Becoming Turner not an easy undertaking
Fear was what drove actor Timothy Spall to reach for perfection in bringing British painter J M W Turner to life, he tells James Croot.
‘‘THERE’S nothing like the knowledge of being hanged in the morning to concentrate the mind.’’
An upbeat and avuncular Timothy Spall cheerily admits that phrase was constantly in his head as he sought to make his version of British painter JM W Turner as accurate as possible.
From the delight and trepidation of first being approached about the role by director and old friend Mike Leigh seven years ago, to completing a full scale version of Turner’s Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, the 57-year-old actor was constantly dogged by a fear that he would fail to pull it off. He needn’t have worried. His performance in Mr Turner was the toast of Cannes, with an emotional Spall picking up a gong for best actor.
But it is easy to see why even the 35-year acting veteran, who has played everyone from Wolverhampton electricians to Winston Churchill, had trepidations. While Turner was an extraordinarily prolific, single-minded and uncompromising artist, he was also an anarchic, erratic and uncouth individual who mistreated many.
‘‘I didn’t know a great deal about him going in,’’ admits Spall down the phone from Britain. ‘‘But I knew enough to know that he was a fascinating prospect and it was going to be more than just a walk in the park to do it.’’
Extensive research revealed a mass of contradictions, not only in the perception of Turner, but also within his own character.
‘‘There were so many conflicting opinions as to what he was like. What was liberating for me was stopping thinking that this was an impediment to cracking his character and in fact that it was an essential part of his make up that he was both kind on one level and a downright arsehole in some cases. He could be miserable and quite convivial.
‘‘Some people said he was mean, others said he was incredibly generous, so we tried to pack as much of that into the character.’’
Spall believes this contrary nature probably grew out of Turner’s difficult childhood, with his ‘‘violently insane’’ mother committed to the infamous Bethlem Hospital (better known as Bedlam).
‘‘She was a huge influence for good and bad and his father became massively over-compensatory, which is a relationship we try to investigate in the film.’’
But rather than try to explain Turner, Spall says Leigh’s film prefers to show you what he was like, all the ‘‘physicality, earthiness, animalistic qualities, coupled with this amazingly poetic soul and scintillating hands-on practical intellect’’.
Of course as part of that, Leigh had asked his leading man to spend two years learning how to paint like Turner.
‘‘The thing is, when you’re working with Mike Leigh, whatever the character is, whether he’s an opera singer or a cab driver or photographer, you go off and you learn as much as you possibly can about that trade so it doesn’t look like your putting it on like a jacket that doesn’t fit,’’ says Spall who has now worked with the 71-year-old writer-director five times.
‘‘Admittedly, knowing the cab fare from Greenwich to Paddington is a bit different to portraying one of the leading lights of the romantic and the sublime art movement,’’ he quickly adds.
While Spall could doodle a bit and had enjoyed art at school, outside assistance was definitely required.
‘‘They found a brilliant guy called Tim Wright who is a very talented portrait painter and teacher and he basically gave me a foundation course in all the disciplines, from charcoal to oil, watercolour and ink. We did still lifes and went out and sketched. It all led up eventually to experimenting and looking at how Turner might have done things and then I ended up painting a full scale version of one of his masterpieces.
‘‘That was a good exercise. It showed me that Turner was a genius and I’m not,’’ he says, laughing.
Mr Turner (M) is now screening.