Sony Pictures Classics has snapped up all North American, Latin American and Eastern European rights to Brit auteur Mike Leigh’s upcoming film, currently referred to as “Untitled Mike Leigh 13.”
Leigh (“Another Year,” “Happy-Go-Lucky,” “Vera Drake”), who is a seven-time Oscar nominee, has been planning the project for over a decade. This passion project is by far his most ambitious film to date, a portrait of England’s hallowed painter J.W.W. Turner. (Leigh expressed his hopes to make the film back at the 2008 Telluride Film Festival, saying at the time that no one would fund the film.)
Leigh also went period for his 1999 biopic, a delicious portrait of two artists at work, “Topsy-Turvy,” starring Jim Broadbent and Allan Corduner as Gilbert and Sullivan, respectively.
The director is reteaming with many cast and crew from his previous films, including Timothy Spall (“Secrets & Lies,” “Topsy-Turvy”), who will play the lead, director of photography Dick Pope (“Another Year,” among other Leigh titles) and makeup artist Christine Blundell (who won the Oscar for “Topsy-Turvy”).
The National Gallery, the Tate Britain and Royal Academy are granting special access to some of Turner’s paintings for the film.
Leigh states of his interest in the artist:
“I want to explore the man, his working life, his
relationships and how he lived. But what
fascinates me most is the drama that lies in the tension between this driven
eccentric and the epic, timeless world he evoked in his masterpieces. I also see rich tragic-comic potential in his
often turbulent relationship with the English Art Establishment, especially in
his later years, when his increasingly radical work was misunderstood and
derided.”
The film is set to begin production this spring, with SPC eyeing a 2014 release.
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