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On Movies: In "Mr. Turner," Star and director again use immersion tactics

The great British artist J.M.W. Turner's Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead is as huge as its title, a massive swirl of blues, grays, and browns, full of light and mist and the tug of waves. The 1842 masterpiece hangs, along with many other Turners, in the Tate Gallery in London.

Timothy Spall, as British artist J.M.W. Turner, learned to handle brushes and oils for the role - and even painted a full-scale copy of a maritime tableau.
Timothy Spall, as British artist J.M.W. Turner, learned to handle brushes and oils for the role - and even painted a full-scale copy of a maritime tableau.Read more

The great British artist J.M.W. Turner's Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead is as huge as its title, a massive swirl of blues, grays, and browns, full of light and mist and the tug of waves. The 1842 masterpiece hangs, along with many other Turners, in the Tate Gallery in London.

Well, it hangs in the Tate, and it hangs in Timothy Spall's London home, as well. As the culmination of three years of tutelage with brushes and oils, training for the title role in Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner - a gem of a biopic that just opened at the Ritz Five - the veteran actor made a full-scale copy of the ahead-of-its-time maritime tableau.

"I look at it in the morning, and I think, 'How the hell did I do that?' " Spall says with a chuckle. "I was so immersed in it."

Immersion, of course, is what Mike Leigh movies are all about. The English filmmaker is legendary for the rigorous rehearsals and workshops he puts his troupes through - spending months, if not years, researching or creating backstories, exploring motivations and character-specific skills.

For Spall, perhaps best known for his roles as Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter series and Winston Churchill in the The King's Speech, learning the ins and outs of Turner's history, his family background, his love life, even the way he handled his brushes ("he never held his brush any way other than half way down, like it was an extension of his arm - I called him Turner Scissorhands") became an obsessive pursuit.

"He was a contradiction," says the actor, in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, when Mr. Turner had its North American premiere. Already, Spall had won top honors in May at the Cannes Film Festival for his role.

"Turner was this artistic genius whose physical attributes, whose demeanor, were at odds with the image of 'the Artist.' . . . But if anybody was born to record the sublime - and not sublime like a nice piece of cheesecake, but sublime being the visceral, the emotional . . . attempting to capture the horrendous destruction of nature in a painting - if anybody's soul was built to do that, it was Turner's."

Director Leigh has long had it in his mind to tell Turner's story, focusing on the last quarter of the artist's life, from 1825 to his death at age 76 in 1851. Here was a prodigious talent of humble background whose early proficiency in portraiture and landscape exploded into something daring and new in the latter part of his career, anticipating Impressionism and even veering toward abstract art, and doing so in the haughty thick of the Victorian age. (Queen Victoria detested Turner's work, and Leigh says that, to this day, there is not a single Turner in the royal family's collection.)

"He was uncompromising, extraordinarily prolific, and revolutionary in his approach," the director has said.

Leigh calls Spall, with whom he has worked on five films, "the consummate character actor." Spall likens Leigh to a "maestro in an orchestra, or a scientist with his chemistry set," mixing the key elements into a harmonious, catalytic whole.

"He's always refining, fine-tuning, finessing," Spall says of Leigh. "He's a master dramatist."

Yes, it's a lovefest, but the work they and a company of Leigh regulars have created - Life Is Sweet (1991), Secrets & Lies (1996), Topsy-Turvy (1999), All Or Nothing (2002) and now Mr. Turner - speaks to the success of their relationship. Leigh says he didn't consider anyone but Spall for the part of Turner. In addition to Leigh's confidence in Spall's thespian chops, the actor and Turner are both Londoners, both from working-class backgrounds. Turner's father was a barber (played by Paul Jesson in the film); Spall's mother was a hairdresser.

One aspect of Spall's portrayal that's impossible to ignore: the periodic eruptions of grunts and guttural sounds coming from Turner as he walks about town, or talks to his peers at the Royal Academy of Arts, or goes off to a seaside resort where he befriends an innkeeper (Sophia Booth, Leigh's real-life partner).

Spall contends that he was unaware he was making the noises until crew members started imitating him, gently mocking him, between takes.

"I didn't realize I was doing it at the time, until everybody commented on it," he says. "It was the way [Turner] deals with his emotions. He was a man who kept it all inside. . . . He imploded it into a grunt. . . .

"But no, it was a totally organic thing that grew out of the character when we first started in rehearsals. . . . There's always a point in a Mike Leigh film where the character starts to dictate to you."

Mr. Turner marks just the third time in Leigh's career of 40-plus years that he has strayed from stories set in contemporary times. But his approach remains the same, rooted in realism, devoid of phony drama.

"The whole idea of doing this film was to make the story truthful and like life, but of course that isn't to say that there are not epic heightened moments. There are in this film, and there are in all my films. But the extraordinary has to grow out of the status quo. And the problem with a lot of films is that there's no status quo, therefore it all seems fake. . . .

"You're inviting people in by saying look at this, be a fly on the wall. . . . The conceit with a period film like this . . . is to make the texture and the feeling as real as contemporary life. Like you got into a time machine and you got out and this is what was happening."

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