Mr. Turner | movie | 2014 | Official Featurette
Eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner lives his last 25 years with gusto and secretly becomes involved with a seaside | dG1feXAyQUtLN3Zxb3c
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC]
00:10 My little lagger drawer, I thought he could read and write.
00:16 [MUSIC]
00:18 Guys, they're all, I don't know.
00:20 You're still making your nice little pictures, Mr. Turner.
00:23 [LAUGH]
00:24 [MUSIC]
00:27 Whenever a person was born with a pencil or a piece of chalk in his hand,
00:31 it was Turner, because he was painting from almost, since he could hold anything,
00:35 he was drawing things.
00:36 And he worked and worked and worked and worked until he became so good,
00:40 he's never been bettered.
00:42 He turned up a massive amount of work, and his life was long and complicated.
00:47 So it took a long time to get your head around it, really.
00:49 You know, I'd like to vary from film to film to film.
00:53 One year is as different from Happy Go Lucky as another year is from this.
00:58 It is a departure for his films in recent years, but of course,
01:02 he did make Topsy Turvy, which I was involved in as well,
01:05 which dealt with Gilbert and Sullivan and that Victorian London theatrical life.
01:10 But it is a kind of hybrid form of working, because you sort of do the same process,
01:16 if you like, of creating the character, but it has to fit in with historically,
01:20 what that character actually was.
01:22 The people in it were historical figures, so the research was slightly different,
01:27 that you were researching an actual person that lived and died in the Georgian period.
01:33 What we were doing here was trying to create a character based on real people again,
01:38 and bring him towards the character that we knew,
01:40 and we were discovering as we researched Turner in depth.
01:44 What he was like as a human being, many people had different many views of him.
01:49 Some said he was mean, some said he was generous, some said he was funny,
01:52 some said he was miserable, some said he was cruel, some said he was kind.
01:56 Well, it was brilliant. I had worked with Tim in Topsy Turvy,
01:59 but never had any close scenes, and I knew that this would happen.
02:04 I was just so excited about working with him, because he is kind of a master of improvisation.
02:09 Mike had talked to him ages and ages ago, and he has always had Tim in mind to play this part.
02:14 Before we actually raised the money, we talked to Tim and said we would like him to do it.
02:18 And so he has been with us all the way through the process.
02:20 He is a great character actor, he is a Londoner, he knows working class characters, which Turner is.
02:25 Also, he has read a lot of Dickens and things, he is good at 19th century.
02:29 So, anyway, he is the obvious man for the job, and he has delivered the goods, as far as I am concerned.
02:34 Mike Lee set me the task of learning how to paint, which I did for two years with a very brilliant guy.
02:40 And he gave me a foundation course, a fine art foundation course,
02:44 and then we started to work towards how we thought Turner painted.
02:48 You read, you research, you get it into your bloodstream, and then you do the business.
02:52 I mean, you can read a million books, but that doesn't make it happen in front of the camera.
02:55 You have got to bring it to life.
02:57 The universe is chaotic, and you make us see it.
03:05 You are a man of great vision, Mr. Turner.
03:08 [Music]
03:16 [Music]
03:17 [Music]
03:19 [Music]
03:21 [Music]
03:23 [Music]
03:24 [Music]
03:25 [Music]
03:26 [Music]
03:27 [Music]
03:28 [Music]