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 MIKE LEIGH - PART 1INTERVIEW BY STEVE LAFRENIERE PHOTO BY LEO LEIGH 
I’ve been watching Mike Leigh’s movies for almost 20 years and every time I see a new one I have a fantasy conversation with him afterward, which generally consists of me trying to worm crucial personal info out of him. Because his characters can be so hyperreal—the kind of people who are so interesting or honest or insanely, baroquely fucked up they make you curious about living another day yourself—I usually feel like I’ve just met them offscreen. Like, in Abigail’s Party has anyone considered that Angela might be retarded? In Naked, for which of several reasons would Johnny be faking his cough? Does Gary Oldman’s skinhead have some kind of schoolgirl crush on Tim Roth’s nerd in Meantime? Not many other directors could even get me to wonder this sort of stuff. When Vice asked me to actually talk with Mike Leigh for this issue, I gulped. For one, he’s got a reputation as a hairy interview. Legend has him cutting off journalists he thinks haven’t done their homework and being hostile to anyone he even slightly perceives as having an agenda. Good for him, but erm... Then I saw his new movie, Happy-Go-Lucky, which is about a woman so cheerful she makes Amelie look like Diamanda Galás. I didn’t like it that much at first. It seemed kind of weak for a Mike Leigh film. But sure enough over the next few days I found myself mentally rerunning almost every scene, amazed yet again at the densely woven characters and what made each one tick. Now I love it. So yeah, I looked forward to getting him on the phone. It turns out Mike Leigh is nothing like they say. It’s just that he doesn’t cotton to the idea of being misunderstood, period. He’ll vigorously argue any mistaken notions about his work that you put across, no matter how slight, and calibrate every opinion of his own to a precise click. He’s also mordantly funny about people and things he doesn’t like. He’s basically just like half my friends. Except that he’s one of the best living filmmakers in the world. Vice: Happy-Go-Lucky looks different from your other films. It’s jammed with bright, saturated color and it’s shot in wide-screen. Mike Leigh: When it got to the stage where I had a clear conception of what the film was going to be, I talked to Dick Pope, my cinematographer, about the central character, Poppy, and what she’s like. How positive she is, what a great sense of life she’s got. Just as we were about to shoot tests we discovered that Fuji had brought out a new stock called Vivid. It’s great with primary colors. We used that, so then it seemed a natural thing to go wide-screen. A first for you. Yeah, it was. We’d thought about it for earlier films but this was the first time it was absolutely the right thing for the feel of the picture. Poppy is almost obnoxiously chirpy, but that’s just one of an ensemble of qualities. Her stubbornness not to be afraid of life is great to watch. What made you want to present this particular character now? In a way it’s a kind of anti-miserabilist film. The fact is, we’re knocking lumps off each other and we’re destroying the planet. Things are looking quite tough, bleak, and indeed we have good reason to be gloomy. But while all that is going on, there are people out in the real world who are just getting on with it. Not least among those are teachers. If you teach kids, you are by definition being optimistic. You are cherishing the future. So, yes, I wanted to make a film that was motivated by and carried by a generous, open-spirited, funny, optimistic, positive person. Now, that wouldn’t be interesting if it was just a simulation of those things on a surface level. But as you said, Poppy is actually a rounded and proper person. Now, on another level it’s due to Sally Hawkins, the actress who plays Poppy. She had interesting parts in your two previous movies, All or Nothing and Vera Drake. But I’d never have guessed she could carry a lead like this. Sally has this great energy and sense of humor and that obviously played its part in the chemistry of the proceedings. If you’re familiar with my films you know that I make them by collaborating with actors to create characters. And although the characters that we get in the films are never the actors themselves, I do tap into their various energies. Having worked with Sally Hawkins, I got to know her and I did absolutely think it was time to put her at the center of things. There’s an encounter between Poppy and a homeless guy she meets late one night. He’s talking gibberish but she looks him in the eye and seems to get exactly what he’s going on about. Given your extemporaneous method, did Sally Hawkins know how that scene was going to play? Everything you see in any of my films comes out of improvisation work from when I first set these things up, in which none of the actors ever know what’s going to happen. But of course we then draw from that and build and distill and construct scenes, and then we shoot them. So when you improvised at the start of your process, had it even been explained to her who this person was that she was going to encounter? No, no, no. That would run counter to the whole principle of how I work. I simply set up a thing where she’s moving around and suddenly this guy’s there. When actors agree to take part in one of my films I won’t say anything about it. They will never know anything about the film or the other characters or anything other than what their character would know at any stage of the game. Obviously the more the actors get to know each other through their characters the more they find out. But it’s still only from that perspective. In fact, given how we shot the scene, even if she watches the film now she doesn’t really know any more about him than you do. CONTINUED MIKE LEIGH | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
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