Hello pod, I'm Chris Eudon, welcome to a very special edition of the Empire podcast.

Almost 30 years on from its release, Mike Lee's Naked is as powerful as it was when it

was first made. After the better sweet comedy drama of High Hopes and Life is Sweet, it marked

a determined detour into darkness for the director, charting the nightmarish, picker-esque

journey of its lead character, the poetic, but problematic drifter Johnny, a never-better

David Thuelis as he crashes into London and the lives of those he encounters. It won

both Lee and Thuelis prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and had a big impact on their

subsequent careers as well as the careers of those who worked on the film.

Now remastered in glorious 4K, Naked has been re-released for your home entertainment

pleasure and so to mark the occasion, I sat down over the last few months and over a number

of fascinating Zoom sessions with Lee, Thuelis, cast members Leslie Sharp and Peter White,

costume designer Lindy Heming, director of photography Dick Pope, composer Andrew Dixon,

and hair and makeup designer Christine Blendell for an in-depth oral history of this all-time

classic. But there's only one place to start and that is at the very beginning of the

project and with Mike Lee himself. Naked is one of those films, which are quite a number

that I've made where really the journey of discovering what the film is, is the journey

of making it really. I had some sort of sense of the spirit of the thing and I knew that I

asked the David Thuelis to be in it and I knew that he would carry it because I'd already

worked within a couple of times and the previous time which was life is sweet. He played

in a significant part which was the boyfriend of Jane Horax's anorexic character. But because

of the dramatic and narrative requirements of the film, you only saw him very little. I mean,

just really well one on a quarter times. Over now, the David Thuelis, you play his Johnny.

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