Naked (1993)

[DB7]

'I got dangerously close to Johnny'



One day in 1992, David Thewlis and Ewan Bremner had a fight in a London street. "I had a sharpened screwdriver in my bag," Thewlis recalls. "And I was going to pull it out and use it if he kept coming. And he kept coming."



Someone called the police. "Ewan had thrown a beer can at a Mercedes. We were very loud and out of order." Then an unlikely peacemaker arrived on the scene. "Everybody could see this little bearded fellow cross the street and whisper something that stopped us tearing lumps out of each other."



That bearded fellow was Mike Leigh. "Mike said: 'Come out of character,' and we did." Thewlis and Bremner had been improvising in character - Thewlis as the randy Mancunian motormouth and conspiracy theorist Johnny, Bremner as the deranged, bawling Scottish runaway Archie. They were doing a preparatory improvisation for Naked, Leigh's 1993 film, which is now finally getting a DVD release.



"Mike told me to hang round the church steps and then an actor - he didn't say who - would turn up," recalls Thewlis down the line from LA. "When Ewan came along, I didn't recognise him - it was before he was in Trainspotting. He was speaking in this impenetrable Scottish accent. He might have been an actor, but he might have just been an annoying Scotsman. I just followed the motivation of the character." Even if it involved stabbing someone with a sharpened screwdriver? "Yeah. Most of you is really engrossed in what the character would do. " How did you get the screwdriver? "I'd stolen it in character as Johnny."



Mike Leigh, sitting in his panelled office in Soho, remembers the fight differently. "I was standing across the street. Ewan was wandering around shouting, 'Maggie! Maggie!' because Archie was looking for his friend. Somebody leaned out of a window and told him to quiet down and he, in character, told them to fuck off.



"When the police arrived, I went over and said: 'I'm a director and we're making a film.' The officer asked where the camera was. I said we were improvising, and he wasn't convinced. So we had to take him back to our office and get others to corroborate the story." You stopped the improvisation? "I always do if there's a chance of violence - or if two characters are going to fuck."



These, and other improvisatory travails typical of Leigh's meticulous methods, paid dividends. Naked was a breakthrough film for both Leigh and Thewlis. It won best director and best actor awards at Cannes in 1993. "I thought that was another world, not for the likes of me," Leigh says. But Naked's triumph was just Leigh's appetiser: in 1996, Secrets and Lies won the Palme d'Or, the following year he served on the festival jury, and his films are now competition regulars.



Naked also turned Thewlis - who was, with all due respect, a nobody, even in Britain - into an internationally marketable star. "The lifestyle I have now, and the opportunities I have had, are all down to Mike getting me on board in Naked," he says. "After Cannes, my agent told me to get the next flight to LA. He was right. I had a part in Prime Suspect 3 by the end of the week."



These were unlikely consequences for a film that was, the critic Jonathan Romney contended, "immersed to the hilt in a traumatised conception of the real - the real London of homelessness, violence, sexual exploitation and despair". That quote wasn't on the posters. Romney wrote that the experience of watching Naked was like "being trapped for two hours in a railway carriage with a charismatic preacher who might possibly have an axe under his coat". Or a screwdriver in his bag.



That charismatic preacher was Thewlis's Johnny, a twentysomething motormouth on the run in London. We see him in the opening scene having sex with a woman in an alley - a scene some have taken to be a rape. Even if Johnny doesn't rape the woman, even if it is (as Thewlis puts it) merely "sex that gets out of hand", it's a queasy beginning.



Either way, Johnny treats the woman so roughly that she screams at him and calls on her husband to exact revenge. It's time for Johnny to get out of Manchester sharpish. "Her husband, Mike and I thought, was a nightclub bouncer, so Johnny has to clear out or get filled in," Thewlis says. Johnny heads down the M6, head filled with conspiracy theories and autodidact chippiness. He visits an old girlfriend who doesn't want to see him, and goes to bed with her flatmate (played by Katrin Cartlidge) instead, after seducing her with his typically suave Manc patter: "Have you ever thought, right, that you have had the best moment in our life and all we have got to look forward to is sickness and purgatory?"



Johnny gets chucked out, and is taken in by the night watchman of an empty office block. He is later kicked half to death by a flyposter and returns to his ex's flat. "You feel he deserves the kicking," wrote the Guardian's Derek Malcolm, "since he is, at his worst, a cold, desperate fish. His redeeming feature is that he still cares."



Leigh accepts that last point. "Johnny's an idealist, certainly not a cynic, which is how he's often portrayed."



The germ for Naked came when Leigh was at primary school in Manchester in the early 1950s. "We had a very enlightened teacher who endlessly reminded us that the next total eclipse would be in August 1999. Later I started thinking about the millennium and the end of the world. In 1992 the millennium was impending, so I brought that idea to the film." Leigh often nurtures ideas for decades before he realises them in film. "With Vera Drake, I had long wanted to do a film about backstreet abortions before the 1967 act. And for a long time before Secrets and Lies I wanted to do something about white mothers of black babies who gave their babies up for adoption, particularly. But with all of my films, the idea bears only a little relation to the finished film, which is always a character-driven drama.



"What always happens is that I'll get an actor to come along, and I'll say: 'I can't tell you what the film is going to be about, but we will collaborate on the creation of a character.' Some actors run a mile."



Leigh has now made 18 feature films and reckons to have created more than 500 characters this way. Thewlis had already worked with him on a short film, and had also played Jane Horrocks' insistent secret lover in Life Is Sweet, so he knew what he was letting himself in for.



"When we first met for Naked, Mike asked me to list men I'd known or met and to tell him everything about them," Thewlis says. "I told him about 150 different people. Mike asked of each one: 'Does he drive? When did his parents die? How does he prefer to have sex?' And then you narrow the list down. It's like a beauty contest, and by the end of it I was rooting for the guy we chose, because I knew that I could do something with that role. But I also remember thinking, 'Jesus, not him,' because there was a lot of darkness there, which I knew that for the next eight months would be my life."



Johnny emerged from months of improvisation. "What you end up is not the person on whom the improvisation was based. I knew that guy quite well, but even mutual friends would find it hard to identify him from what they see on screen.



"I got dangerously close to the character. I rather unfortunately got married a few months before [to the actor and director Sara Sugarman], which was a mistake. It wasn't a good idea to work on Naked in the first months of a marriage. I was living apart from my wife in a flat overflowing with books I was reading for the part. I read Kerouac, Bertrand Russell, the Bible, the Qur'an. I remember finding out there was this plan to subcutaneously insert bar codes into our skin and I made a note, thinking that would be a great thing for Johnny to talk about in the film."



Leigh says: "I'm often asked, 'What does Johnny do?' He's a reader. He's one of those kids teachers have turned away from because their intelligence is too unruly."



While Johnny read, Leigh watched. Leigh spent weeks observing Thewlis living alone in character as Johnny. "Short of masturbation, he'll watch you do anything. Later you improvise with other actors. Katrin and me, or Lesley [Sharp] and me, would go to the pub in character. Mike would sit a couple of tables away. All of this was essential to creating fully realised characters in a scripted film."



Naked was filmed in London during 1992. "We wrapped just before Christmas and I knew it was great," Thewlis says. Leigh was less positive: "When friends asked how it was going, I said, 'It could be a disaster,' and they would say, 'But you always say that.'"



For Thewlis, Naked proved both a big break and something of an albatross. "I think David's tragedy," says Leigh, "is that he hasn't found a role to match Johnny since." Maybe that doesn't matter too much. Leigh helped Thewlis not only to a Hollywood career, but to catalyse his creative mojo outside acting. "He said: 'You shouldn't direct, you should write,'" Thewlis says. "He was right about that." Thewlis grimly relates his directing experiences on the straight-to-video film Cheeky (2003) - "I wrote the film, but I really shouldn't have starred in it and directed it too" - but last year his first novel, The Late Hector Kipling, was published to enthusiastic reviews. "I thought it was terrific," says Leigh.



"Working with Mike gave me an understanding of how to create character and story which were invaluable for the book," Thewlis says. "I'm writing another now. I always wanted to write. Mike helped me to fulfil that ambition."



But Leigh also helped create a spectre who still haunts Thewlis. "Even now, people take me for Johnny. That's difficult. He's not someone you want to be mistaken for."

[josfab]

Saw this at the cinema with some friends and had planned a jolly night out, more or less went straight home to bed afterwards in shock. What a grim but great film. I don't think I'd seen anything with such gritty realism before it. Got me into Mike leigh so very important to me.

[Torquemada]

I tried to watch Naked again last night and had to give up after half an hour (again) because Thewlis' character was just too irritating and one dimensional. The character behave liked a fifteen year old boy who has just discovered sarcasm and was yet to expereince just how unpopular over-doing it can make someone. Can someone please tell me if his character improves or is he just as irritating throoughout.

[Rowdon]

There was a video of this in our house for ages, and I never watched it because the title on the spine was "Mike Leigh's Naked", and I thought that was a sentence.

[Robin Davies]

If you stick with it you'll meet The Landlord...

...who is an even nastier character!

[Torquemada]

Thanks Robin, but I'd say that's finally put the tin hat on it for me and this film forever.

[saruk]

Prett self-indulgent if you ask me , like a few of Leigh's films. Do not make for easy watching and the lead characters have annoying personality traits (Im thinking Life is Sweet)

[saruk]

Me too! Just think its oretty hard to watch , especially with all that whining....lol

I really love High Hopes (1988) too, one of my faves. Ruth Sheen-fantastic yet sadly underused since...

[Wheelieman]

It was the first film in which Katrin Carlidge came onto my radar. I thought she was excellent. Such a shame that she died so young.