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When Mike Figgis isn't directing movies he takes photographs. He tells Charlotte Cripps the stories behind his favourite shots
Mike Figgis is better known for his films than for taking photographs. But now some of the director's sexually charged images of women, including blindfolded girls, an abstract nude and Kate Moss descending a staircase in suspenders, are going on show in "Best of British", at London's Little Black Gallery, alongside pictures by Terence Donovan, Terry O'Neill, Patrick Lichfield and Bob Carlos Clarke.
It's a busy time for Figgis, who arrives this morning at his London studio, Red Mullet, looking rather dishevelled, with a wild mop of hair. He's in the middle of directing his first opera, Lucrezia Borgia for the ENO, which will open at the London Coliseum at the end of January. He's also preparing to shoot a new thriller, Suspension of Disbelief, about a writer's troubled relationship with reality.
As a rule, the director prefers to work with a small film crew and a hand-held camera to avoid the stress of big-budget Hollywood movies, where, he says: "Feelings of over-responsibility can lead to creative death". Photography is his stress reliever. He started snapping aged 11, on his first camera, a cheap Kodak. Once he moved to Lose Angels to direct films in the 1990s, he treated himself to Hasselblad and Leica cameras and started taking pictures seriously.
He pulls out two small personal photographs and lays them on top of a cabinet. One is of Nastassja Kinski on the set of his 1997 film One Night Stand. The other is of his old friend Uma Thurman, whom he first met when she was 16 years old, taken at her apartment in New York. "It's my first ever nude", he says. He's photographed the actress again and again...