Who is J.M.W. Turner and How Does His Work As a Painter Factor Into the Aesthetics of “Mr. Turner”?
J.M.W. Turner is one of the most celebrated painters in history. He’s been credibly hailed as the greatest landscape painter as well as Britain’s greatest painter. According to director Mike Leigh, “the look of the film comes out of a sense of us trying to interpret, visually, his paintings, but also the spirit of the two periods in which the film takes place, Georgian and Victorian.”
Cinematographer Dick Pope described his approach as “more invoking the spirit of what Turner was looking at, or what he was seeing. What inspired him to take the journey to Margate in the first place, which was and still is famous for its light and wonderful sunrises. What drove him drove us.” Pope also stresses that “the other thing is where we put the camera, because that’s what’s more important in one of Mike’s films, more than anything else, is where do you see it from? A lot of the vantage points in the film are from Turner looking at what he is observing.”