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"The most interesting thing to me about Francis Bacon is his relationship with George Dyer," says filmmaker John Maybury. His first first feature, Love Is the Devil, examines the life and work of one of modern art's most celebrated painters. "In all the books I read, including the Bacon biography, Dyer is hardly mentioned. Most artistic muses in history have had biographies written about them. But not Dyer. It's as if he's been erased from everything. It is, I think, a form of homophobia." Sitting in a SoHo restaurant, Maybury's trim frame and slight features belie his conversational ferocity, which is hinted at only by his spiky bright bond mop of hair. He takes a drag on his cigarette and blows the smoke out with a grand gush. "I'm not supposed to smoke in here am I?" Another drag. Another gush. "The Bacon estate and the critics who were Bacon champions really didn't want the film to be made," he continues. "They are trying to sanitize him, because he's this great artist. But this element of his life is part of what made him great." Maybury based the film in part on longtime Bacon intimate Daniel Farson’s biography, The Guilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, but the estate would not allow any of his canvases to appear in the film or be photographed for it. Maybury, however, found freedom in this limitation. "How interesting is it to watch paint dry? Or look at a canvas? When the estate refused permission, that was the most liberating thing of all." Maybury's film, which fashions a dissection of Bacon's approach to painting, may not traditional storytelling, but it's gripping nonetheless. Maybury cites influences from the poems of T.S. Eliot -- "The fragmentation of shots has the same fragmentation of language in The Wasteland" -- and Greek Tragedy -- "The Colony Club people are the Greek chorus, commenting on things as we go along." Maybury immersed himself in writing by gay authors from Jean Genet to Oscar Wilde. He re-read all the plays of the famously irreverent, sexually daring Joe Orton, "to try and get myself in that mindset. That transgressive, weird, homo attitude." But Bacon reigned supreme. "The shots and sequences are like brush strokes. And at the end, you have an entire composition. It didn't need to have a flow the way linear narratives flow. It’s not a mystery. It's about the dynamic, the sexual masochism and sadism and all of it they had with one another. But I also like the idea of moving towards something but never really getting there." Something like the sexual relationship between Dyer and Bacon who, in one scene, spots a squabbling couple and sighs, "Oh, they're not happy. That's what love is." Is this a real Baconism? "No, it's me-ism," Maybury says through a deafening laugh. "There's as much of me in the film as there is of Bacon. I think that really pisses some people off. Especially my friends, who are a bunch of evil, vicious queens. They recognize me in the film, but they also recognize themselves." Those very words deftly describe some of the film's characters, people for whom mum would probably not like to pour tea. "When I was researching the work, about three weeks in, I thought 'Why am I making a movie about these hideous fucking people? I hate these people!'" says Maybury. "But in the end, it's about Dyer and Bacon." Maybury, who wrote his first screenplay for the film, trusts his audience to follow the story. "There's a kind of visual language, with more abstraction, that people are able to understand now. Audiences are as smart as you let them be. I very much wanted to put the relationship between George and Francis in a film that visually did them justice, and I think I quite carried it off." The accomplishment was decades in the making. A London native who celebrated his fortieth birthday last spring, Maybury attended art school at North London University in the 1970s and began making Super 8 films. He also met two people pivotal to his eventual artistic path. "I was great friends with Siouxsie and the Banshees, so I was hanging around that scene, making films. And I met Derek, who was also making Super 8s. That changed everything." This is the legendary late filmmaker Derek Jarman, whose films like Caragavvio and Edward II (both of which starred Swinton) are renowned for their visual style and politically informed texts. Maybury was set designer on Jarman's Jubilee (1977), edited The Last of England (1987) and designed and edited the war sequences for the director's highly acclaimed version of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1988). "The thing I learned most from Derek was generosity of spirit. He had an amazing ability to leave everyone to do what they did best. When I worked on War Requiem he never even came to see what I was doing or asked about it. He trusted me and just left me alone. That was extraordinary. I'm just so terribly sad he can't be here to see this film. I think he'd quite like it." (Jarman died of AIDS-related complications in February of 1994. Although we were not acquainted at the time, Maybury and I discovered during this conversation we had both attended his funeral that March, in a beautiful sunlit stone cathedral on the Kentish coast near his weekend cottage.) After his first solo film and painting shows at London's prestigious ICA in the mid-1980s, Maybury turned to music videos for badly needed cash. By 1990, he'd racked up a slate of work with Everything But the Girl, Boy George and, most famously, Sinead O'Connor, winning four MTV Awards for "Nothing Compares 2 U." Maybury returned to making his own videos and films early in this decade, including an experimental film called Remembrance of Things Fast for Channel 4, one of Britain's national networks, in 1993. "They got more complaints than anything ever shown before," he smiles, cigarette smoke again swirling about his head, the gold ring on one forefinger flashing in the light. "My favorite comment was 'This director should burn in a lake of fire.' Which is quite poetic, really." A seasoned traveler on the European film circuit, Maybury is not the least bit worried about Love is The Devil's stateside debut. "It's almost shocking how much interest there is and how well the film is doing. It's number four in the box office in London. Those two words have never really come out of my mouth before -- box office." Maybury quivers, momentarily racked by a disapproving twitch. "And the negative reaction we've gotten, well, you have to expect as well. I'd be kind of worried if there were none. There are a lot of intelligent people here who would like to be treated better by the arts in general. And this film's for them." Good buzz, bad buzz. Maybury is perfectly willing to live with the dilemma, and is already plotting his next cinematic tricks. "Tilda and I are thinking of doing an electronic version of Medea. I like the idea of coupling my new discovery of actors with a classic text and a modern medium. I'd like to apply the visual techniques of my video work to a narrative and see what happens." Rather than set his sights on Hollywood, Maybury is looking just to the north. "I've optioned a book about the early years of counterculture in Haight/Ashbury. I actually think I could do something quite interesting with that." A final drag. A final gush. "I like the idea of filming someone falling down the DNA strand." John Maybury Filmography
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