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Mike Figgis (1948)
Michael Figgis
Summary
Michael "Mike" Figgis is an English film director, writer, and composer.
Biography
personal life
Figgis was born in Carlisle, England and grew up in Africa. Figgis for several years had a relationship with the actress Saffron Burrows and cast her in several films. He is cousin to Irish filmmakers Jonathan Figgis and Jason Figgis who run the award-winning film production company October Eleven Pictures in Ireland. His sons Arlen Figgis and Louis Figgis have also followed their father in to the film industry, as editor and producer respectively.career
Figgis's early interest was in music and he played keyboards for Bryan Ferry's first band. In 1983 he directed a theatre play, produced in Theatre Gerard-Philipe (Saint-Denis, Paris, France). This play performed with great success at Festival de Grenada and in Theater der Welt .After working in theatre he made his feature film debut with the low budget Stormy Monday in 1988. The film earned him attention as a director who could get interesting performances from established Hollywood actors. He initially made a splash in America in the 1990s with the gritty thriller Internal Affairs that helped to revive the career of Richard Gere. His next Hollywood feature Mr. Jones was misunderstood by the studio who attempted to market the downbeat story as a feelgood movie resulting in a box office flop. Figgis poured his disenchantment with the film industry into Leaving Las Vegas, creating star turns for Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue which earned Figgis Academy Award nominations for Best Directing and Best Screenplay. His most ambitious film to date is the low budget film The Loss of Sexual Innocence, a loosely based autobiographical movie of the director himself.
Forays into digital video technology led him to conceive of and direct Timecode, which took advantage of the technology to create an ensemble film shot simultaneously with four cameras all in one take and also presented simultaneously and uncut, dividing the screen into four quarters. Since then, his work output has almost exclusively been on the cutting edge of creative digital filmmaking, with the exception of star-laden Cold Creek Manor. He returned to the Timecode quad-screen approach for his section of Ten Minutes Older, but has also worked on documentary pieces including a segment of The Blues and a short piece on flamenco. His curiosity with the cinematic use of time has led him to cite Robert Enrico's 1962 film version of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge as an influential film for him. Figgis has a well-documented love-hate relationship with the Hollywood system which leads him to often be an outspoken critic of the system while also despairing the lack of a better alternative, in his mind, at the moment. At an appearance at Camerimage in 2005, he expressed the view that filmmaking had become "boring and perhaps need to become even worse before anything better can emerge" successfully at least in reaction.
He was the founding patron of the independent filmmakers online community Shooting People. At one of their events in 2005 he said that filmmaking with a small digital camera made the experience more like painting or novel writing than the movie industry. His fascination with camera technology has also led him to create a camera stabilization rig for smaller video cameras, called the Fig Rig which places the camera on a platform held within a steering wheel-like system and has since been released by Manfrotto Group.
In 2007, Figgis shot his newest feature Love Live Long set between Istanbul and Bratislava on the infamous Gumball 3000 Rally, starring Sophie Winkleman and Daniel Lapaine.
Since 2008 Mike Figgis is professor of film studies at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he conducts intensive summer seminars.
In 2008, Figgis was called upon by Transport for London to help shoot a PIF entitled A Little Thought From Each of Us, A Big Difference For Everyone, encouraging more considerate behaviour on London's public transport systems, which was then shown in London cinemas. The ad comprised the screen split into four sections, each section showing one of four scenarios all on the same double-decker bus. At the end of the ad, the friction-creating scenarios were resolved and the ad ended on "A little thought from each of us. A big difference for everyone."
To promote a new camera phone, Sony Ericsson commissioned Mike Figgis to create Life Captured - a short film made out of mobile phone snapshots taken by fourteen people from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, who were selected to submit a series of photos after winning the global Life captured competition.
Movie
- Directing
Love Live Long
Director
2008Cold Creek Manor
Director
2003The Blues
Director
2003Ten minutes older
Director
2002Hotel
Director
2001Time Code
Director
2000Timecode
Director
2000The Loss of Sexual Innocence
Director
1999Miss Julie
Director
1999One Night Stand
Director
1997Leaving Las Vegas
Director
1995The Browning Version
Director
1994Mr. Jones
Director
1993Liebestraum
Director
1991Women & Men 2
Director
1991Internal Affairs
Director
1990Stormy Monday
Director
1988- Writing
Time Code
Writer
2000The Loss of Sexual Innocence
Writer
1999Women & Men 2
Writer
1991Ten minutes older
Screenplay
2002Timecode
Screenplay
2000One Night Stand
Screenplay
1997Leaving Las Vegas
Screenplay
1995Stormy Monday
Screenplay
1988- Production
Cold Creek Manor
Producer
2003Time Code
Producer
2000The Loss of Sexual Innocence
Producer
1999One Night Stand
Producer
1997Foxfire
Producer
1996Foxfire
Executive producer
1996- Camera
Ten minutes older
Cinematographer
2002- Sound/Music
Stormy Monday
Sound designer
1988Cold Creek Manor
Composer
2003The Loss of Sexual Innocence
Composer
1999One Night Stand
Composer
1997Leaving Las Vegas
Composer
1995Internal Affairs
Composer
1990
TV show
- Directing
The Sopranos
Director
1999- Pre-production
Canterbury's Law
Executive producer
2008
TV show season
- Directing
The Sopranos (season 6)
Director
2006The Sopranos (season 5)
Director
2005The Sopranos (season 4)
Director
2005The Sopranos (season 3)
Director
2001The Sopranos (season 2)
Director
2000The Sopranos (season 1)
Director
1999- Pre-production
Canterbury's Law (season 1)
Executive producer
2008
Videos
User reviews
Sources
Whole or part of the information contained in this card come from the Wikipedia article "Фиггис, Майк", licensed under CC-BY-SA full list of contributors here.