Mike Figgis at Boilerhouse Voices: Hollywood madness & beyond

Film-maker Mike Figgis spoke to an audience of Boilerhouse guests at the latest ‘Boilerhouse Voices’ event in Birmingham on 12 March. The twice-Oscar-nominated director of Leaving Las Vegas, Internal Affairs and the experimental Timecode, spoke among other things about the madness of the Hollywood studio system, predicting that some spectacular, banking-industry style, frauds and catastrophes undoubtedly lie ahead.  The ‘peculiarities’ of film distribution had meant that Leaving Las Vegas, a film made from his own resources and those of its leading actor Nicholas Cage, had never returned either of them any money, despite making in excess of $120m at the box office. 

The advent of digital film-making, he said, with its ultra low shooting and editing costs is freeing film-makers from dependence on studio funding and as for distribution, he recommended that film-makers should ‘get a bit creative, organising screenings a bit like raves, and using the web to get an audience there’.