NEWSLETTER

MIKE LEIGH - PART 4

INTERVIEW BY STEVE LAFRENIERE

Sally Hawkins and Mike Leigh on the set of Happy-Go-Lucky. Photo by Simon Mein/Courtesy of Miramax Films

You’re known for casting the same actor again in different films, sometimes many years later. Is this partly because you wanted to investigate something else about them? Phil Davis comes to mind. Anthony O’Donnell. For those familiar with your films, it adds another layer as well.

You’re barking up the wrong tree. Look, if I work with somebody and they’re really good, I want to work with them again. Occasionally I work with people who it turns out I don’t particularly like. That’s very rare. But on the whole it’s about getting on with people and us liking each other. If there’s somebody I really like they become a friend of mine. It’s great to be able to come back to someone you know and like and you stimulate each other both personally and creatively and then you go on another journey and explore somebody else. But it’s all about the job. To tell you the truth, the idea that I come back to an actor to investigate something about them in a personal way actually has never occurred to me until you suggested it. The first time I work with an actor, whatever we do goes in whatever direction. The second time I always say, whatever we do we’re not going to repeat ourselves. But that’s an artistic thing. It’s not to do with our relationship.

Although it’s one of your most brutal films, I noticed a new audience for your work after Naked.

It’s true. But don’t forget it’s also true that it’s the first film that I made that went to Cannes. And it also won prizes at Cannes. So apart from anything else, we went wider with that one. But in terms of the film itself and its spirit, it certainly spoke to people who would not previously have been concerned about Life Is Sweet or High Hopes. If there’s a previous film with which it’s a younger sibling, it’s Meantime, which enjoyed cult underground status for years with unemployed people before it came out on commercial DVD or video. Although Naked doesn’t have that kind of specific constituency, nevertheless it’s enjoyed a similar kind of cult.

Naked is a great example of this: Your films can be harsh in their depiction of people’s lives, but they’ve all got this seductive entertainment factor too.

Hitchcock once famously said that a woman who spends all day washing and cleaning and ironing doesn’t want to go the movies at night to see a film about a woman who spends all day washing and cleaning and ironing. In my experience Hitchcock in this particular instance is talking a load of crap. Because people get a real buzz out of being able to relate to what they see. At the same time a film must be entertaining. A film that’s just a bland, surface record of reality would be extremely tedious and alienating. And pointless, in my view. My job is to make films that resonate with people’s lives, in all ways. I haven’t invented that. It was going on when Shakespeare wrote King Lear.

Give me a Hollywood movie that you’ve seen lately. And approved of.

I don’t know whether you’d count There Will Be Blood as a Hollywood movie, but it’s a great piece of work. I’m a sucker for cinema, you know. It’s about movies to me. A painter can be into all kinds of paintings but it doesn’t mean to say that he or she is going to paint like all kinds of painters. My passion for cinema of all kinds feeds in on a conscious or a subliminal level to what I do.

What about younger audiences? Do you think it’s true that they’re too ADD to focus on anything but the mythical, served up with big-budget effects?

Younger audiences are ready for anything and everything. They’re extremely sophisticated, they’re extremely open, and the more you chuck at them the more interested they are. People now understand film not just in part because the means to explore film is readily available to them. The only ones who are saying that people only want big-budget films are the studios.

Are you thinking about the next generation?

I am. As a matter of fact I am the chairman of the London Film School. It’s been going since the mid-50s and it’s a great international house. I put a lot of time and energy and effort into young filmmakers. It’s something I’m very concerned with and passionate about.

But in regard to your way of creating a film, can that be taught to a new generation in the same way as, say, method acting?

It can’t. Perhaps one could teach the surface mechanics, but what I’m actually able to do each time can’t really be, as it were, quantified and turned into a set of instructions for a manual. Does that make sense?

Sure, I figured as much. Not that you’re about to leave anytime soon anyway, but what about critics who say that with Happy-Go-Lucky Mike Leigh has mellowed?

First of all, and you know this perfectly well, every movie I make is in some way different. Of course it’s also true, as Jean Renoir said, that we all make the same film over and over again. So, following Vera Drake I got around to making this one. It’s a question of choices. No doubt in some ways I am mellowing. In any case I’m 65 and was somewhat younger when I made my first film. But it’s simplistic to review Happy-Go-Lucky as merely a function of a person going soft. Anyway, they haven’t seen the next film yet.


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