LIKE ALL IMPORTANT ART, Mike Leigh’s latest film, Topsy-Turvy, is about many things. On one level, it is about the end of the 19th century. It captures the excitement that surrounded emerging technologies, like the telephone and the ballpoint pen; the public’s growing interest in Asian art and culture; the rise of mass entertainment in big European cities; and the general political atmosphere at a time when Britain was a powerful nation.
On another level, it is a film about art, about the making of art. For nearly four hours the movie details the complex processes (both personal and national) that make a big, expensive art project possible. Mike Leigh has never ventured into this territory before, let alone this era. Most, if not all, of his films have been set in modern England and deal with personal, social, political, and class realities of the day. But now, late in his career, Mike Leigh has decided to step back and make a film about what he is: an artist. He does this by telling the story of Gilbert and Sullivan — a composer/writer team that produced comic (or light) operas in the mid- and late-19th century — and their production of the highly successful Mikado. The movie starts with Gilbert and Sullivan in a creative rut that threatens to break their partnership. They, like many artists of their time, have simply run out of ideas. Then, when Gilbert chances to visit a Japanese culture exhibition in London, he is rejuvenated, and the team produces a masterpiece of light opera, The Mikado.
What is impressive about this film is that Mike Leigh examines the intricacies and mechanisms of art production (and, in a way, filmmaking) by using secondary genre artists. This is brilliant, because to examine art and its meanings through a first-rate artist never works well. First-rate artists (Mozart, Beethoven) are about genius, and the processes of genius are always mysterious and hard to translate or realize cinematically. It is the second-rate artist who is better fitted for any serious, cinematic investigation of the systems of art, because it is not the final product of the artist that is important (as would be the case with a work of genius), but the labor, the lives, the struggle, the procedures, the motion (hence the cinema) of making a work of art.
I brought this idea up to Mike Leigh when I interviewed him in the luxurious lobby of a downtown hotel. To my surprise, Leigh is a small, sweet, middle-aged man — I expected someone who was more commanding, meatier, and serious in tone. He put his hands on his chin and said in a brooding manner: “If we define them as secondary artists, which I agree they are — I mean, Gilbert is one of the great lyricists in the English language, no question, and an inventor of some very comic stuff, but they’re nevertheless secondary artists — the bottom line is that a first-rank artist is an artist who deals with getting to the essence of a reality, which Gilbert and Sullivan certainly don’t. It’s not that they are lesser artists, and therefore the story is more tellable, but what they produced was popular and accessible, and therefore easily digestible. This makes it, in a sense, an attractive film to make. I like Gilbert and Sullivan; I don’t think I could have made the film if I hated them. That would have been unbearable.”
The Stranger: Why do a period piece?
Mike Leigh: A number of things drove me to do it. One of which was seeing [unrealistic] period films, which irritate me because you don’t believe in them, because people don’t… don’t… fart. You know? How can you believe in such a film? And often in any so-called Victorian film, they are not even wearing corsets. I wanted to do what I normally do, except now applied to that world. I wanted to jump into a time machine and pop up and be there. That’s what filmmaking is about.
I was born in the early 1940s, in a world where the 19th century hung in the recent past, hung in the air. Culturally, I grew up in a great Victorian city, Manchester, which is full of Victorian architecture. I went to a Victorian school. I was taught by old people who were brought up in Victorian times. We read Victorian literature and listened to Victorian hymns. I lived in a Victorian house, and we had Gilbert and Sullivan.
I also did it because I wanted to do a film, as you’ve obviously already identified, about us: artists, popular artists. And I was attracted by the notion of doing it on a chocolate-box subject like Gilbert and Sullivan, then subverting it by taking it seriously.
Did you do anything differently when making this film? Did you work from a script?
We did what we always do, which is to start with no script, do a lot of character stuff, and above all, do a huge amount of research. We always do a lot of research in whatever we are doing. I mean David Thewlis [Naked] actually read all of those books he mentioned; Marianne Jean-Baptiste [Secrets and Lies] learned how to be an optometrist, etc. But here [in Topsy-Turvy], we just had a huge research operation on the go, and everybody got into their character. You name it, we researched it, so that we could bring this world to life. And it was great. It’s very interesting to go to another planet and find out what it is like.
What was it about Gilbert and Sullivan that drew you in?
I find Sullivan and Gilbert fascinating as characters because they are contradictory within themselves. I mean, Sullivan is sunny, a bon vivant, but he is a man who wants to be profound and serious. He would have been horrified to know that just under a hundred years after his death people would sit in a hotel room in Seattle and discuss him as a secondary artist. Here is this guy whose real, natural, unquestionable ability was to create this very accessible and attractive popular music. Then there is this other guy, Gilbert, who is very happy to be humorous, but inside he’s rather tortured and dour. I sort of identify with aspects of both of them, frankly, as an artist.
This is a long film in a season of long films. Were you worried about the length of yours?
I’m not at all nervous about the length of the film. I’m also pleased that other films which are even longer than mine are coming out. No, I’m not nervous about the length. I’m the first to take a hatchet to a thing if it is too long, and I really don’t think this film is too long. I think it is a respectable length for anyone to devote time to. I had to make a two-hour version for airplanes because of some contractual agreement that was drawn up, and of course this was very depressing. To make it nearly 40 minutes shorter, you have to just hold on to the narrative structure, and the stuff that is cut is the stuff that gives the film its texture. It’s just awful. Truly awful. The fact is, there is nothing to cut.
There are people out there who said, “Well, you could lose some of those musical numbers.” In other biopics you see the artists struggling and you don’t know what they are creating, so I said, “Okay, whoever sees this film need not know anything about Gilbert and Sullivan, but they will go away with a pretty strong sense of what it is all about.”
Of course, then there is a breed of persons called distributors and exhibitors, who are merely concerned with these things because of the number of times they can show it in a day. And there are certain types of audience participators who — because of the nature of late-20th century culture — have short attention spans. But I’m sorry. As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t spend 239 minutes sitting in there and enjoying this, then there is something wrong with your life.
