Mike Leigh Defends His Decision Not To Go To Israel

Zionism? To hell with all that, says film director


By Stephen Applebaum and Simon Rocker, October 21, 2010

Mike Leigh, the film-maker and playwright who has cancelled a planned trip to Israel next month, has backed a cultural boycott of the country, calling its policies "suicidal".


In an exclusive and personal outspoken interview in which he justified his decision not to teach a masterclass at a Jerusalem film school, the 67-year-old, Salford-born author said he was now "implicitly part" of the boycott.


Mr Leigh, director of award-winning films such as Secrets and Lies and Topsy-Turvy, had been invited by the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem to take a workshop for students. During the week that he was due to spend in Israel he had been scheduled to visit Palestinian film-makers in Jenin, on the West Bank, and also to give a wide-ranging press conference.


Mr Leigh admitted to having been "extremely uncomfortable" about agreeing to go to Israel in the first place, but the loyalty oath planned by the Israeli government for new immigrants had proved "the last straw".In his interview, given to publicise his new film, Another Year, Mr Leigh gave his angriest assessment yet of his life as a Jew and his feelings towards Israel.


He complained that he and his fellow former members of the left-wing Zionist movement, Habonim, had been duped by Israeli propaganda, and denounced religion in the strongest terms.


"Religion's never been an issue. I've been sceptical about religion since I was born, basically. And certainly by the time I came to my barmitzvah I had long been sceptical. I think organised religion is bulls***. And I have thought that literally since before I could walk. So that's not a problem for me. Although I grew up in the north Manchester Jewish scene, in a district that's now completely where all the frummers live."


He revealed that he had planned to take his sons with him to Israel, where he has a "lot of very close relatives. My mother's surviving sister, who went on aliyah in 1949, is still alive. She'll be 90 very shortly, and she was looking forward to seeing me. But in the end, to hell with all that. A decision had to be made that this simply wasn't good enough."


Although the argument might be put that "committed, serious, liberal, left artists are not responsible for the Israeli government," he said, "that simply won't wash. Because actually, the truth is that what Israel is doing… is suicidal."


While cultural talks went on "in the nice cinematheques of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, it is hell on earth in Gaza and I wouldn't want to be there basically".


A former member of Habonim, he has only twice visited Israel, once in 1960 and again in 1990.


"Not only was I in Habonim, in the '50s, but I actually happen to come from a very long, unusually Zionist background in Manchester, at a time when many Jews were not particularly Zionist," he said. "In fact a lot of Jews were very sceptical about the whole notion of Zionism. My great-grandfather actually edited a Zionist newspaper in Manchester at the turn of the last century. So, I have struggled with this issue, the whole thing, for a very long time."


All his close friends from Habonim had long since "walked away from Jewish life" but they talked about Israel, he added: "We wring our hands on a daily basis, saying 'For f***'s sake, what are they doing? They are shooting themselves in the foot'."


His 2005 play about Jewish identity, Two Thousand Years, would have been "tougher" if he had written it now, he said. He felt that not only had he done "the right thing" in deciding to call off his trip to Israel but "in so far as anything achieves anything, more publicity has come out of what I have done than would have been the case had I simply not gone, or had I gone and merely made a few statements that no one was listening to inside Israel."


He said he had been "of course exhorted not to go to Israel by a number of factions. That included Israeli factions within Israel. Whilst I have been berated by some Israeli positions, there are also Israelis that are extremely pleased I made that decision."


Mr Leigh, who insisted that all his work was "unquestionably Jewish", was dismissive about rocket attacks on Israel. "I don't want to know about rockets," he said. "What I am concerned with is humanity, is life being lived properly. And you cannot deal with this issue from an Israeli perspective and not from a Palestinian or a Gaza perspective. You simply can't. And if you do it's totally unacceptable. And that's the bottom line."

Originally published in the Jewish Chronicle, October 21, 2010

Bobcat Goldthwait Talks World's Greatest Dad, Two Girls One Cup, And Amazonian Nuns

World's Greatest Dad is the second film you've had at Sundance. How did it feel going there again?

Oh I don't take it for granted. I wish I could actually give a lecture to people who get movies into Sundance, because everybody thinks they're going to be the next Tarantino and the reality is, as a film-maker, you're just lucky to get your film shown.

Does being a film-maker feel like a fresh start or is there still a connection with the stand-up work?

You know, I retired from acting, and I try to retire from stand-up but it's like Godfather III, I keep getting drawn back in. I go out and do stand-up so I can pay the bills so I can keep making small, indie kind of movies. But it's weird to be almost 50 and to get a second shot. I don't take that for granted either.

You started doing stand-up when you were 15 but you don't seem to have enjoyed it much. Why?

When I first started doing stand up I was making fun of it. I would just read a Dear John letter on stage and cry and go, 'And you people want to hear jokes?' or gut fish and have entrails all over the stage. I then started getting work because I got on Letterman when I was 20, and had to become a comedian because people's expectations was to see a comedy show. I was no longer allowed to do my whole show from inside a box, and all these weird things I used to do. So I ended up becoming the very thing I was trying to parody originally.

I think it's funny that I retired from comedy - well I never do, because I always to go out and do the alimony tour - but I retired from acting the same time people stopped hiring me, so it worked out really well. But getting behind the cameras, I didn't realise how happy I would be, you know? When I wanted to be a comedian, I was eight when I decided. But I think if people were held to the decisions they made at eight years old, there would be a lot more astronauts and firemen.

Why were you drawn to it at such an early age?

When I was a boy I was home from school sick one day and I saw George Carlin on television. I asked my mother, 'What does he do to make a living?' and she said, 'That's what he does.' I thought, 'Wow, that's the greatest scam in the world.' So I was in.

In World's Greatest Dad, when Robin Wiilliams's character, Lance, gets what he wants, he deliberately sabotages it. Did you do that with your career when you set light to a sofa on Jay Leno's show, and smashed up the set of the Arsenio Hall Show?

Oh sure. But I don't see Lance as sabotaging it. Well he does sabotage it but he sabotages it for the right reasons. It's him being honest with himself and being able to say, 'Hey, man, I'm going to make a decision and I will probably be completely alone when I do it. And will I be okay with that? Am I strong enough?' His reward for that is obviously the end of the movie. But I think he sabotages in a healthy way, and I sabotaged in an unhealthy way.

But did you ever think in career terms or about the consequences?

No, I never did. And I still try not to now that I have this new career. I'm developing with Ray Davis this movie based on The Kinks, and that wasn't, like, me sitting at home going, 'What is really popular now? All these kids' dancing musicals.' This is something I have wanted to do since I was 13. So being honest with myself is really paying off. The other side of it is, am I willing to rent instead of own? And the reality of it is, yeah, I am willing to rent instead of own. I've done all that other side of the Hollywood dream and I was so unhappy.

You do touch on this idea in World's Greatest Dad that when Lance achieves the notoriety he sought, he becomes even more isolated. Other people have told me that fame made them feel lonely and I wonder if that was your experience?

Yeah, I feel that like Lance is - and it's done in a jokey way at the beginning of the movie - trying to connect with people for the wrong reasons. He's not trying to write to write, he's trying to write for the results instead of doing it for why you should create. Early on I stopped creating for the wrong reasons. If I did a persona that people were expecting, it could pay. And it paid well there for a while in the 80s.

Did that make you feel more alienated from who you were?

Sure. Completely, yeah. I just became something I resented.

When did you decide to try and turn that around?

About seven years ago. I changed everything in my life. I just downsized my whole life and asked my daughter if she was cool living in an apartment and she said, 'Yeah, let's do it', and only wrote what came out of me instead of what I thought might get made in Hollywood. That changed everything.

But I thought I hated stand up and then recently when I was on the road I went, 'Oh no, clearly I just hated this persona.' So once I jetisoned that, I actually started having a little fun up there.

How does the audience react? Do they still want Zed from Police Academy?

It depends what cities I'm in. There's plenty of cities where that is the expectation, but I couldn't do it anymore.

I read that you'd start out doing the Grover voice, as you call it, and then gradually drop it as the show went on.

Yeah, that's what it used to be and now I just start off saying, 'This is how I talk and I'm sorry if you came to hear me scream for 45 minutes. That would be a dick in all of our asses.'

You've said that if you could go back in time you'd tell yourself not to do the Police Academy films. Was it fun at the time though?

You know what it is, really the first time I was in one it was exciting to be in a movie and see it and stuff. And I know that there's certain people that really have a fondness for that, and I don't mean to sour them, because they're not the same people that necessarily enjoy the movies I make. It's really weird because there's people that come to see my stand up that aren't aware of the movies I make, and vice versa. There's some people that think making arthouse movies for Sundance is a very lucrative profession and can't believe [I'd do stand up].

Which is the real you?

Oh the movies. They're 100% me. Even when I'm being like interviewed on a radio show or a television show, that's not the real me. But I think if you really wanted to understand who I am as a person, if you watched the last two movies I made [Sleeping Dogs Lie, World's Greatest Dad] they'd give you a really good idea. And some people think that I'm a perverted, twisted guy, because of the last two movies, but, you know, that's not my goal. I'm not trying to shock people. I think when people hear what goes on in my movies they think they're like slob comedies or shock comedies, but they're not. That would be much more lucrative for me to pursue.

How has the internet and the shocking stuff online impacted on stand up?

Well, as a stand up, it's like how are you going to shock the next group of people that grows up? How do you shock kids that were raised on Two Girls One Cup?

Have you ever watched that?

Yeah.

I've only seen the reaction videos.

I wish my friends had told me. It's horrible. Why do people do that to each other? Now I've got this image in my head and I know that when Alzheimer's finally kicks in, that will be the only goddam thing left in my head.

It seems to me, though, that it's more subversive to put something like the idea of bestiality, as in Sleeping Dogs Lie, in an emotionally involving narrative with characters we care about.

Yeah, well that's the thing to me. That's not a movie that's an exploration of bestility. That's a movie that's an exploration of honesty. Sometimes people say these are the inciting incidents. They're not. I don't know what film school language you'd use to describe these things ...

McGuffin?

Yeah, it is the McGuffin. That's what it is. That's how I see it.

When you write a film you begin with the ending. So is World's Greatest Dad a conscious subversion of the message of Sleeping Dogs Lie, which ended with the idea that it's often best to lie in relationships?

Yeah, it is. It was like, 'Okay, now I'm going to write the flipside of being honest.' Because I don't know what is the truth. When are we supposed to be honest and when are we not? I am obsessed with the lies that I tell myself to get through the day. Every time I pass somebody begging on the street and I don't give them money, I make up some lie: 'Oh well he was high, so I shouldn't have given him money.' It's all these lies we tell ourselves.

I started pitching my wife another script idea and I go, 'You know, it's about those lies that we tell.' She goes, 'Well that's a fresh one. That's all you keep writing about.' But I guess everyone makes the same movie over and over again.

There's also the school aspect. Amy in Sleeping Dogs Lie and Lance in World's Greatest Dad are both teachers, though the latter film is set more within the school environment.

It's funny and now I'm going to do Schoolboys in Disgrace [the Kinks film]. I tell yer, I think by the time eighth grade rolled around I was completely damaged. I think I'm still mad trying to figure out what the nuns did to me. It's time to move past it.

You went to a faith school?

Yeah, I went to a Catholic school in central New York, where I grew up. It was all nuns. My friend Tom Kenney [voice of Spongebob Squarepants] said they were nuns that went to the convent on wrestling scholarships, because they were these big, Amazon-looking women.

So is that where your humour comes from? Is it rebellion?

Sure. And the opression and the constant being beaten down. When you're a kid, you don't know the difference [between reality and lies]. You don't say, 'Hey, this is a work of fiction,' you just blurt out something. So I was always told I was a bad kid. It's good that I decided to go on stage and not rob banks.

Can you see yourself having gone the other way?

If I hadn't channelled all my anger at that into some other field yeah, definitely.

You were pretty angry when you were 19, weren't you?

Oh I've always been angry. You're talking to me and I seem pretty mellow, but I feel that I'm not angry anymore at showbusiness. Because when you're young and you're angry at showbusiness, what you're saying is, 'I should be more famous.' I look at myself and I think of myself as being very happy, because I just pursue these things that come up. My wife has a tattoo that says, 'Get greedy, get hurt.' I believe that.

But it was work for me. I found it was very lucrative to be very angry. You know, to rip people a new asshole and crowds would cheer and stuff. But the toll it paid on me, I said: 'No, if this means I'm done, I want to walk away from it.'

I spoke to a director of very dark dramas and he said one reason he wouldn't do a comedy is because the comedy geniuses he had met were all dark, angry, scary people. Is there a darkness that accompanies comedy and was that what you were getting at with your directorial debut, Shakes the Clown, in which almost everyone seems angry and bitter?

That was the idea behind Shakes. I was trying to make fun of comedians who are really humourless and angry. You know what's funny, the amount of anger in comedians. And then you see these guys on television and they're just friendly and they're universally accepted and loved. And then you spend a little time with them and you still don't see the anger, but you really scratch deep and all of a sudden you go, 'Holy shit you're angry!' I think people have been frightened of me over the years but I've never been quite sure why. Because the musical acts I was drawn to, I didn't think of them as being angry. I just thought of them as expressing themselves.

Talking of which you supported Nirvana on their last tour. How did the audience react to you?

Well about every third show they liked me. And then the other two they hated me. And I would then make it worse. Getting laughs from 5000 people is a really awesome thing. But to have 5000 people hate you, that's really awesome. They go, 'How was Nirvana last night?' and they go, 'Oh, it was the greatest show. But this fucking comedian opened up for it and I want to punch that guy in the face.' I'm like, 'Wow, man. You're talking about me and you got to see Nirvana.'

You knew Kurt Cobain. Did you see anything in him that would have suggested he'd end his life?

Oh sure. Like people say, 'Why doesn't someone stop someone doing something like that?' But, you know, I made a few jokes with him that, in hindsight, you go, 'Wow, that was real dark'. But I truly believe that he died from - and this is just my own feelings - a chemical imbalance. He certainly, maybe, abused substances and all that stuff, but I think they didn't work for thim. I think he really was unbalanced. I think that was what killed him. Everybody can have all these other theories but, you know, I wasn't shocked when he died.

About the casting of Robin Williams: when you put him in a film called World's Greatest Dad, people are going to have certain expectations, aren't they?

Yeah, well there's a dad right now at the screening who brought an eight or 10-year-old girl. I just introduced the movie and I said, 'You know, you might not want her to watch it.' He said, 'Oh, it'll be okay.' I'm like, 'Alright then ...'

It's a double-edged thing because on the one hand the title makes it seem like it could seemingly sit happily on a shelf alongside Father's Day and Bicentennial Man and ...

Sure it's World's Greatest Dad, stars Robin Williams, and is directed by the dude from Police Academy. That's a lot of hurdles to get to the audience that would appreciate this movie. But I didn't write the movie with Robin in mind. I had written it with another actor in mind [Philip Seymour Hoffman], and he [Williams] read the script hoping he could do a cameo to help me get the movie made, and then he asked to be the lead and that changed everything. I was really happy to have him, not only because he's such a good friend but because he's such an amazing actor. But I never thought in those terms of, will people be able to get past that? Because I see him much like myself, but I see him as two people: there's this brilliant comedian and there's this amazing actor. I just thought this would make great sense. Because I do think this is the first time he got to be funny in a movie and it didn't rely on him having to do all the lifting. He could be funny by being his stripped away persona.

The film touches on this idea of the pornification of teenage sexual desire and the infleunce of the internet. Is that something that concerns you? Larry Clark made a short film called Impaled and the boys he interviewed in it were not unlike Lance's son, Kyle.

I haven't seen that but, you know, to me the villain in this movie is the lack of imagination. I think the instantaneous nature of the internet and Twitter and all this stuff is there's no thought behind anything, it's all reaction: I like this so I'm going to watch more of this. I see something I comment on it. But I never stop and go, 'Hm, you know what? Maybe I don't need to watch a horrible clip.' It's just mind-numbing. There's no creativity involved. I've spent a lot of time on the internet and it's like gambling in a casino. I spent three hours online, I got nothing done, and I was just waiting for three ducks to show up.

Did you research online porn and its effect?

No, not at all. And then I made a reference to Doom, which, apparently, just showed how old I was. All the people on IMDB are like, 'Doom is an old game. I can't believe Bobcat Goldthwait could write Doom into his screenplay.'

How personal are these films? You dedicated Sleeping Dogs Lie to your mother and you said the brother was based on your own older brother.

Yeah and then I did a short. My brother passed away and I dedicated it to the same brother. They're all very, very personal to me. It started on Sleeping Dogs Lie, as kind of like a sick joke, when I said, 'For mom'. The more it sunk in I thought, 'This is the one she would've liked, even though it might seem shocking to people.' I know she would've liked that one. And the same thing here. My dad passed away before he got to see World's Greatest Dad. He was really sweet. He was like, 'You know, I think this is going to be the one.' These movies are extremely personal. Like I said, if you want to get an idea about me, this is what they are.

What about Shakes the Clown?

No, Shakes is a very sarcastic movie.

And angry.

Very, very angry. I know there's a small world of people that really like that movie, but I just watched it the other night with a group of people who're fans of it and I wanted to say, 'It's not that good.' But I can't do that to them because they have actually memorised the dialogue. It's like that Saturday Night Live sketch with William Shatner at a Star Trek convention, and he just goes, 'Get a life!' A little bit of me, there's like people dressed up as their favourite clown, I want to go, 'What is this fucking monster I made?'

It felt like a big leap from Shakes to Sleeping Dogs Lie.

Yeah, but I would say Shakes was my student film. It's really where I learned, or started to think about, making a movie, and started to see if I could even do it.

As you say, Shakes has become a cult now. But when it was released critics trashed it.

Oh it was loathed.

Was it tough having your film hated that way when you're putting yourself out there like that?

It hurt, but it hurt then for the wrong reasons. I just wanted people to go see it and then it would make money. Now I'm someone who doesn't like these movies, it doesn't hurt as much. I'm not like Lance trying to connect with people; I don't know who I make these movies for. So when people do like them, that's really awesome. But I think I make these movies for myself first. Which sounds horrible, seeing that you use other people's money to do it.

Is it difficult to get the funding for films like this which are truthful and which do often take extreme subject matter to explore their themes? And is it getting harder?

I don't know. The other one [Sleeping Dogs Lie] we shot in two weeks with a crew from Craigslist, and then I did another movie I worked on [Windy City Heat] and it was just on television, and I directed that but that's not like these movies that I write/direct. Once Robin came on board it was easy to get money, but not for the right reasons. So Sarah [my wife/producer] and I kind of held out until we found people that we respected and were going to let us make the movie we wanted to.

The other people would have asked for changes?
eah, and I'm not really interested in that. It's all subjective: either you're in or you're not.

There is this idea of re-invention in World's Greatest Dad. Is it a reflection of your own experience, and maybe Robin's as well?

Yeah, yeah, and again, you know, my wife had to clearly point out who these people [characters] were in my own life. I was like, 'Oh my God.' I mean I really was that dumb. 'Oh really? Oh my God, she's going to be so pissed when she sees this.' There's people even saying the exact things they said. There's a couple of lines like when the guy's talking about his son and he goes, 'His mother and I were supposed to make a baby together, we just weren't supposed to live together.' That's just this pompous, fucking asshole I know that said that for real, and I just thought, 'Wow, that's the dumbest fucking thing I ever heard.' So I put it in the script.'

Do you think he'll recognise himself?

Well he can go fuck himself. I hope he does. What are you going to say if you're sitting in a theatre and people are laughing at some asinine thing you said? Are you gonna say, 'He stole that line from me'?

At the end of the movie, it's a happy ending for Lance – and everyone says it's upbeat - but what about the people like the football jock whose lives he's probably ruined by revealing the truth?

Yeah, they're totally fucked up. That kid may go jump off a bridge at the end. And in spite of it, you've got to be willing to say, 'Am I going to be okay?'

Is it ultimately a selfish act on Lance's part?

You know, being honest with yourself is a selfish act but I don't think he's being cruel when he does it. That's the most scary thing to say to someone, you know, 'This is really who I am. I'm not waiting around to see if you're okay with that.' And maybe that's what my movies are.

© Stephen Applebaum, 2010

Sylvain Chomet: The Illusionist

Sylvain Chomet found love in Edinburgh in 2003. It wasn't a person the acclaimed French animator fell for though, but Auld Reekie herself. He had come over to attend the Edinburgh International Film Festival with his acclaimed animated feature, Belleville Rendez-Vous, and, he recalls, "discovered a place and a people who were really welcoming. So I fell in love," he says, smiling wistfully. "It was very, very inspiring."

The smitten director moved to North Berwick with his English producer wife, Sally, and set up a studio in the New Town. Although the couple have since relocated to Provence, the passion of Chomet's brief encounter is evident in every frame of the movie he created in the city.

Based on an unproduced screenplay by Jacques Tati, The Illusionist is a veritable love letter to Scotland's capital, in which familiar locations are delightfully rendered in classical 2D animation.

The film did not start out this way, however. When Tati's script about an ageing magician who forms a father/daughter bond with a young girl, at the fag-end of the music hall era, was handed to Chomet by the late star's daughter, Sophie Tatischeff in 2000, a year before her death, the setting was Paris and, Chomet recalls with mild perplexity, Prague.

The Czech capital is a "lovely city", he says. "But a journalist from there told me that in 1959 it was a dark, horrible city. So, I don't know why Tati did this." Whatever Tati had found magical there, Chomet couldn't see it. Instead he found what he was looking for in, of all things, Scotland's fickle weather system. "I wanted the light to be constantly moving in the background so that when the characters are in rooms it is always changing." So what better than a city where "you don't sit out on the terrace even if it's sunny, because 15 minutes later it rains, or 15 minutes later it snows?" Chomet laughs: "I remember that well. It was like a clock."

Something else that troubled the film-maker about Tati's screenplay was a sequence where the protagonist arrived in a village at the same time as the arrival of electricity. Everyone told Chomet that while Czechoslovakia might have been an Eastern country, not even villages were that technologically backward. "The only place I found where they had the arrival of electricity in 1959 was the Isle of Iona," he says.

Consequently, the switching on of the lights on the island is the occasion of a ceilidh at which the coming of rock'n'roll drives another nail into the coffin of the world represented by the magician, and, says Chomet, whether the celebrating Ionans realise it or not, of their culture and way of life. The scene is thus simultaneously joyous and elegiac, echoing the film's theme of endings being new beginnings.

Chomet is convinced that Tati was writing about his own experiences. He had managed to cross over into movies when the music halls in which he made his name were dying. Not everyone was so lucky, though, and Chomet added a bibulous, down-on-his-luck clown to the story to represent one of the real-life friends Tati helped financially. "The Illusionist was very personal to him because he jumped before he actually collapsed," says Chomet. This, he suggests, is why it went unproduced. "It was too personal. He was a very shy guy and he didn't want to show his true self, I think. He always wanted to hide behind a character like Monsieur Hulot."

Chomet is convinced, moreover, that Tati wrote the script for Sophie, to whom the animator has dedicated the film, because he felt guilty about being away from her when he was working, missing much of her growing up and compounding the pain behind the story. This interpretation was contested by Richard McDonald, however, who argued in a letter to a London newspaper that the real inspiration was his mother, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, the illegitimate elder daughter whom Tati abandoned as a baby.

Mentioning the letter – published just days before The Illusionist's world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival – causes Chomet's expression to darken. He bitterly dismisses McDonald's claim as "madness", asking how could Tati have written something so personal about a daughter he never lived with? Although the script wasn't dedicated to anyone, "it was obvious it was for Sophie. And I knew it from her," he claims. "It's very frustrating to discover that he's related to Jacques Tati and he's got this kind of love and hate thing with him. I think it's much more of a personal problem that he has to solve himself."

Most hurtful of all, it appears, was McDonald's charge that Chomet had sabotaged Tati's script, referring to his supposed failure to recognise "his troubled intentions, so that it resembles little more than a grotesque, eclectic, nostalgic homage to its author", as "the most disrespectful act". Chomet shakes his head and complains that no one ever asked him for his side of the story. "You know, it's actually very difficult to make a film like that. It's very difficult to make it in the UK especially. And when that happened I felt it was very unfair to get criticised even before the film had screened, by someone who didn't dare even to talk to us and didn't dare to see the film. So, you know, that's all I have to say," he says, drawing a line under the matter.

Chomet had already moved back to France by the time the story broke. Running an animation studio in Edinburgh was, ultimately, a "bad experience", he says. This isn't to say he's fallen out of love with Scotland, far from it; he simply realised that being an artist and an entrepreneur was not for him. "At some point you just think about investing, things like that, and there's a lot of lawyers involved as well. A lot of really useless people. It's not nice. I just want to make films and then shut the place, a little bit more like a gypsy. I had five wonderful years in Scotland," he says warmly, "but I thought I needed some sun, and a real summer."

Those "wonderful years" produced yet more evidence that animation is not just for children, a perception Chomet blames on years of Disney domination. For a long time, he says, they were the only ones able to afford to make animated features, and, "although they did some really beautiful things – they created the medium, they made it flourish into a beautiful art form – they kept it a bit frozen for a long time. When I started, people said, 'You want to do animation for adults? No, no, it's for children.'"

The likes of Chomet, Ari Folman (Waltz With Bashir) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) are now changing people's ideas about what animation can do and the subjects it can address. "Even at Pixar they have started to grow up," he grins. "It's a new age!"

But animation remains an expensive medium and American products still dominate the market. Chomet has tried working with American studios but his experiences have not been pleasant. Being fired as director of The Tales Of Despereaux, for instance, is still a sore point. "That was quite a nasty story because I developed a lot of the look of the film, basically the characters, the little mice... and I'm not even mentioned in the credits."

Ultimately, the issue appears to be the difference between American and European practices. "I've learned that the Americans are very good when you have done a film that is successful. They're very good about calling you and asking you to do something. But what they're not good at is understanding what you do," says Chomet. "So it's very dangerous because you have to be a yes man because they take over the artistic side. So with me there have always been clashes."

Nobody's man but his own, Chomet has a number of ideas for the future. He would like to make a live action feature with Ewan McGregor as a mute in France, or an animated feature about the Paris Commune, or even a musical with people who can neither sing nor dance. Whatever he ends up doing, you can be sure it will be worth waiting for.

A version of this story appeared in Scotland on Sunday

John Densmore: The Original Drummer Of The Doors On When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors

AS DRUMMER with The Doors, John Densmore not only survived the 1960s but, more to the point, Jim Morrison: the self-proclaimed Dionysian erotic politician, whose excesses and early death have threatened to obscure the fact that The Doors were more than just a one-man band.

When Densmore's candid memoir, Riders On The Storm: My Life With Jim Morrison And The Doors, was published in 1991, it read like the work of a man lucky to have emerged sane from his wild 54-month ride with the band. Morrison's erratic behaviour – fuelled by a staggering consumption of drugs and alcohol – created such tension, the author recalled, that "I got year-long headaches, rashes, phobias."

The appearance of Densmore's book coincided with Oliver Stone's widely derided but entertaining movie, The Doors. Playing fast and loose with the truth, it was criticised for essentially offering a fantasy of what it might have been like to be Jim Morrison, as imagined by a man who, at the time, was fighting in Vietnam.

Unsurprisingly, the drugs and hedonism took centre stage, overshadowing Morrison's fellow Doors – guitarist Robby Krieger, keyboardist Ray Manzarek and Densmore – and even, to some extent, the music. Now, in what looks like an attempt to redress the balance (a bit), indie film-maker Tom DiCillo has made When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors – a whistlestop tour through the history of the band, comprised entirely of archive footage and a narration by Johnny Depp. Morrison still dominates the story, but the documentary's scope is broader than Stone's film, with due attention now paid to the creation of The Doors' sound.

Even so, when I meet 65-year-old Densmore at a hotel in London, he rejects the idea that When You're Strange is a corrective. Wiry, with a grey goatee and ponytail, he says he personally sees it more as an "addition". "Some people in the band hated The Doors movie," he says. "I didn't. Val Kilmer was astounding. It was about the self-destructive artist and this new one has more of the times, more of the other band members – so it's kind of more well rounded. As Jim says (in the film], you can't help but reflect what's going on: Vietnam, assassinations, all this stuff. So I'm pleased that there's more of the era this time."

What it also has is astonishingly fresh-looking footage from a self-financed art film that Morrison made, starring himself, called HWY: An American Pastoral (out of respect for the dead star, DiCillo only used outtakes rather than edited sequences). In one excerpt, a lean and bearded Morrison emerges from a car partially submerged in the desert. In another, he turns on a car radio and, in a surreal addition by DiCillo, appears to hear a newsflash about his own demise in Paris.

"Fabulous!" says Densmore, laughing. "But it's not to say he isn't dead; he was an alcoholic." His caution is understandable. For years, some have suggested the burnt-out star didn't die at all, and that he was never in the sealed casket interred in Paris's leafy Pere Lachaise cemetery, resting place to the likes of Edith Piaf, Chopin and Oscar Wilde. These stories, Densmore sighs, were "fuelled by Ray. When Jim died there was some fake-death rumours and we sent our manager (Bill Siddons] over to Paris and all of a sudden he was buried. Our manager called us and said, 'Hey, we buried him,' and I said, 'What?' We didn't see his body', so the rumours started."

It was a sad end to a journey that for Densmore had begun when he met Morrison in the garage Manzarek used as a rehearsal room at his parents' house in California. Morrison was completing a four-year degree in film at UCLA; he was shy, and couldn't play an instrument, but Densmore was impressed by his lyrics – well read, Morrison was already into Rimbaud, Blake and Nietzsche by the age of 16 – and his mysteriousness. "I dug that," he says.

Manzarek has said the band, formed in 1965, were "kindred souls – acidheads who were looking for some other way to get high". Indeed, Densmore recognised the dangers in prolonged LSD use early on. When he took it for the first time, it opened up new realities, changing the way he saw the world forever. None the less, he says now, "it's a complicated subject, psychedelics. I won't deny there's knowledge there, but they need to be respected. You don't party." 

Morrison lacked such caution, and one night, high on acid during the band's 1966 residency at the Whiskey A Go Go on the Sunset Strip, he added an Oedipal passage to the band's eerie epic The End, expressing a desire to kill the father and f*** the mother. "I thought I was in a band with a psychotic," says Densmore, "but then I wasn't well read and I didn't know the Oedipus myth." 

Residencies at the Whiskey and, before that, the grungier London Fog, had given the band time to find their identity and hone their songs. However, after their first hit album, The Doors, and number one single, Light My Fire, it would never be the same again – at least for Morrison. Playing the clubs had been "a time of experimentation… and a good time," says Densmore. "And that was a little bit of torture for Jim, because you get bigger and they want to hear Light My Fire, and the incubation period of songwriting goes out the window." He says that his new book, The Doors: Unhinged, due in October, will reveal how "Jim wanted to go off to an island and start over, but by then he was a drunk. So we didn't want to do that. It's tough," he says gloomily. "It's tragic."

Morrison's substance-fuelled unpredictability meant the rest of the band often didn't know what to expect during a show. When things were going well, Densmore says it felt "exciting, dangerous". They were like "Geppetto – able to move him around emotionally with the music. We had sections where he could improvise poetry, and it was like, what is he going to do tonight, live, in the moment?"

When Jimbo – the name they gave to the Mr Hyde side of Morrison's personality – took over, no-one was safe. At a gig not mentioned in When You're Strange, at the University of Michigan homecoming in 1967, the singer revealed a darker side than Densmore had seen before, as he launched into a tirade against the audience of tuxedoed football jocks and their coiffured girlfriends. 

"He was f***ed up. Drunk. I left the stage and I was very pleased that Robby joined me as a statement. Ray then picked up Robby's guitar and was playing blues and Jim was, like, ranting. Ugh. And it was all because we wanted to stop for ice cream. 'Oh yeah?' said Jim. 'OK. I'll get some Courvoisier.'"

When the pressure of Morrison's behaviour became too much for Densmore during the recording of their fourth album, The Soft Parade, the drummer quit. However, he returned the next day as if nothing had happened. What was going through his mind? "Ah, that's a good question," says Densmore. "That there's an elephant in the room and nobody's saying anything. And also he's connected to my path that I've found in my life: music. So I came back." 

The film reveals that Morrison had wanted to quit in 1968, at the height of the band's fame. "He'd had enough," Densmore says. In hindsight, should he have gone? "Mm, yes," he says warily. What happened? "Jim said, 'I'm having a nervous breakdown', and one of the band said, 'Give it another six months.' And I'm feeling, 'Holy f***! So what if we don't have another LP. Maybe this train wreck will not happen.' But I'm young, and we don't have substance abuse clinics, and I don't know what to do."

But the train wreck did happen, during a riotous concert in Miami that resulted in Morrison being convicted of indecent exposure (to this day there is no evidence that this actually happened) and profanity. The band's first major US tour collapsed in the fall-out, but they bounced back with two of their best albums: Morrison Hotel and LA Woman.

Morrison didn't hang around but left for Paris with his common-law wife, Pamela Courson, to write poetry and try to get himself straight. Densmore became the last person in the band to speak to him when he called from France. I point out that Depp's narration says Morrison sounded "slurred", but in his memoir he wrote that he "didn't sound loaded". "Hm, I should check that," says Densmore. "I'm trying to sense how he is, you know? And I know he got excited by hearing about the response to LA Woman and Riders On The Storm. So he wanted to do more. But I was feeling he was still partying too hard, I just could tell."

Whatever the truth, Jim Morrison died not long after, aged 27. The band recorded two more albums – Other Voices and the wretched Full Circle – and then disbanded.

In 2003, Densmore filed a lawsuit against Manzarek and Krieger in a bid to prevent them from using the band's name when they started playing as The Doors of the 21st Century. I ask if this was out of loyalty to Morrison. Densmore looks over his right shoulder. "I'm trying to listen to my ancestor who's on the other side. Although," he says, adding what I suspect are arguments used against him by his former bandmates, "'Who the hell are you to speak for him? He's dead. So we should do whatever we want.'"

Densmore clearly doesn't agree with this. "Is there The Police without Sting? The Rolling Stones without Mick?" he asks, sarcastically referring to singers – such as Morrison wannabe Ian Astbury, presumably – that have toured with Manzarek and Krieger as 'Jimitators'. "People ask if we're getting back together. Yeah!" he exclaims. "When Jim shows up. Not with somebody else."



Originally published in Scotland on Sunday