He’s Leaving Las Vegas--and Big Studios--for Creative Control

At a time when Hollywood is thinking “big”--as in event movies with massive budgets--at least one top filmmaker is thinking small.

Mike Figgis, the uncompromising writer-director of the dark, edgy drama “Leaving Las Vegas,” which was nominated for four Oscars, has no qualms about working outside the studio system, whose generous spending habits and production perks are usually coveted by movie makers.

In fact, Figgis finds the studios creatively inhibiting.

“The bigger the budget and the bigger the crew, the slower the process becomes and the harder it is to be spontaneous,” says the 49-year-old British director, known for an unfettered filmmaking style that favors hand-held cameras and the use of natural light and inexpensive film stock.

On his next movie, “Death and the Loss of Innocence,” a semiautobiographical script he wrote a decade ago and for years tried unsuccessfully to get made, Figgis will forgo his upfront fee in exchange for complete creative control and eventual ownership of the negative.

Los Angeles-based foreign sales company Summit Entertainment has agreed to fully finance the project, which is expected to cost less than $6 million. Figgis describes the film as a nonlinear collection of short stories about the complexities of sex “all linked together thematically or emotionally.”

In a somewhat rare deal, Figgis will own the domestic rights (which he’ll eventually license to a U.S. distributor) and the international rights (they will revert back to him from Summit in 15 years), giving him full ownership of the movie.

The arrangement, brokered by agents Robert Newman and Bart Walker of International Creative Management, is a variation on similar types of creative deals being devised in these days of extraordinarily low returns in the movie business.

With production and marketing costs outstripping profitability, more top directors, producers and stars are willing to take less than their customary upfront fees for back-end profits on films.

Figgis, who has made both independent and studio films, has had a highly schizophrenic relationship with Hollywood over the years.

His first splash in the movie business came in 1988 with his well-received noir-style British feature “Stormy Monday,” a thriller starring Sting and Melanie Griffith set in the jazz club scene. Two years later came his American debut, “Internal Affairs,” an atmospheric cop thriller starring Richard Gere and Andy Garcia for Paramount Pictures.

But three movies that followed--”Liebestraum,” “Mr. Jones” and “The Browning Version”--flopped, leaving Figgis virtually unemployable in Hollywood.

During work on the 1993 release “Mr. Jones,” an ugly and much-publicized creative battle erupted among Figgis, TriStar Pictures and the film’s producers. The studio forced Figgis to re-cut the film several times; ordered re-shoots by another director; and took over the final edit. Figgis said the studio felt the movie about a manic-depressive (Gere) who falls in love with his psychiatrist (Lena Olin) was too dark. But Figgis found that absurd, given the subject matter.

“It was very contentious,” recalls a former top Sony executive. “Mike, who is very independently minded, was clearly not comfortable in the studio environment.”

Disheartened by his experience, Figgis opted to make his next picture, “Leaving Las Vegas,” outside Hollywood, which had rejected the idea of making a film with another bleak subject matter. In the movie, Nicolas Cage plays a suicidal alcoholic who goes to Las Vegas for his last binge and has a love affair with a prostitute (Elizabeth Shue).

The $3.5-million movie was financed independently by the French production/distribution company Lumiere Films and was released in the United States through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s United Artists Pictures to wide critical acclaim. Figgis said his experience with UA was positive, particularly because he was allowed to be “very, very strongly involved with the marketing” of the film.

John Calley, then-head of UA and now president of Sony Pictures, said working with Figgis was “utterly fantastic. . . . I find him totally delightful, brilliantly creative as a writer, director and musician.”

Figgis’ roots in the jazz and English pop music scene, as well as experimental theater, have transferred to his work on films. As he has with other films, Figgis scored “Leaving Las Vegas” and played trumpet and keyboard on the film’s soundtrack.

“Mike’s approach to the work is very musical,” says Gere, who says he found an immediately personal connection to Figgis, “because we’re about the same age, we come from the same economic backgrounds and we play the same instruments . . . the guitar, piano and trumpet.”

And his unconventional and improvisational way of working on a set gives his actors the breathing room that encourages spontaneity. “It’s like you’re floating. . . . He keeps things very free,” says Cage, who won the Academy Award for best actor for “Vegas.”

“Having spontaneity from actors tends to intimidate most directors,” Cage says. “Mike looks for that. A confident director lets the actors find their characters and nurture them.”

The film’s success made Hollywood once again take notice of Figgis, who found himself courted by some of the very studios that showed little interest in him earlier.

When New Line Cinema offered him a chance to produce and rewrite the Joe Eszterhas script “One Night Stand,” his fee of $2.5 million was double that of the $1.25 million he received on his last studio movie, Paramount’s “The Browning Version.” (He said that to get “Vegas” made, he took a modest fee of about $300,000.)

After its production of “One Night Stand,” a $24-million romance starring Nastassja Kinski and Wesley Snipes due out Nov. 7, New Line production President Mike DeLuca said he offered Figgis a number of projects, “which he turned down. . . . He’s a very picky guy.”

Figgis was “so pleasant to deal with and trustworthy as a director, we didn’t check back in with him until the movie was made,” DeLuca said.

Newman said that since the success of “Vegas,” his client is commanding $5 million to $6 million to write, direct and produce. But Figgis has opted instead to make another independent film.

“I think it would be a betrayal to leap back into the studio system,” Figgis said in a phone interview from Madrid, where he was shooting a “labor of love” one-hour TV documentary on flamenco dancing.

“It’s important to lead by example,” he says. “If you’re prepared to lower your sights financially, then you can take more risks because you won’t cripple anybody if the money doesn’t come back.”

A big budget, he adds, “inhibits the creative process . . . corporations feel responsible for marketing a film in a certain way and maybe you have to agree with all sorts of ridiculous ideas.”

Figgis says he’s found that “too many economic facets slow down the process” of making movies.

Just as he shot “Leaving Las Vegas” in 28 days, Figgis plans to make his latest movie on a very short schedule, filming in Northern England, Italy and North Africa with a very small crew.

Figgis believes that in addition to saving a production “enormous amounts of money,” he can save himself from headaches by not being bogged down with the usual trappings of physical production.

“I’ll be dropping a lot of elements that I think are top heavy for this type of movie,” Figgis says, including catering trucks and heavy camera rigs.

“The speed of filmmaking goes up tremendously,” says Figgis, who will shoot his new movie on inexpensive Super 16-millimeter film, most commonly used for documentaries, as he did with “Vegas.”

Nonetheless, Figgis, who lives in London with his wife and three children, said he would consider doing another studio film, “if the budget had an intelligent relationship to the story.”

The studio system, he says, “has become so fat and top heavy, and the movies cost so much to justify the salaries executives are paying themselves.”