Film

Mike Leigh’s J M W Turner film (2012)

Director: Mike Leigh

Synopsis

He’s not going to shoot the film until 2013, but in 2012 Britain’s Mike Leigh will finally get round to working on a long-cherished biopic of J M W Turner, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British painter. Leigh is known for his contemporary tragi-comedies – and plain tragedies – but he’s delved into the past lives of artists before with ‘Topsy-Turvy’, his film about Gilbert and Sullivan. He hopes to secure a relatively big budget to do this – as Leigh said recently, if he’s to do the man, life and te period justice, he needs to give this story some scale. As usual Leigh will work with his actors for months before shooting to devise the film, but casting is likely to remain under wraps for a while. Leigh often returns to work with actors he’s collaborated with before. Maybe Eddie Marsan (‘Vera Drake’, ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’) is in with a shot at the lead?

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