Filmaker Leigh has it down to a fine art

Mike Leigh tells Alan O’Riordan about finally getting his film on JMW Turner to the big screen

MIKE Leigh’s magnificent, gorgeous and engrossing new film, Mr Turner, has been a long time coming. At the end of the last century, Leigh made his first foray into Victorian times with Topsy-Turvy, a film about the theatrical duo Gilbert and Sullivan. Around the same time, he says, it occurred to him that the era’s greatest painter, JMW Turner, might make an interesting subject.

And, 15 years later, so it has proved. “I started with a vague notion,” Leigh says, “and once I began looking into the character of Turner, I became struck by the tension between the character of this eccentric, complex guy and his remarkable, sublime work.”