From City Search's Interview with John Maybury, the writer and Director of Love is the Devil:
Your film is hardly a traditional biopic . . .

  John Maybury:  No.  There are already so many biographies and brilliant documentaries, monographs, essays, and the paintings themselves.  So [a traditional biopic] just didn’t seem either appropriate or necessary.  But I’d been a fan of Bacon’s work since I was an art student in the late ‘70s, and I always related to it.  And it was that challenge of writing a screenplay that most excited me.

City Search:  Together with the idea of focusing on George Dyer . . .

  John Maybury::  Yes.  When I started looking into all the material, I realized there’s really very little information about George Dyer, which, considering he is one of the icons of 20^th-century art—he hangs in most of the world’s major galleries!—is sort of astonishing.  And during the research period, Daniel Farson took me to the Colony Room, to the French House, and various other places, and I met several friends of Bacon’s who knew Dyer.  And even they couldn’t tell me too much.  They were together for what, 8 or 9 years, so in a way, the subject of the film is what happened to him in real life:  Dyer being reduced to a kind of cipher.  And that’s peculiar to me.  But in terms of writing, I could see a drama there, in that relationship.

George Dyer

City Search:  Concerning the sadomasochistic dynamic that is at the core of Bacon and Dyer’s relationship, isn’t it curious that the direction of that dynamic reversed, depending on whether they were in or out of bed?  

  John Maybury::  What is interesting about S&M, anyway, is that the masochist is in many ways, inevitably, the controller, in the formal sense.  Because they can shatter the illusion at any time.  On a deeper level, in the film, the whole thing is about balances of power.  Everyone is constantly jockeying for position.  Everyone is always trying to put one over on someone else.  Come up with a wittier, nastier, bitchier remark.  But the phenomenon is fascinating, and that English bitchiness is inclusive, in fact, a kind of camaraderie.  If they really wanted to be vile, they’d simply ignore you.

  City Search: Going through the huge retrospective in Paris two years ago, it struck me that the strongest work was categorically the paintings of the Dyer years.  Do you agree?

  John Maybury::  Oh for sure.  I always felt that. When I was an art student, they were the ones I connected with.  And at that time, late ‘70s, they were actually recent work.  The fourth time I went around that same show—I think at nine o’clock at night—I was able to really get up close to those pictures and really examine them, and I didn’t have the annoyance of seeing hundreds of thousands of people reflected in the glass, I was stuck by the tenderness of the brush stroke.  A kind of poetry which completely belies the thing of the horror of his work.  It looks to me like the caress of a lover.

City Search:  Any ideas why or how a dysfunctional sadomasochistic relationship results in the best work of Bacon’s career?

John Maybury:  For me, the intensity of that love—well, the tragedy of the story is that neither man, as far as I’m concerned, is able to fully express that love, or to find a voice which can express it.  Bacon has the medium of paint to try to express it; George has the medium of self destruction.  And the real tragedy in the story is the way George’s life dissolves throughout the story and his inner-most thoughts and nightmares are infected by Bacon imagery.  And by the time of his suicide, George practically no longer exists.  That’s why I went for a completely unnaturalistic setting for the suicide.  By that point, his death actually just is a Bacon image, he’s no longer in the real world.  To me, that’s a really touching, tragic, and hideous phenomenon.

City Search:  I love the film’s subtitle:  “Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon.”  Besides being a witty allusion to dozens of Bacon titles, it’s also the perfect key to the film’s open-ended, fragmentary quality.

John Maybury:  It was a kind of a get-out clause for Bacon, as if to imply that none of these things were completed paintings, and in a way, I’m using that same conceit.  On every level, Bacon informs the film and how we were to approach shooting it.  My cameraman, production designer, and I would sit and look at the paintings and extrapolated the information we needed:  the claustrophobia, the spaces, the nicotine-stained, alcohol-sodden English skin, the rotten teeth, the mirrors that give the wrong reflection, the lights that cast the wrong shadows.  And beyond that, Bacon’s own influence:  TS Eliot, Greek tragedy, Eisenstein (I love Eisenstein anyway).  Also, I went back to Joe Orton, to get my head into that period.  And Genet, and Cavafy.  It’s a collage approach, but again, it’s a reference to how Bacon himself worked.    

City Search:  I have the impression the academics aren’t too keen on your film . 

John Maybury:  Yes.  I keep stressing that this is a fictional drama based on real events, and so I’ve altered the sequence of some things for dramatic effect.  And I think that’s what’s annoying to a lot of the cultural gate-keepers and academics.  But I didn’t make the film for them, they don’t need it, I can’t tell them anything they don’t already know about Bacon.  And I think the other thing that pisses them off is that there’s as much of me in the film as there is Bacon.  For example, 11 years ago, my boyfriend died of a drug overdose—very different circumstances—but I did feel that furnished a point of connection that I could draw on.  I talked to Derek and Daniel [Craig, who plays Dyer] all about that.  That first scene when Derek walks into the room and buries his head in the pillow, that was me, when I came back from Los Angeles (I was doing a pop video), and Trojan, my boyfriend, had died in my flat, and there was still a dent in the pillow, and I smelled him on that pillow.  And I told Derek that, and I think it unnerved him to be given that kind of information, but it put him right in that place.  In a funny kind of way, if we don’t use those kind of experiences, then they were futile.  

City Search:  Where did the voiceovers and dialogue come from?

  John Maybury:  One thing that I think is a phenomenal mistake in films about artists is having them talk about their work.  It’s so unconvincing.  I’m a painter as well, and lots of my friends are, and we don’t sit around talking about our theories or philosophies of art.  We gossip about each other’s sex lives, who’s doing what drugs, and who’s drinking too much.  Still, it was important to me to try to convey a sense of Bacon’s intellectual and interior self, and voiceovers seemed the best way to do it, rather than have him spouting all these kind of things.  As for the dialogue, most of it is my own writing, with little bits of plagiarizing and paying homage to various people along the way.  I was able to lift a certain amount from Daniel Farson’s book, but a lot of it is just me.  I am actually an evil, vile, bitchy queen—sometimes.  Today I’m being charming and polite.

City Search:  How do you feel about the finished product?

  John Maybury:  I’m really proud of this film.  I think I’ve done Bacon justice, I think he would like this film, which is actually the most important of all.  I hope I haven’t made too many enemies—it’s not very useful for me as an artist to have made so many enemies in the English cultural elite.  But maybe one of my agendas has always been to annoy people a bit. Perhaps that is something I learned from Derek Jarman and Francis Bacon.  Actually, I think most artists of interest, one way or another, function as provocateurs, or have some sort of annoying quality.  I like that.

City Search:  Speaking of Derek Jarman, can you talk about the influence he’s played in your life and work?

John Maybury:  Sure.  It annoys me when people say the film is very Derek Jarman, because actually, I don’t think this film is very Derek at all.  Derek was much more anarchic in a way.  I think I’m much more controlled.  No, the most inspirational quality Derek had on me was his generosity of spirit.  Allowing other people total freedom in terms of their contribution to his work.  And I think it’s the way you get the best out of people:  you give them the freedom to do what they do best and just incorporate that back into the bigger picture.  Derek was a friend.  He gave me my first super-8 camera.  He encouraged my filmmaking.  An elegant man in every sense and his intelligence was elegant.  I miss him terribly.  I wish he could see this film, he’d be really proud.  But the list of people I’ve lost to AIDS in the last ten, fifteen years is horrifying. The only kind of solace I can take from any of this is that you have a kind of duty to absorb the best qualities of those people and carry them with you like a torch.