The devil made him do it - filmmaker John Maybury

British filmmaker John Maybury talks to The Advocate about Francis Bacon, gay politics, and his next film subject the '60s

The first time he was approached by the BBC to direct a film about the controversial British painter Francis Bacon, `artist and experimental filmmaker John Maybury yawned. What could he possibly add to the numerous detailed biographies and documentaries about the celebrated Bacon?

It was when he hit on the idea of focusing on Bacon's lover and muse, George Dyer, that Maybury became excited. For him, the tortured relationship between the working-class petty crook and the upper-class artist possessed qualities of a Greek tragedy.

"I wanted to talk about that love affair and how it informed Bacon's painting," he says. As an artist himself, Maybury was looking to capture the emotional tenure of Bacon's series of paintings for which Dyer served as the model. (The artist's estate would not grant him access to the actual works).

And that's how Love Is the Devil was born. The challenge for Maybury was to dramatize this period in Bacon's life without falling prey to the "and then he wrote" cliches common in most biographical movies: "I needed to find a way to bring my visual style to bear on a conventional narrative."

The style of Love Is the Devil is almost hallucinatory in a very disturbing way, reminiscent of the films of the late Derek Jarman (for whom Maybury worked on several films and whom he reveres), but with a powerful emotional undertow. It effectively captures the obsessive quality of Bacon's creative process for which Dyer unwittingly served as a sacrificial lamb, according to Maybury. The affair, which ended with Dyer's suicide in 1971, was "in many ways your classic S/M role reversal," says Maybury. Sexually, Bacon was the masochist; emotionally, it was Dyer. The fact that it occurred at a pivotal point in recent English history, when homosexuality was still illegal and the gay rights movement was just emerging, only added to the erotic tension.

Neither Bacon nor Dyer identified as gay, Maybury explains. "You could almost say they were antigay," he adds. Bacon enjoyed being a sexual outlaw, and the gay rights movement was a threat to his outsider status. "In a funny kind of way, I agree with that," Maybury says, laughing. "My sexuality is just another way of annoying people. It's being different that excites me--not being some buffed gym queen or cyberclone who watches horny `Disney' movies [his description of today's squeaky-clean gay porn]."

Love Is the Devil was well received at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and Maybury was approached by several film companies looking to take his style and homogenize him. Yawn, again. He hasn't yet decided what to do with his temporary carte blanche. One idea was to make a film about his own adolescence, the androgynous glam-rock period in Britain. But since American filmmaker Todd Haynes has already appropriated that subject for his upcoming Velvet Goldmine, Maybury may turn to what he considers an unjustly neglected chapter in American cultural history. "I think the whole countercultural Haight-Ashbury period is due for a reassessment," says the 38-year-old director. "People have a tendency to put it down, but that's where movements like gay liberation and women's liberation started. And since I'm kind of pissed off that Todd took my childhood, this could be a way to get mine back."

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