NEWSLETTER

MIKE LEIGH - PART 2

INTERVIEW BY STEVE LAFRENIERE

A cornucopia of good shit from Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, Meantime, All or Nothing, and Career Girls. Every single movie that he’s made is better than almost any other movie by any other person.

You start the process with only a vague idea of who the characters are, who even Poppy is.

Yes. In a way I discovered who I was making the film about through the journey of making the film.

Well, all this has an interesting effect. More than once after seeing one of your movies I’ve found myself thinking about a character as if they were someone I’d actually met. They seemed to enter the part of my brain reserved for new, possible friends. Or enemies.

That’s the objective. That’s the job.

When did that first become the objective?

I’m a movie watcher and I have been since an early age. And I used to sit, as a kid, thinking, why can’t we have movies where people are like how people actually are? To me that’s what it’s about still—trying to put on the screen people like we actually are. Now, there are a million things I try and do to make that happen and what we’ve been talking about is the key to it: being completely spontaneous and organic. But it’s not only that. It’s hard to know how to express it, but there are hidden elements that have to do with the unpredictability of creative exploration and a certain kind of telepathy, so that the characters function and operate the way that we do in real life. Hopefully what I don’t put on the screen are characters who are only a function of the plot, or this moment in the story, or who are in other ways two-dimensional. Or indeed characters who are behaving, rather curiously, like actors.

An ongoing problem in the cinema.

[laughs] Especially when such a character wouldn’t know any actors.

You’ve been making plays and films for over 40 years. What was the atmosphere in 1960s London for accepting your ideas when you started out?

There was a lot going on. And you shouldn’t underestimate the degree of transatlantic exchange of ideas. For example, when I hit London in 1960, the very first breach, Shadows—Cassavetes’s first film—was playing. One also knew about the Living Theatre. In fact, I saw the Living Theatre in London. And by the mid-60s, when I started doing this stuff, one of the major things in theater was the work of Peter Brook. A lot of other barriers were coming down, and then happenings began. Do you know about happenings?

Like Claes Oldenburg and Yayoi Kusama.

Yes. There was also the documentary-play movement, where one went out and talked to people in various industries and made that into plays.

How did you fit into all this?

I started up writing in hidden corners. I put on plays with actors in fairly remote, fringe places and for very few performances. A lot of people didn’t understand what I was doing because my work was, and this remains the case, not concerned with displaying in an obvious way the manifest signs of experiment. I was concerned more with creating work where you actually did suspend your disbelief because it was so real. Or because of a sense of heightened realism that took you through the barrier. This was fairly unfashionable. Experimental theater at that time was very much about displaying its experimentation. You had action going sort of sideways, people walking on their hands, all kinds of linguistic tricks and surrealist things, and all the rest of it. It wasn’t until I got into my stride with what is in fact my natural habitat—movies—that I started to be taken more seriously. Then, of course, the plays started to be taken seriously too. By the time you get to Abigail’s Party, which started as a stage play, people were right on the case.


CONTINUED
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