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 MIKE LEIGH - PART 3INTERVIEW BY STEVE LAFRENIERE 
One of my favorites is your first film, Bleak Moments. It also started as a play. Yes. We made it into my first film simply because I was desperate to make a film. It’s not really a dramatization, but more a reinvestigation of the play. A large portion of what happens in Bleak Moments is never in the play at all. Nuts in May is also a reinvestigation of a play. How were the original plays received? It wasn’t understood what people were looking at. There was a review in the London Times of the play Bleak Moments. The play was like a clock, meticulously structured with silences. In the audience you could hear a pin drop. Yet the heading of the piece in the Times was “Embarrassed Actors.” He’d got hold of the fact that it was an improvised play and thought the actors were improvising before your very eyes, which they were not. If you’ve seen the film version, the atmosphere, the moods, the tensions, the silences, the embarrassments were all in the original play. The whole review was predicated on the premise that because they were improvising, the actors were tongue-tied and didn’t know what to say. The reason I ask you about the early responses is because you seem to still encounter confusion from audiences and critics now. People try and decode my films. For example, there have been reviews of Happy-Go-Lucky that say the problem is it’s got no plot. Well, by the most extreme and crude Hollywood criteria, sure it has no plot. But there are two kinds of plots. There are causal plots and there are cumulative plots. A causal plot it certainly hasn’t got—A happens and therefore B happens and therefore C happens and that makes D happen, etcetera. Happy-Go-Lucky has a cumulative plot. Critics can be rough on your actors too. There are responses to Happy-Go-Lucky that say “Sally Hawkins’s acting is dreadful because she’s just improvising and she’s self-indulgent and it’s all hanging out all over the place and it doesn’t add up to a real person.” Apart from anything else, that is someone coming to it so marinated in preoccupations with form that their natural ability just to respond to a human being as a human being seems to be cauterized in some way. Another standard detraction is that you’re sneering at the working-class characters in your films. I know you don’t agree with this. What drives it is cynicism. There’s a certain amount of cynicism out there that makes people perceive it in that way. OK, to tell you the truth, that’s me trying to come up with an answer, because to a considerable extent I don’t get it. It’s dreadful. Certainly there’s nothing serious to say about it. Large numbers of people find my work compassionate, as I hope it is. I showed Abigail’s Party to someone recently and they had that knee-jerk reaction. A real lefty I might add. The fact is, Abigail’s Party is a passionate lamentation on the way people become seduced and indoctrinated by all kinds of received behavior and materialistic preoccupations. It’s obvious. Do you use actors with the same background or class as the characters they’re going to play? It’s no big deal. There are a hundred examples. Say Imelda Staunton, who plays Vera Drake, comes from a London working-class background. It’s a bonus, but that isn’t to say much. Or Leslie Manville, for example, who I’ve worked with a lot, has played characters from all sorts of class backgrounds, from posh people to the kind of working-class woman she did in Grown Ups or indeed All or Nothing. Sometimes it’s useful, but it’s not the only criterion. We’re talking about versatile, intelligent, sensitive, sophisticated, imaginative actors who can pitch tent in all kinds of different territories and explore with me. Sometimes it is a territory they’re familiar with, sometimes it isn’t. And I guess you could say that, being as it’s set in the 1880s, Topsy Turvy would be a good example of unfamiliar territory. Exactly. We had to go and pitch tent in a whole other century. Actually, Topsy Turvy is my film about filmmaking. It’s the one time I dealt with the real fundamental issues of filmmaking. I thought it was a liberated way to explore those preoccupations. Would you be interested in making a film about actual filmmaking? I don’t think I would find out any more about the subject than I know. Each film is an exploration anyway and there are other things to explore. I’ve often wondered if your films operate as psychoanalysis? No. I’m not concerned with that one bit. I’m a storyteller. What I’m concerned with is storytelling and audiences. I’m also an artist, hence I’m concerned with the synthesis of the craft of film with the substance of it. So far we’ve talked mostly about actors, but in the end the real investigation is the shooting of the film and the postproduction. It’s about the coming together of the performance and what the camera does and the design and the rhythm and the tempo and the music. So when I’m working with the actors I’m working to create fictitious characters and I’m working toward making a movie. I assume they should be enjoying themselves and they should be feeling very positive and creative. Obviously part of my responsibility is the pastoral care of the actors. But I’m not concerned with their psychotherapy. Actually, I meant your own psychoanalysis. The same answer applies, except that these films are very personal and very much a part of my life and they come out of me, if you like. Therefore they move me on and they form how I look at the world. In that case, yes. But it’s not something I think about consciously. I’m talking about watching one of your own films years later and understanding something different about not only the film, but yourself. If any director would be interested in that I thought it might be you. Well, yeah, that may be true. But I think we directors fall into two categories. To put it very crudely, there are hired hands who come in and do a movie and they’re not really concerned with its provenance and its meaning in a personal way. They only execute the job of getting a movie made. The rest of us make films very much from our hearts. So you ask that question of us. CONTINUED MIKE LEIGH | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
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