Mike Figgis: 'It costs stars money to be in my films'

Mike Figgis thinks that Hollywood celebrities are encouraged to behave like 'pigs'. And enjoys denying them 'fringe benefits' when they work for him. Fiona Morrow meets a director who's convinced that small is beautiful

As I walk into the Red Mullet offices, a blast of WD40 stops me in my tracks. I should have expected it: Red Mullet is Mike Figgis's production company, a shining example of the DIY film industry made possible by digitisation. There are boxes of bits and pieces sprouting wires and leads everywhere and, in an adjoining room, a complete sound mixing studio, where Figgis merges his love of music with the films he makes.

One of cinema's determined non-conformists, Figgis brings with him all the perverse, defiant characteristics that come with that particular territory. He moved from a rock band (Gas Board) to pop promos to movies, then bought a return ticket to Hollywood (which included a stopover at the Oscars for Leaving Las Vegas) before unpicking his skills at the seams and starting all over again.

It is a career that frustrates pigeonholing: Figgis has dabbled in everything from noir (Stormy Monday) to period melodrama (The Browning Version) via the impressively edgy Internal Affairs and One Night Stand. He hit a brick wall of non-risk-taking studio investors with Mr Jones, and promptly turned up with Leaving Las Vegas under his arm, the film Hollywood loved but would never have funded.

Now Figgis prides himself on the dissolution of conventional film-making in favour of ever-more ambitious experiments (The Loss Of Sexual Innocence, Timecode). He has won as many critics as admirers along the way; his results have been anything but consistent.

With his trademark Bride of Frankenstein curls and untidy goatee, the director can appear a touch stern, but shows his true colours when he smiles – a little grin takes over his face, transforming his features into those of a naughty schoolboy. He's dressed up for the photo ("I even had a bath," he jokes), but still sports more a collection of ideas than a single style. As he talks, I notice his hands; the square, chubby fingers are so white as to be almost translucent – only their many freckles give them substance.

His new film, Hotel, takes the multi-stranded storytelling device of his earlier Timecode and runs with it (see Anthony Quinn's review). Where Timecode unfolded in real time across a quadranted screen, Hotel's structure is yet more riddled with new camera and sound developments, its plot allowed to splay and rupture every which way.

Not everyone is going to be impressed: narrative freefall is an acquired taste even without a panoply of visual trickery. But those who recognise the ambition behind the project and respond to Figgis's willingness and desire to simply try things out may find themselves surprisingly caught up in its myriad notes.

"After Timecode," he says, "I wanted to take things much further, in a way go more low budget." Coming up with a story was no problem at all. "There are two approaches to writing a script – your conventional, three-act structure based on one of the three immortal stories that apparently exist. And the other one – much more interesting psychologically – which is just to start writing. You look at what you have and find one story, and then you may spot another one that has some kind of resonance. Then it's about how you create interesting connective tissue. Rather than the idea that plot explains things, I prefer the idea that film illuminates events in a certain way.

"It's the process of making meaning out of apparently random connections," he continues. "It's a very Jungian approach and I think the correct one, because it's how I see life."

Initially, the idea was to make another film with the screen dissected into four quadrants: "I thought a nice, tidy mathematical concept would be 10 10-minute quadrants, each cut representing a shift in time or space, as in a conventional narrative, but still making use of what was interesting about the real-time technique – parallel narrative, et cetera."

The script was drawn out on music paper, using different-coloured ink to make it clear what was going on in each corner of the screen at any given time; it proved too unusual for some of the cast.

"We lost a few actors on the first day," he admits, no resentment in his voice. "Everybody else was either pleasantly nervous or genuinely energised."

Once shooting started, Figgis quickly discovered he had tied himself into an unworkable device: "Not being present in three out of the four segments and knowing, when I watched them, that had I been there, I would have done things differently became very frustrating.

"By the end of the first week I decided that the concept was limiting us, it was almost like a Dogme principle and it was already annoying me."

So he decided to throw away his carefully charted real-time structure and began shooting in a much freer way, leaving the screen format open until he reached the editing room.

"I stood up and said – it was mad – 'Call me old fashioned, but as the director I'd like to be present in every scene.' I could hear myself droning on and I had to remind myself that it's OK for the director to take control."

He says he thinks that the cast was relieved: "Your job as the director is to convey the idea that you are in possession of some kind of overview – you can't just be one of the lunatics.'

He is obviously very persuasive – John Malkovich, David Schwimmer, Burt Reynolds, Salma Hayek and Lucy Lui all happily took time out from their more lucrative careers to make the film. "One doesn't have to reassure them economically – it cost them money to be in the film," Figgis smiles. "It's nice to be able to be honest and say, 'OK, I can offer you an experience in a strong ensemble in a very intense period of work. There are no fringe benefits: no trailer, no wardrobe, no transport, no assistants. Your hotel room will be exactly the same as everybody else's, even those people you've never heard of.' Once that's out of the way, everyone feels better and slightly cleaner."

Figgis is delighted with this levelling approach: "I felt a great sense of achievement that there was a spectacular absence of resentment," he beams. "On every other film I've ever worked on, someone got upset and I ended up having to do my impression of a bad therapist." He rolls his eyes, then adds with a grin: "Usually you're like Steve Buscemi's character in Living In Oblivion – that movie really nailed the role of the director, I think."

Which is? "You have to be whatever you need personally to be to get your rocks off," he answers, matter-of-factly.

It's the morning after the Oscars and Figgis is still surprised that he stayed up all night watching. "It's really creepy, the Oscars," he says, with a discernible shudder. "That crap that's talked about as 'entertainment' and 'showbusiness', all that producer-speak, I just don't buy it. And then all the manipulation of magazine covers, the way publicists behave badly and encourage their clients to behave like pigs – I couldn't wait to get far away from it, it has so little to do with why you want to make a film. You shouldn't be making a film in order to win a bloody award."

It may sound like it, but he hasn't completely cut his ties with the mainstream. There are a couple of films out there which may or may not come off, one with Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly: "I know that now I would only take work on my own terms," he insists. "If they don't happen, I'll just go off and make another small film."

Figgis is clearly a man who likes to surprise others with his choices, who relishes not being obvious and who fancies himself subversive. He loves the fact that technology is forcing power from Hollywood: "It's a genuine revolution – a genuine economic, capitalistic-based revolution – and they are suddenly a redundant, lumbering machine."

Figgis says he'll never stop pushing the boundaries. "You have to have confidence in your ability to fail, because it's honest. You honestly tried and honestly failed. It's very difficult to make films, and you can be halfway through and realise it's a stinker and there's not a lot you can do about it – you can't jump off a sinking ship."

I ask him if there are any such stinkers in his closet, and he takes his time rolling the idea around his head for a minute before answering, very seriously: "No, not in my own head. You can look back and think you would do some differently now, but in each of those films there are 10 minutes that I'm terribly proud of."

He stares down at his hands for a moment, then looks up with a frown:

"There's no such thing as a perfect film."