- You have a frame, and in the frame is whatever the artist puts there.

And that seems to be a kind of order, because so much of life is not ordered, so much of life is random.

(lively music) My mother was an actress, an Irish actress called Geraldine Fitzgerald.

And I partly grew up in California, 'cause she was working at Warner Brothers.

And then, she and my father split up when I was quite young, and he went back to Ireland, where he also was from.

And then my mother met someone and fell in love, and we moved to New York when I was six.

And I wasn't a successful child, partly because I couldn't read until I was almost nine.

And as a result of that, this has turned out to be good, my literature came from comic books, comic strips.

And so I'd be able to tell what the story was from the panels.

And so I started to draw a lot when I was young, and I kept on drawing.

I was the most out of it teenager god ever invented.

I went to work when I was 16 in a summer theater in Stratford Connecticut.

I amazingly got into Oxford University, and when I say amazingly, everyone was stunned that I passed the exam, me most of all.

And, but when I was in England, still theater this is, I got an offer to assist on and be in a production of a "Chimes at Midnight" with Orson Welles.

And I was a really bad actor, I mean I wasn't, I could never have made a living as an actor, but it was the world I wanted to be in.

And it was really only when I started to direct a rock and roll show in English television, "Ready Steady Go!"

that I started to have the camera (light acoustic music) in my life.

It was this rock and roll show that had been on for like a year before I joined.

I really wanted to direct it, and I also wanted to shoot rock and roll in a way which I hadn't seen done before.

I became friends with the musicians, and they asked me to do videos.

The first ones I did were with The Beatles, "Rain" and "Paperback Writer".

And following that was "Jumpin' Jack Flash" for The Rolling Stones, and The Who.

(upbeat music) And then The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, and then "Let it Be" the documentary with The Beatles.

I wasn't painting because I didn't know how to paint.

And but when I met my wife Lisa, after we'd been together for about eight or 10 years she said, "Why don't you paint?"

And I said, "I don't know how."

And she says well, "Hmm, well why don't we "go and get a canvas and get tubes of paint, "a couple of brushes, and see?"

And so I did paint, and it turned out all right.

I've been doing it for 25 years now.

I paint on really what's ever there, canvas, board, panel of the door or something, and I'd paint on that.

I paint on anything really.

I suppose I was drawn to portraits and pictures of people because people I think are what interest me the most, being a people myself.

And, I find you know you walk down the street and you look in someone's face, or the way they walk, and you think, I wonder who that person is?

And a lotta times people to me look confused, or out of it the way I was.

I'm very interested in people who are kind of out of it like I was.

Confused, and sometimes also you notice in some of my pictures is there's might be a displacement of power, like who's more important, and who's the master, and who's the servant?

And do they like their roles?

Why should they come to see my paintings at Hudson Hall?

No reason I can think of, except they're interesting, I think they're unusual, I think they're good, and I think you won't see them or see similar paintings in many other places.

The thing I miss most about directing, which I haven't done for a while for whatever reason, is the family.

Because when you direct, you make a, you choose your family, crew, actors.

Painting, it is more solitary, like writing, but I don't mind it.

- [Interviewer] Do you get to pick your crew?

- I get to (Michael laughs) pick my crew yeah, exactly.