourself. As you can see, I'm an enormous physical specimen, so I had to learn to look after myself under those circumstances.

GA: I was an only child as well... but you're not here to listen to me... You did talk about having to fend for yourself though, and actually, of course, one of the things about Get Carter and indeed I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is this certain amount of violence in the films, I don't want to start talking about censorship or anything like that, but what I find really fascinating is that the violence is rather banal in a way. In Get Carter you've... this is just a simple stabbing, it's frightening because it is so simple.

There's also a moment when Caine is trying to get in to see somebody in a big mansion, and it's John Osborne's mansion and he just picks up a stick and beats the bodyguard over the head. Even when a gun is used, it's one that's been kept under a bed next to a chamber pot, and it's completely anti-glamorous. Was this very conscious on your part, when you were making the film, or indeed the new film?

MH: When I made Carter , guns were quite rare in this country. Since then of course, the whole business has changed, of crime. But my observation, certainly of violence, has always been that it's been clumsy and it's rarely slick in the way that it's often presented in films. So I think that it's just a messy, sort of amateur kind of business in the main. Most of the violence I saw was during my National Service in the Navy - I was an Able Seaman, on the lower deck of a minesweeper which went round all the fishing ports - this is in the 50s, mid 50s - so I would go ashore in my bellbottoms and be in disguise. The Navy was my university, I can tell you. It was like two years of living in a Hogarthian painting, I mean it was just... it's almost impossible to describe what one saw in Hull and Grimsby and Lowestoft and all these places.

And the violence was always preposterous and drunken and stupid and just messy, and often very comedic. And it's the sounds and the way that it happens. When you hear sounds of violence coming from an alley, it's an unpleasant feeling, and I've always tried to capture that in my films. It's interesting, in the clip, you never see a knife at all, I mean you just never see a knife, so I like trying to find ways of doing... finding some detail which is... I mean the detail for me in that scene has always been the ship's horn, it's the sound of pain, it's not just Glynn Edwards dying. By the way the actor in it, Glynn Edwards, his mother ran the Rose and Crown in Salisbury when I was a kid [laughter] ... so I thought I should give him... I always wanted to kill him... he was bigger than I was... so I eventually had it happen... no, I'm kidding...

GA: We are getting very psychobabbly, aren't we?

MH: So... it's the small detail always that seems to me that makes something telling.

Shooting a scene

GA: I think so, I mean even Caine's intonation - 'I know you didn't kill him', 'I know ' - is sort of... it's going against what he's doing, because he's acting as if he did kill him. It's a beautiful detail. But the other thing I would... one reason I wanted to choose that clip is because even at the very dramatic moments, it seems to me that your direction is usually very very to the point, and almost matter-of-fact. In this scene, which is... by now the film is really beginning to build up and the vengeance is really coming home to roost - that's a terrible mixed metaphor, isn't it? - anyway, there's no flash stuff at all. Apart from... you've just got these very very tight close-ups which intensify the emotion, and I want to ask you about your idea of mise-en-scène , or direction, or whatever you want to call it. I mean, do you storyboard, do you decide what to do on set, how is it that you go about deciding how to shoot a scene?

MH: I never storyboard. I learned quite early on that if you spent all night working out what you were going to do with the sequence the following morning, to the point of not getting any sleep at all, and you thought up amazing tracking shots - mentally you're going here, there and everywhere, and then you get to the location the following morning and you've found that you've forgotten there were three pillars, two sofas, and they all get in the way of these amazing shots that you were going to do, and all you'd had was a sleepless night.

So I learned to relax. I basically just walk onto the set and just plot and breakdown the scenes to the end - it's very important to do the scene right to the end... rehearse it right to the end, and then I just try to find the simplest possible way of shooting that scene. If I can find a way of doing it in one single shot, I will do it. I mean there are scenes in Carter where... there's a scene in the boarding house that he's staying in where he brings Thorpey. He takes him up to his bedroom and there's a long interrogation scene. I mean this would have been two days of shooting, and pedantic - close-up here, close-up there, master shot and so on and so on... But because Caine - this was my first feature film - because Caine was not expecting to have his close-up, as some actors do, I was able to shoot it largely on his back, so... I just worked it out... and we did it in one.

I mean the producer was tearing his hair out because it took two to three hours to plot it, but once I'd plotted it, then you just did it, and you shot - it's a bit like cooking, in a sense: you put the ingredients in and then you've got to take it off at the right time. If you take it off too late it's overdone, if you take it off too early it's underdone, it's finding the right moment because you want to keep it fresh. Hopefully you end up with a nice sweep to the scene itself. And I think it's wonderful for actors because there's a great deal of excitement in doing a scene in one, the performance is heightened because... it's stretching them to have to do it all in one take, and so I struggle to do just that... that's my dream, my ideal.

GA: Do you tend to be somebody who does a lot of takes...

MH: No, very few. I like to go home to bed [laughter] ...

GA: More Clint Eastwood than Stanley Kubrick...

MH: This film, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead was shot in 28 days, you see, I really like my weekends off... you know as you get on - the old wheelchair gets creaky, you've got to oil it, get it ready, get the Zimmer out, do a few trips round the block... you've got to look after yourself.

GA: I came down on the set of I'll Sleep When I'm Dead one day and I think there was a Sedan chair they were carrying you around, in a rather grand fashion...

MH: Thanks very much [laughter] - have you got a photograph of that?

Black Rainbow

GA: OK, well at this point I'd actually like to go on to another example of what I think is beautifully straightforward direction. It's from Black Rainbow [1989] and basically the previous scene has shown that... the two main characters in it, I suppose, are Jason Robards and Rosanna Arquette, and they're father and daughter, and they're going round, I suppose...

MH: She's a medium...

GA: Yes, she's a medium and they're going round -

MH: 'The Bible Belt' the underbelly of America -

GA: Yes, and basically, they've just been doing this show which, I think, Robards seems to prefer to think that it's probably - not exactly a con act, but, you know, it's 'entertainment'...

MH: But she feels... she collects information from the audience...

GA: But she's beginning to see things for real and she's just been talking to one of the audience's relatives, but they suddenly realise it's a mistake, she's talking about somebody who, the woman in the audience thinks is alive, but Rosanna has been talking with a dead person, and it's freaked everybody out, and... this is the next scene, so if we could go with Black Rainbow , please.

[Clip: Black Rainbow]

MH: It's like watching films in Australia - seeing Jason Robards upside-down is bizarre, I can tell you [laughter]

GA: I should point out that that was actually taken from a DVD, so if the projection looked a bit strange... but we decided to do this at rather short notice, and in fact it was actually you, Mike, who said 'can we play this scene,' and I think it's a lovely scene, but what is it that made you want to select this particular clip?

MH: Well, you're showing Carter and you're showing Croupier and I just thought it would be nice to see another film that I made - and this one I wrote as well - that's less well known. It had great reviews here but absolutely terrible distributions, so hardly anyone's seen the film, and it comes out on a DVD at the end of April... I'm starting to laugh [laughter] ... Do you know, when I listen to Start the Week and programmes like that, I say 'God, these bastards, they're plugging their sodding books on a Monday morning...' Anyway, it comes out at the end of April. Done! And it's called Black Rainbow .

So I was very proud of that film, and I loved... the cameraman... I suddenly see Wolfgang sitting there... Wolfgang Suschitzky, who shot Get Carter , I've just spotted him. Anyway, Gerry Fisher, another great British cinematographer shot Black Rainbow . I thought Rosanna and Jason were just extraordinary. But also it's because the film's a deeply serious film again, it's...

GA: - Despite the line about television -

MH: ... Yes, exactly... it was a really... it was an ambitious film. I was trying to use the thriller, yet again, as a kind of vehicle to discuss all sorts of other things, including - how about this for a list - religion, the existence of God, what we're doing to our planet - that's not bad for a thriller, is it? [laughter] - so I chose a medium because she'd become... it's the whole business of time, I was playing with that as well. She starts to slip ahead of time, so she's communicating with the dead before they're dead. She can also see the future despoiling to the planet, the way that we're destroying it. So it's a film on many levels, but the top one is a thriller.

GA: But in some respects, it's very opposite... I mean, yes it is different, but what strikes me about Get Carter , Croupier and I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is they're very... about the material world... they're absolutely matter-of-fact about why people behave with each other. It's about power struggles and money and where you come from and all that. This is about those things but it also has this added element of - for want of a better word - religion, or the supernatural. It's about spirituality... to some extent it has a little bit of a relationship to the horror film. The previous scene to this is actually very very disturbing. Whenever she starts conversing with the not-yet-dead, you think 'what the hell is going on here?' Did you feel at the time that it was quite an anomaly for you to be dealing with something that is dealing with another world, because you don't usually do that?

MH: All those elements have always interested me. You can't be brought up... it's difficult to explain what it's like to be brought up as a devout Roman Catholic... and it's traumatic when you lose the faith, as it's called. And of course this was in the 50s... Catholicism was much stricter. You would go on a retreat and you would put pebbles in your shoes, so your whole belief system is wrapped around a belief in Christ. I'm glad that I lost it, otherwise I'd have turned out like Mel Gibson [laughter] - So not only did I lose my religion, but I didn't believe in God, I just went through an absolutely traumatic change. But that didn't stop me being interested. So if you don't believe in God and you're dealing with a film like this, you're then grappling not only with time, but a whole range of different things in terms of physics.

You know that now there is so much revealed that is inexplicable to scientists, like the fact that particles can be in two places at the same time, so it could be an explanation for bi-location, which is when somebody's seen in two places, like Padre Pio, so I think probably... and there are parallel worlds... I mean the area that's happening in terms of physics is absolutely startling and confusing and fascinating because we don't know what it is. We're just on the brink always of finding out these things, so it was my attempt at grappling with all of this.

I think Jason, when he saw the film, thought that it... he too was an unbeliever, like me... he thought that it vindicated the... I think , he never said this to me... that it vindicated an existence of God, which, of course it doesn't. If you analyse the film, it really doesn't do that. In fact, Martha comes out at the end and says 'if I told you that I was a fraud... you wouldn't want me to say that...' and the audience says 'no, I wouldn't want you...' and they don't want you to say that. If I told you that God didn't exist... no, no we don't want you... God exists, let's leave it as it is. So she said 'then I will not do that, I won't destroy it for you...'

So the film is an attempt to use the thriller at a completely different level. Whether it succeeds is another matter... it's strange when you're grappling with time, because film... it's a fairly blunt instrument, so I had her wrist watch getting ahead, and she kept having to check the time on her wrist watch, which is a pretty clumsy way of saying she's getting ahead in terms of time. But because you didn't know what was happening at that point in the story it was a possible way of introducing the idea - does that make sense?

GA: Yes. Absolutely... You wrote this film yourself, and you wrote Get Carter yourself...

Croupier

GA: ... The last two films were written by Paul Mayersberg and Trevor Preston. Is directing a different experience for you when you're working from somebody else's script?

MH: It's much easier... I've written so many scripts that haven't been made that I really felt I'd just had it with writing... Croupier was sent to me as a script. I loved it, absolutely immediately. I've been lucky. I've had two that I really liked, and I must say they're both written by men of approximately my own age. They still have the same political beliefs as me, they're culturally very similar, and we've also been friends, Paul Mayersberg and Trevor Preston, for many many years, and I found it absolutely... it was lovely having a companion to work with, and we worked very closely on the script for really quite a long time, before we got to make it.

With I'll Sleep When I'm Dead , Trevor and I... because it was over a span of about eight years... every time the money looked like it was coming in, we'd meet up, look at the script again, and we'd hone it some more and take out things... there was a lot of dead wood... in every script. It's quite extraordinary. You could ask audiences not to expect so much back-story, and so on and so on, so you had a much cleaner line to the whole film. But it's been a joy in both cases, I've loved every single second of working with somebody else on the script... and not having to go back and rewrite it, which is hard, I find rewriting scripts... I always found that terribly hard.

GA: Well let's have a quick look at a very brief clip from Croupier , before we go on to talk a little bit about that, then on to I'll Sleep When I'm Dead .

[Clip: Croupier]

GA: Well I like that clip because it tells you quite a lot about what it's like to be in a casino and I have no idea what it's like to be in a casino, so I found it fascinating, but also because it has that lovely last line about he was enjoying watching people lose, and actually, maybe that's why we enjoy watching your films because they're quite often about people losing in some respect or another. They're quite dark films, many of them, certainly Get Carter , I'll Sleep When I'm Dead , but actually even Croupier is about somebody who... there's something wrong with this guy really, he's not the most sympathetic of people, he's very detached, he even doesn't seem over bothered when his girlfriend ends up dead. Do you worry sometimes that you're making films that are too dark for the audience?

MH: Sometimes I wonder why I make them... I don't...

GA: ... The Catholicism and the lonely childhood again...

MH: ... Yes, all that... I don't really think... I think audiences are... I just think of audiences as adults. I think there's enough utter pap... romantic pap in the cinema that... there's plenty of that catered for. I like to have a different clientele [laughter] .

GA: Were you surprised by the success of Croupier ? It opened here and then went on to take a fortune in the States.

MH: Croupier really sums up my career. There are two similar expressions, one is 'your number's up', the other that 'your number has come up'. Well, with this one, my number came up, so having had a rough old period, in a sense, with terrible distribution of my films like Black Rainbow - The Terminal Man [1974] was never distributed in the UK and so on, and it looked like Croupier was destined for the same route as the others. And then suddenly... slowly actually, over about 8-10 months in the United States, it suddenly started going from 17 cinemas to170, and I'm down in Dorset digging my vegetable patch and the fax machine - no-one had ever sent me all the cinema returns before... the fax machine would purr all day and I'd go into my office and there'd be sheathes of paper, telling me all the money that's been taken in all these cinemas across America and I'd chuckle [laughter] ...

It was just lovely, I still... because it was so far away, I just didn't believe it was really happening. It was absolutely delightful. I felt vindicated for once in my life, because... it really is... it's pretty grim when you've made a film and it's not shown in the cinema. It's like it dies... it's like Black Rainbow died, as if it was never made. But you... the music... Simon Fisher Turner's music, every time I... you know, he did the music for both Croupier and I'll Sleep When I'm Dead and he's just brilliant. But it reminds me of something that happened with Simon. You're very hurt when... it is painful when a film isn't distributed, but then the main thing is to get the film made the way you want it. Something happened to me while I was working with Simon on Croupier . Simon's very big in Japan - I love lines like that [laughter] - somebody once said to me my film is very big in Malta [laughter] ...

GA: ... Is that possible?

MH: Anyway, I... Simon's very big in Japan . The doorbell rang and this big hunky Japanese guy came in... a musician, and Simon introduced me and they discussed their business and he went out of the room and then he came back in, and he came and stood in front of me, this wonderful looking man, and he says 'you make Black Rainbow ?' so I said 'yes, I wrote and directed it,' and he said 'I see... six times,' and I said 'six times?' so I said, 'on video?' and he said 'no, in cinema... very big in Japan .' [laughter] . So it's just like making a film and putting it in a bottle. It'll land some bloody place, you know...

GA: ... Just hope it's not Greenland ...

MH: So the main thing is that what you've got in the bottle is what you want in the bottle.

GA: ... Yes

MH: So, no I don't really bleat about it but the success of Croupier was a delight for me of course.

Simplicity is the answer

GA: But one thing you mention... Simon Fisher Turner's music... which is another reason why I chose that clip... because I think it's very good but... one of the things about that clip is it shows... Croupier was fairly modestly budgeted, I believe...

MH: Very, very modestly.

GA: And I'll Sleep When I'm Dead didn't cost a fortune. But it seems to me that you... particularly in your later films have come to a point where you are able to do a lot with very little.

MH: Yes.

GA: In this scene, basically you've got a room with people milling around, you've got Clive [Owen] being a croupier, bit of voice-over, bit of music. The camera moves very carefully and seductively along the table at one point but otherwise it's very very simple. It seems to me that your films are getting more and more pared down, more and more simple in a way, and actually better for it. Do you want to talk about that... or have I said enough?

MH: Well, I'm a real [Robert] Bresson fan, I must say, I love... simplicity is the answer to everything. I mean you must struggle for the simplest way of telling a story. And you have to hold your nerve, I think, because you take... nowadays the cinema's so... what am I going to say about current cinema... the pace is so fast, a lot of it's very tricksy, in terms of mainstream cinema, certainly. So you take a gamble if you don't condition the audience with music, if you don't indulge in a sort of Pavlovian sense - I hate cinema that manipulates the audience. Cinema is a manipulative art but I think that... I like to allow the audience time to ruminate on the film as it progresses, I think part of my lack of success is probably... I've never gone for the jugular... in terms of manipulating audiences.

In fact I made a short film, strangely enough between Carter and Pulp [1972] called The Manipulators [1972] which is about just that. It's about Pavlov and the whole process of how human beings are manipulated in what to buy, how to look, what to drive, the whole process of living... and this process seems to me to be reaching fever pitch nowadays. So, when you're making a film and you're not indulging in that manipulation, it is difficult. But you struggle for the simplicity, and you trust audiences. My experience, certainly with Croupier is that there are audiences for these kind of films and if you have the nerve to make them, then they'll go and see them. I think audiences are screaming for intelligent films that don't manipulate them all the time, wouldn't you agree?

GA: Yeah, I think I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is... to me, it's probably the most noir of your films. Most of it seems to have been shot at night, or indoors, and in that respect it's quite stylised, while still feeling very authentic. Will Graham... the Clive Owen character says very very little. It's very much in that laconic vein of film noir . Did you feel you were moving into that territory more than usual?

MH: I suppose it was with Croupier that I started this journey, really. I hope I'm finding my own style. Although it is noir film-making without a shadow of a doubt - I'm not very fond of the expression - but I hope that I'm finding a way of using the material and making films that are different to the 40s noir or the 50s noir - that they have their own kind of style. I've always loved reading the noir novels, American novels in particular, and I loved all those B-films... I used to go to the cinema when I was a kid, you know, in those days there were two films in the programme... I often thought the B-movie was much better than the A-movie.

GA: Yeah... and, of course, we've been talking about this from very much an auteurist viewpoint tonight, talking to one person, but film is a collaborative exercise and there are quite a few people who have worked with Mike, not only on I'll Sleep When I'm Dead , but also in the past, here tonight. I would particularly like just to ask both Clive Owen and Sylvia Syms, who are both in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead to put up their hands, or even stand up, and take a bow, please [applause] ... and thanks to you, and all the other people who have come along tonight. But I wanted to point out that, as with Croupier , the new film does have a joint credit. Croupier was a film by Mike Hodges and Paul Mayersberg, and this is a film by Mike Hodges and Trevor Preston, so could we please have Trevor Preston join us for a few minutes... [applause] ... you thought it was warm up here...

Trevor Preston on I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

GA: ... OK Trevor, the genesis and inspiration of the film... it started with you, so how did it come about for you?

Trevor Preston: Like Mike said, we'd been working on it for eight years, but it's actually taken 13 years to reach the screen. I started to make notes in 1991, and because I started to read about the anomalies between male and female rape... at that time, in 91 there wasn't, on the statute book, male rape, it was called 'non-consensual buggery'. Also, the victim of the male rape was not allowed anonymity in court like a woman. Also, a very severe and very violent female rape can get a tariff, a sentence, of life imprisonment. The maximum sentence for a very serious and violent male rape is 10 years. And I got very angry about this, so... I thought at first of doing a drama documentary, and then I thought 'no, really I'm a thriller writer,' and that's how it evolved, and then in 1994 the law was changed considerably.

GA: And how did it get from you to Mike? I mean, did you discuss it as friends, or...

TP: Well, by that time we were sharing an agent, and Stephen , my agent sent it to Mike... we'd been old old friends from way way back to when I first came into television, we both worked on a very odd arts programme called Tempo and obviously... Mike and I used to live under one another, I lived underneath him, so we were terribly close...

MH: ... Underneath me...

TP: ... Underneath him [laughter] .

GA: This conversation is getting out of hand, frankly [laughter]

TP: But it really went on... first of all, I don't like it being called a gangster film, I don't think it is. And it went on from being a film about rape in general, which was the catalyst of it, obviously, but it went on to be a much bigger thing for me. It's what you suggested in the middle about not being able to escape your past, and a man, because of the mores of the society he comes from, being forced into an act of violent retribution, which in fact kills him, not bodily, but spiritually.

GA: It's actually interesting, because there is this dialogue in it about whether it's possible for someone to change, which actually comes up as a brief discussion in Get Carter as well... and it's obviously something that interests you both. You had a lot in common in terms of interests and friendship here. Was there any friction between his tendency to pare away and cut down what you'd already written?

TP: No, it was absolutely wonderful. There were two moments - or really one moment, although it came at two different times - that in fact changed the film for me, which were totally from Mike - when we were discussing casting, and in my original script I had the woman who owned the restaurant, the Charlotte Rampling character, as about the same age as Will, and Mike said it would be so much more interesting to have her an older woman, and the moment he said that it made such utter sense, and it added another dimension and consequently, and on from that, Malcolm McDowell, being an older man than I had made him, gave that generation sexual jealousy when he says, the women, with their eyes like hands on him all the time. And for me, that was an enormous... but I mean working on the script was just great, it was absolutely wonderful, and we really did take away...

I can remember, when the Americans come over, because the Americans saved this film, not the English, the Americans did this. Mike Kaplan worked his arse off getting this film made, and it was the Americans that came in with financing, not the English. And they came and they were terribly worried that the script only ran to 82 pages, and were absolutely convinced... and I said 'well I think it's running a bit long,' [laughter] ... and the producer went white, but in fact we shot it and we took out one long shot scene, and we actually edited out, just prior to shooting, five or six smaller scenes, so it really was a 75-page script.

GA: Yeah, and one of the scenes that you edited out was the one that I saw being shot...

TP: ... That's the reason... [laughter]

GA: ... I wasn't in it!... But when I came down on set and I was chatting to you then, you said 'oh, you're not just a critic, you work for the NFT, when are you going to do a Melville season?' I said, 'well you're lucky... in about two or three months...' Then when I saw this film, I thought 'this is Melville, it's very very dark, it's about questions of honour and... changing and guilt and shame, revenge - do you go for revenge or what - and what does that do to you, and you've even got a little budgie in it - it's not the canary from The Samurai [1967] but... was that something very much in your mind when you were writing this?

TP: I absolutely... your Melville season was wonderful, absolutely wonderful, I mean I think he's extraordinary. I think the three films towards the end of his career, The Samurai , The Red Circle [1970] and Un flic [1972] , these are just extraordinary. Melville does something which the Americans never could do with noir , and, like Mike, I'm very much into 50s crime fiction - Jim Thompson, people like that, [David] Goodis a nd people like that, so... but also there are other influences that are American. I'm a great admirer of Paul Schrader as a writer. I think Light Sleeper [1991] is one of the great scripts of all time - not a word wasted in it. And I'm also an admirer of a man called John Flynn, who made a film called The Outfit [1973] , and I always see John Flynn is still making B-pictures, and John Flynn's B-pictures are so much better than most people's A-pictures... so there were all sorts of influences. Strangely enough, I'm more influenced by painters than I am by other writers. I was trained as a painter and... the moods and the textures and things of paintings interest me very much.

GA: Shall we throw it over to the audience, now?

TP: Yes, I think we should!

Locations and farces

GA: Yes, there must be somebody out there with a question... because otherwise you'll get more of mine... yes.

Audience member: This is a location question. I used to live around the area of Brixton where you filmed most of the scenes, and the exterior of the club I knew well. Where did you film the interior of the club?

MH: There's another club, a Salsa club, it's about five minutes away... it looks like an extraordinary set, doesn't it? But it's a real club, I didn't do anything to it. I used both floors as well, because I really like the scene where he goes in, he's got that... what do they call those revolving lights... I don't come from South London - once I saw Loughborough Junction, I knew the area I wanted to shoot, and virtually everything was around there. Charlotte 's house was five minutes away, I just walked the area... the same way as I did with Get Carter . I just walked the area and made everything geographically fit. And we shot this in 28 days - you know that's going some - so we had to have all the locations close by our production office, which was again, just up the road.

MH: What was the name of the mail order company... no, it doesn't matter...

Audience member: The Freemans Building...

MH: The Freemans Building , yes, so we were in The Freemans building and that was our production office. They were downsizing, so we were in there [laughter] ... it's perfect, isn't it?

GA: Trevor, did you have any specific locations in mind when you wrote it?

TP: Yes, I did. Strangely enough, when Mike and I started to talk about locations, when things started to bubble, I was telling Mike about... I used to live in a place called Erith, which is on the edge of London, down near Woolwich, and I was telling him about Woolwich and that whole sort of area, from Greenwich down and Mike said 'take me there...' and we had a day there which broke my heart. I have never seen... I hadn't been there for 25 years, I have never seen a district that had gone so down. It used to be... my father used to be a market trader and it was the most awful place, and it's so sad because the people that bleed from London into Kent are really good people... big families, but very poor... and I took him down to the ferry and we looked at it all but we realised that... it was just so heartbreaking to see it. But most of my stuff... mostly from south London , there's east London connections as well and I just didn't want to do an East End film. Most of my television work has been set in south London ...

GA: It's very much a reaction against... whether it's a conscious reaction against... but it seems to be a reaction against the 'Lock, Stock and Smoking Barrel'... sort of... the thing that had taken over British cinema for a while.

TP: Well, the reason we had such a long time in making this is because Lock, Stock [ and Two Smoking Barrels , Guy Ritchie, 1998] spawned half a dozen other films, more than half a dozen... in fact they're still coming out - there's one about Charlie Richardson out at the moment... this was a film that they sort of saw in that genre, but it wasn't people wielding shotguns and putting on stocking masks and so that's one of the reasons that they all sort of went over the top of us, because it isn't what I call a kick-bollock-and-scramble film. [laughter]

MH: They're farces, really, aren't they? I've only seen Lock Stock , but it's a farce really. I don't mean it rudely...

GA: No, no I think you don't... you don't... I would...

Advice, influences and plans

Audience member: Mike, do you have any advice for anyone wanting to get into film directing?

MH: Any advice?

TP: Don't!

MH: Try and get a producer. I didn't realise this until almost too late... the first two feature films I made with the same producer, Michael Klinger, whom I liked... I loved him actually, but there was something missing... so I then produced The Terminal Man myself and I liked that producer very much, I got on with him. [laughter] And then when I came back I never really found another producer to work with until Mike Kaplan [who produced this film], and I won't work with anybody else now.

All the successful partnerships seem to me are based on a producer-director relationship. John Schlesinger, for example had Joe Janni for many years, and when Janni died I think his film-making went off, personally... it's a very strange relationship. You've got to be, intellectually, at every level, on the same plane, then I think you've more chance of surviving. It's not just a question of just making a film, it's got to be a film you want to make; it's just pointless making any old film, it seems to me. You do need a producer, you need a friend with you... good luck! [laughter]

GA: Yes...

Audience member: Could you say something about the extent to which Japanese cinema has impacted on your work or... the extent to which it's influenced your film-making?

MH: I love Kurosawa, patently... it's very odd for my lot - I'm over 70 now, and influences come in a different way to how they do now. In short you went to the cinema - in my home town there were three cinemas, I went three times a week. Slowly foreign films would come in, so you only saw a film once. I saw Billy Wilder's films as they came out, then when I came to London , you know, Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray and a whole load of other foreign directors - I would go and see their films. But again, only once. It's difficult to describe how influences happen when you didn't have video. So the influences are slight... like a watercolour brush stroke.

Access to video can be dangerous in a sense. When directors sit down and study a film, and study it, and study it, and study it, so they're at the point where they're just copying it, so in a way, the influence is just much lighter for my generation than I think it is with contemporary film-makers. It is there, but it's just the lightest touch, really. I don't consciously think in terms of being influenced by Japanese cinema in that respect, but then all cinema influences you. I certainly love Kurosawa, but I wouldn't dream of trying to copy him.

GA: I think you're right here, because your films have an authentic tang to them, I mean, OK this may have had something to do with your love of certain movies, your love of Melville, or whatever, and of certain literary crime fiction or painting, but actually you're coming initially from an idea which is to do with real life, that made you think about this disparity about different sorts of rape, and then you're putting it into something you know about from experience, personal experience. Whereas if you're making movies because you've liked other people's movies and you're trying to do the same sort of thing, then you're already at one remove from reality anyway.

TP: But you know, strangely enough, I mean 'Beat' Takeshi is an extraordinary film-maker, and he did, 20, 30 years later what Melville did, he took the American noir film and he turned it into his own sort of film. I think it's Sonatine [1993], the one where they go under the beach... it is the most extraordinary film... I love that film, because it's got such intellectual humour to it and I must say that I've tried to see everything I can of his, I probably haven't seen everything, but I won't say it's directly influencing but I think it might in the future. I think, in a way, 'Beat' Takeshi is taking over from Jean-Pierre Melville for me, because I think he's a most extraordinary film-maker...

[Inaudible question: 'is there anything in the pipeline?']

MH: Yes there is, I'm glad to say. I'm just finishing a script with Paul Mayersberg for a mainstream film company... you see what happens as you get older... for Warner Bros. But it's still a low-budget, don't worry [laughter] ... I'll probably get 22 days to shoot this one. It's very nice because it's with Mike Kaplan again, and my friends. So although it is for Warner Bros... it's very odd, dealing with a bureaucracy. The contract took a year to complete, that's all, very good [laughter] ... then the first payment took another six months... well we're doing fine so far. If I took as long to make the film, we'd be in trouble... [laughter]

TP: It went from being a film about rape to being ... I'll Sleep When I'm Dead , which is a film about vengeance ... and it's now, for me, it's passed on to writing a trilogy of films about people's relationship and reaction just to acts of violence. I've just finished the second one, which is called The Chinese Busker . So I'm trying to write three films because I think violence is the language of our age and I just thought it was something worth while looking at, as far as film goes.

Women

GA: Yes, Sylvia...

Sylvia Syms (in the audience): You have the most amazing close-ups of the men in your films. You obviously love certain faces... do you ever feel the same about the face of a woman? [laughter]

MH: Oh... oh that's lovely, thank you... Of course I do... Don't you like the close-ups of Charlotte and you even saw one of Rosanna...?

SS: Well they're very small parts... but it's just interesting... in all your movies, except the one that you say is coming out on DVD, most of your leading protagonists are men...

MH: ... Right, true.

SS: ... I just want to know why... [laughter]

MH: You've been in this business longer than I have, and know there is a big element of chance, i.e. Croupier ... I have written an awful lot of scripts which were about women...

SS: ... Oh, really...?

MH: ... But they just never got made... now the really interesting thing is that they're always saying that they want roles for women, well I've written some massive roles, i.e. like Rosanna's one but I could never get any... it was mainly for Americans, I have to say, I could never get any American... they were pretty tough scripts, and I could never get any American actresses to play them, and I had great difficulty in getting Rosanna Arquette... a number of people turned it down before, and if I hadn't been recommended by [Martin] Scorsese to Rosanna, I wouldn't have got that one made either. So it's actually nothing to do with me. I love women. [laughter]

SS: No I wasn't suggesting you didn't...

MH: No no, and I love shooting close-ups of women.

TP: Well, you know, Mike, I can remember you talking to me about a film which I thought was the most fabulous idea, this must be 10, 15 years ago, about a woman whose husband thinks she's having an affair because she's slipping away at night, and in fact she's going off to learn to be a stand-up comedian [laughter] ... and I thought that was just an absolutely brilliant...

MH: ... And her act was about their marriage [laughter] ... So... it's all chance, I'm afraid, that particular number didn't come up.

SS: You'll have to do the one about the female comic now.

MH: Yes, I agree.

GA: Yes, at the back, please, and can you speak up...

Audience member: I was very curious about the casting of Charlotte Rampling. There are so many fabulous British actresses of that age. Why did you cast Charlotte - did everyone turn that role down...

MH: Well she's British, actually... I think she's just a wonderful actress. Her minimalism is just extraordinary. She says everything by the movement of an eye, the twitch of a lip, she's just extraordinary, I think. I just wanted that kind of performance.

GA: Can you say, when did Clive Owen come into the equation of this film?

MH: Oh Clive?

TP: Years and years...

MH: Clive was... I loved working with Clive in Rumour [1970] and he was just...

Clive Owen (in audience): In what ? [laughter]

MH: Sorry... it was my second film, I mean, I'm in my dotage [laughter] ... let me out of here. It's Sylvia who's thrown me, I'm thinking of men's faces! [laughter] ... in Croupier and his performance is so meticulous and so wonderful that we just really enjoyed working with each other. We been trying to get this script made for about four or five years, or longer probably, and so when we finished Croupier , I said to Clive, 'would you like to read the script,' so he read it and, being a sensible chap he said 'yeah, I really like this.' So he was on board.

Unfortunately Croupier still had two years to surface, so I couldn't get arrested at that time and Clive, his meteoric rise to stardom was on hold for a couple of years. But when Croupier became successful then I became hot again [laughter] ... which was quite nice at 70, and Clive became even hotter, and we were able to get the money. It was a bit like being discovered... as I was in my vegetable patch in Dorset - they rediscovered that I was still alive! It was a bit like being discovered in a peat bog [laughter] - 'What is this guy... what is he? Dust him down a bit... what's his CV... get his CV out... is he still alive?... Yes he is...!'

GA: Actually, if I didn't know you so well I wouldn't tell you this, let alone in public, but shortly after Croupier came out, somebody at Time Out said 'we're doing something about the hippest people of the year, and we want... who do you want from film, because maybe we can get them to nominate the best things that have happened to them this year. What about Mike Hodges?' So I said 'well, I think he's just having a hip replacement ...' [laughter]

MH: ... He meant hip... hip ...

GA: But they still decided to go with it, and Mike gave his 10 best things of the year, and number one was a hip replacement...

MH: ... Oh was it really? I'd forgotten...

GA: But anyway, he's still making hip films, very good films, so... at this point I think we probably have to close, so I'd like to thank Mike Kaplan for making this happen...

MH: Yes, yes, absolutely [applause]

GA: I'd like to thank Sylvia for bringing some argument into the occasion [laughter and applause] and Clive for disagreeing with Mike over which films he'd been in [laughter and applause] I'd like to thank Trevor and, most especially, Mike, for joining me up here tonight. Thank you.

MH: Thank you all. [applause]