Mike Leigh interview: ‘A guy in the Guardian wants to sue me for defamation of Ruskin!’

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[/audioplayer]Mike Leigh is in a cheerfully bullish mood when I meet him at the Soho Hotel. ‘Have you read today’s Guardian?’ Dammit — I should have seen that coming. ‘A guy in G2 would like to sue me for defamation of Ruskin!’ He seems almost pleased. His characterisation of the great critic as silly and effete in his new film, Mr Turner, does seem a little ungenerous. Ruskin did more for Turner than anyone. ‘That’s true,’ says Leigh. ‘Working with the brilliant young actor Joshua McGuire, I started to think how Ruskin was incredibly spoiled and cosseted by his parents… He was a prig!’ He emphasises the ‘g’ in ‘prig’ for the avoidance of doubt. ‘Turner undoubtedly had reservations about him and took the rise out of him. But the idea that the characterisation is a gratuitous pratfall is nonsense, really. There are guys like that.’ He looks at me askance. ‘You probably know them.’

At 71, Leigh is arguably our greatest living filmmaker, with his own subtle idiom and cross-genre work from the comedy of Abigail’s Party (filmed 1977) to the heartbreak of Secrets & Lies (1996) to the comic opera of Topsy-Turvy (1999). It’s not entirely crass to call Mike Leigh the British Woody Allen (or Woody Allen the American Mike Leigh) for their shared belief in improvisation, the comedy and sadness in their films and their having won every type of golden statuette going. But in their late style they diverge. While Allen is becoming dangerously trite, Leigh has moved into a rich new key with Mr Turner, a biopic of the painter that offers a cinematic box of delights while retaining Leigh’s trademark realism.

And yet, making Mr Turner without his long-term producer Simon Channing Williams, who died in 2009, he was unable to raise the funds to shoot two key scenes: the burning of the Houses of Parliament, which Turner witnessed and painted, and Turner in Venice.