3. Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway CBE is Britain's premiere art house film director. His films are known for their baroque themes and styles. There is usually abundant nudity in his films as well as striking sets and costumes. Greenaway is not scared to tackle taboo material. His best known film - The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover - is simultaneously beautiful and repulsive. It has gorgeous cinematography and sets but it mixes this with forced excrement eating, the torture of a young boy and cannibalism ("Cook Michael For Me"). His film The Baby of Mâcon depicts a young woman being raped to death by over 200 men. It is a heavily stylised film - based on the theatre, and again features unusual sets and feels more like a play than a film. Greenaway's films are often highly experimental - such as Drowning by Numbers, which shows three different women called Cissie each drowning their husbands. The film is very focused on structure and symmetry using repetitive plotlines, the appearance of numbers in chronological order and elaborate games with confounding rules. Greenaway's cinematic output is unlike any other director out there. His films are so heavily stylised and feature unique plots that they transcend much of what consists of British cinema. Greenaway's cinematic idol is Ingmar Bergman. He watched The Seventh Seal when he was 15 and decided there and then that he wanted to be a film maker. When criticised for continuity issues in The Baby of Mâcon, he replied "Who cares about continuity?". Some cineastes love him, some hate him, he draws sharply divided critical opinion. But Greenaway IS British art house cinema with his quirky, inimitable films that are very confrontational and controversial.
2. Mike Leigh
One of the most iconic British directors, Leigh and British cinema are virtually synonymous with each other. Noted for his gritty kitchen sink style, Leigh gives considerable room in his scripts for his actors to improvise, lending his films a strong degree of naturalism. He has worked with the cream of British acting talent. In the 1970s, Leigh was heavily involved in directing plays for television - including Nuts in May and Abigail's Party. His plays were funny but bleak dissections of middle class manners and social mores. Some of Leigh's more notable films are Naked, Vera Drake and Life is Sweet. Naked explores the underclass of London via the vehicle of cynical nihilist Johnny (David Thewlis) and his ranting, philosophising and the poor unfortunates he meets. It is a darker film than what one would usually associate with Leigh, but he pulls it off brilliantly and the film is a caustic classic. Vera Drake also deals with lower class issues. Vera is a loving and kind woman but she has a secret - Vera is a backstreet abortionist. This is obviously not joyful material, but Leigh handles the sensitive material deftly. We don't know the secrets people carry with them, and also, you cannot label people as 'wicked' for certain deeds. Morality is not black and white and Vera's imprisonment really adversely affects all of the people she helps day to day. Life is Sweet is my personal favourite Mike Leigh movie. It follows the fortunes of a working class family during a couple of weeks in the summer. They all love each other but find it hard to communicate this. Wendy the mother is an innuendo laden shop clerk. Her husband Andy is a chef who is in the middle of renovating an old chip shop van. Their twin daughters, who are in their twenties, are very different from each other. Natalie is a tomboy plumber and Nicola is a jobless, unhappy bulimic. The film ends rather happily for a Leigh film. Nicola accepts a gesture of help. Leigh treats his characters with affection and injects them with warmth and wit. For the way he builds his characters, Leigh is deserving of special recognition. He starts off each character with lengthy improvisations and ideas of what he thinks might happen before he gives his actors their script. They do not know of the characters' eventual fates at first and find out gradually as the film making process goes on. This is how the performances in Leigh's work are so special and memorable. Few directors place such emphasis on developing characterisation as Leigh does, and his characters are so interesting and multi layered, they barely need a plot to carry them at all.