My working relationship with Mike Leigh spans an impressive 25 years.

As many people know, Mike Leigh never has a script. Mike will improvise and workshop the actors to create the characters and their relationships. In order for the HODs to gather the information they need, we will then all sit down with Mike and the actor to discuss each character in depth.

 Mike’s guidance to me at the start of my preparation was that he simply wanted this film to feel like

Turner’s “walk through life” with Turner gently getting older and more decrepit as the film progressed.

Therefore all the ageing in the film had to be done very subtly.

 The main challenge of this film was to create a journey through this 25-year period of Turner’s life that stayed completely seamless, despite the fact that – due to budget restrictions and location demands – we couldn’t always film chronologically.

 As with all Mike Leigh’s films, the budget level didn’t match the sheer ambition of the film, so we had a relatively miniscule budget to pull off 25 years of ageing on all of our principal characters.

Mr. Turner

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