Mike Leigh on the set of Vera Drake (2004)Mike Leigh has long been in the vanguard of British writer-directors, but over the last decade he has gone on to establish himself once and for all as a major figure on the international film-making scene.
Michael Coveney: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name’s Michael Coveney and I’m the curator of the season of… retrospective look at Mike Leigh’s films. It’s fantastic that you’ve all turned up. If, like me, you just saw Meantime (1983) for the first time in a number of years… what an extraordinary film that was.
I would like to say just this: that… sorry, I’m particularly hunched over this microphone… turn into a caricature figure in a Mike Leigh film if I’m not careful… that the career of Mike Leigh that has spanned the theatre, television and movies since the mid 1960s is one of the most extraordinary careers in the British media.
It’s a story of persistence, talents and guts, and doing it your way, as it were. There’s nothing quite like it, I don’t think, in the culture of our times and on that note I would like to introduce to you now, on the brink of that compliment, and in the aftermath of this wonderful film we’ve seen this evening… Mike Leigh. [applause]
Mike Leigh: There’s nothing further to add to that.
MC: So we’ll all go home now. Is that the end of it? Is that the end of the conversation?
ML: Yes, I’ve had enough already. [laughter]
MC: Meantime was your thirteenth film and your… yes, I’m just being statistical for a moment… and your 36th piece of work, in the manner in which you’ve devised and found yourself working, after an apprenticeship in various modes and manners in the early 60s. And before we go into some rather revealing clips, which are relevant, I hope, to the discussion, I would like to ask whether… when you woke up as someone who was going to work in the theatre or the movies, what was your first inspiration?
How is it that this little lad from Salford — your father was a General Practitioner; your mother worked in the health service too, and you went to Salford Grammar School and surprised everyone by taking a place at RADA. In 1960 you came to London and then after this early peerage you did courses in art college and in the London Film School and you saw every movie and play going in London.
I always remember… when I spoke to you a long time ago, you had a friend who was an usher at the Royal Shakespeare Company who got you in free to see all sorts of productions, some of which made an impact on you.
ML: Well I think they all did in a way. My friend Paul Rowley, the ‘centre of the universe’ as he used describe himself… he worked as an usher at the Aldwych, and so we just used to go and sit on the stairs. I saw Endgame fourteen times.
All those shows, in the Aldwych, were very rich… that was the RSC in its early stage, where there was very exciting work going on. So that was very… it’s hard to say really what particular thing… and in a way what you’ve described is just absorbing all sorts of stuff. I suppose that was, as much as anything, that’s the way I see it. I can’t really isolate anything.
MC: When you came to London and you went to drama school, presumably you were on the acting course, because you had an idea that you might be… what… the new… [laughter] I hesitate to say…
ML: You’re just being naughty. [laughter] No, you know perfectly well because I’ve told you before and it’s in your book… [laughter] that I…
MC: Sorry…
ML: I certainly didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted to find out about it really. What I wanted to do, really, was make things up, and particularly films. You know, when you’re seventeen you really don’t know anything, and particularly when you’re seventeen and you’re in Manchester and it’s 1960, you know even less actually.
It just was… the exciting prospect of coming to London and finding out about these things, and somehow finding out about… there was so much to find out about, and of course so much… just apart from anything else, I never really saw a movie that wasn’t in English until I came to London effectively. We saw pretty well everything you could that was on at the pictures in the 50s and…
MC: Where did you go when you came to London? Where were the cinema haunts for you? The Academy and…
ML: The Academy. Here, as much as anywhere. The Academy. The International Film Theatre in Westbourne Grove. Jim Clark’s in the audience, he’ll throw out some of the ones I forget… there was one, up near Marble Arch on Oxford Street, that showed continental films. They were all over the place and of course one of my favourite haunts was that cinema called The Tolmer which was in Tolmers Square, tucked away near Euston Station, which happened to be very close to where I lived for about ten years.
The thing about The Tolmer is that it was the last… it was a converted church… until it closed in the 70s it was still the cheapest cinema in Britain. It used to cost 2/10 to get in there. And they would show anything they could get their hands on, so… I remember seeing The Leopard [Il gattopardo, d. Luchino Visconti, 1963], in Italian, the original version, and… really crummy films and great films… any print they could lay their hands on they would show. So that was a great haunt… let us move on…
MC: So you were a cinephile from an early age. I remember thinking that if there was a quiz for people who knew most about the history of world cinema, you might cede first place to Martin Scorsese but to nobody else. But at this point I would like to surprise you, ladies and gentlemen, by absolutely going back on everything Mr… Mike Leigh — Mike Leigh, not Mr Leigh — has said so far. He had acting aspirations. I’m not going to let this go because… when he first left RADA, he was hired by an acting agent and he was sent off to Shepperton Studios in order to be, he was told, the leading role in a new film being shot by Roy Ward Baker, which comes up with the title Two Left Feet (1963).
In this clip, which we are about to see… [laughter] two of the actors were young male choristers who worked with Benjamin Britten. Neither of those guys is Mike Leigh. He is one of three rather stroppy and unconvincing Teddy Boys in a scene which I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I’m told from my dictionaries that the film is about one of the aforesaid male choristers discovering the joys or the limitations or possibilities of sex. I’m not sure about that…
ML: This film was billed around London with the slogan ’ London’s swinging teenage jungle’. [laughter]
MC: And you were part of that?
ML: Yes. [laughter]
MC: I think we should now have a look at this.
Clip: Two Left Feet
MC: The line, as you say, is ‘I can see his feet’ and in that moment we can see the future of the British Film Industry [laughter] and an acting career in either full flood or retreat.
ML: An acting career in inevitable oblivion. [laughter]
MC: But the three of you, Mike, you’re not very butch Teddy Boys, you’re rather tentative about breaking down that door. What are you trying to do? Get into a lavatory where a guy’s taking his trousers… what’s going on there?
ML: No, he’s pissed. The guy is pissed and he’s… we are going to discuss this film for the entire evening [laughter].
MC: But the two choristers were, of course, Michael Crawford and David Hemmings. But you said to me once that… was that your first visit to a film set? And you hung around quite a bit…
ML: The great thing about making that film… I really had this part… I hardly spoke but I was in quite a lot of the scenes. I had to be around. But I actually went every day whether I was called or not. They used to get quite fed up with me actually, but… so I just attended the shoot for ten weeks and it was just a fantastic education really. It was before I actually went to the London Film School so all I’d really experienced was RADA at that stage, and it really was a huge revelation. It was a very conventionally-shot, old-fashioned, studio-based picture. But I learned a massive amount that I take seriously as part of the education.
MC: Well your acting career had obviously taken off in a big way as a result of that movie…
ML: And we could get off this track…
MC: We have a little clip… only our colleagues at the BFI have come up with this — in the same year that you… do you remember Maigret on Saturday nights — if you’re old enough — with Rupert Davies, and his pipe and his sidekick played by an actor called Ewen Solon. We have now a clip in which Mike Leigh’s acting film debut of one line has been reduced to no lines at all because in this clip he plays the part of a deaf mute. [laughter]
Clip: Maigret
ML: It’s such bad acting on my part, but in a way it just seems to me massively good news that, on the whole, I’ve attended to some other matters, in the ensuing decades really. It is just appalling really, isn’t it?
MC: I’m not going to comment… After these brushes with the acting profession, you were at the same time, working in theatre companies and… student companies and eventually with the RSC, and right up until the early 70s…
ML: But not acting.
MC: Not as an actor.
ML: The thing is, I just did acting over the course of a year because having been to RADA I really wanted to get on with the business of finding out about filmmaking, so after a year I went to Camberwell Art School and the London Film School and then to the Central School of Art, so really, all the so-called acting that I did was in the space of a year, and that’s what you’ve just seen.
MC: But at what time did you decide that you were going to direct things?
ML: Oh, when I was about twelve, I think…
MC: Oh, you were just going to be the person in charge of something going on.
ML: Well… and tell stories really, that’s what it’s about. Everybody here — and there are quite a lot of people who have been to drama school — there are always some people in drama school who are the people that want to be directors and right from the word go you get that, and they get to make things happen.
MC: But these acting clips aren’t… they’re not that negative in this conversation because after this you worked with your friend David Halliwell and you worked in certain situations and it seemed to me, when you worked in the theatre and you worked on Little Malcolm and His Struggle against the Eunuchs, the first production, that it was telling you how not to work, that you would do things in a different way yourself, so all these learning processes were quite important to you.
ML: I think that’s right. I think… to take seriously, in the context of your question, these two clips for example… certainly the experience, my experience of RADA and of this kind of work left me in no doubt that it was stultified and it wasn’t creative and it was very superficial obviously, and I… really it wasn’t until I went to art school, to Camberwell, on the foundation course that I kind of got the clue as to what it was all about. It hit me in a life-drawing class that what we were all doing as art students was precisely what we’d never done as acting students and what I’d never experienced in these limited experiences of professional acting, which is to say, as young art students, we were looking at something and investigating it and actually working from reality in some way and being creative and distilling it.
And that’s something that you just didn’t experience in any shape or form as an actor. And it occurred to me that in some way acting… there was a potential for actors to be artists, and then I started to realise, partly through the not-very-positive experience of directing the original production of Little Malcolm and His Struggle against the Eunuchs with David Halliwell in it, playing Scrawdyke. But again that was… we did that in a very conventional way, and I started to get the notion that somehow the barriers between writing and rehearsing, and the preparation of an actor’s role, and directing, and all those things could in some way… the barriers could come down — it could be all part of one organic process.
MC: How important in that was this experience you had of seeing Peter Brook’s production of the Marat/Sade — you’d seen the King Lear — Paul Schofield — and you were a dedicated Pinterist and a dedicated follower of Samuel Beckett by this time. These people had enormous influence on you but Marat/Sade… you found out, I think, through a television documentary, that they’d improvised certain scenes, for a certain purpose, and your view was that, or your idea might be that you could take this process on in a more organic way into working towards an original piece of work, rather than activating a received script.
ML: Yes, I think that’s right. The thing about the Marat/Sade, the Omnibus, or whatever it was… Monitor, or whatever it was… about the rehearsals of that show… What happened is that all the actors had gone with Peter to a mental hospital and everybody had based not the character they were doing, but the behavioural condition… medical condition of the character, on one or other of the patients in the hospital, and they used that, and you saw improvisations and I thought in a way there must be a way of carrying that through to its logical conclusion and actually creating a piece of work.
But I must say that… the things that you’re talking about were all influences and important, but in the cinema there were other things very much happening. First of all, John Cassavetes’ Shadows, which was effectively his first film that he put together, where actors improvised etc. was just going on about the time I hit London, and although I must say, with regards Cassavetes that… and I’ve always thought of him more as an inspiration than an influence in any sense, because I don’t entirely get on with all his films, but the notion of collaborating with actors and engendering work in that way certainly came from that.
But then of course other things were going on, not least what was happening in Paris, the Nouvelle Vague was happening, and in a way the whole thing of creating film in an organic way that was actually alive, and there were all sorts of other things happening too, which it would be boring to list. There were lots of things happening on film that are relevant to these influences, but apart from anything else… we are talking about the 60s… everything was, from a certain point onwards, I was kind of half-seriously thinking of it in terms of pre-Beatles and post-Beatles, although a great number of things were happening that were more profound even than the Beatles…
As the 60s progressed, all kinds of things started to happen. As you know, because we’ve talked about it, one of the things that afflicted me and my work during the later 60s, in trying to get so-called improvised plays, which I carried on doing for some years until I could make a film, getting set up, was that people would say ‘oh, oh, you mean a happening.’ And of course a happening was very much something that was happening [laughter] and it was very much… the boundaries of conventions were being challenged all over the place in all of the media. So in some ways this was all part of that as well.
ML: But you were part of that, but wasn’t there also a kind of rigour, because you’re a rather… not conventional, that’s the wrong word, but you have a rigour about the work you want to present to the public or your audience in the end, and there’s a great misunderstanding here, isn’t there, that the base root of your work is something called improvisation, which is often misrepresented as something like ‘they’re still making it up when they’re shooting a film’ or ‘they’re still making it up when they’re playing the play’ and that isn’t the case, and it’s interesting that your first play that became a film, Bleak Moments, in 1970, which has been shown here in the cinema, was misinterpreted by one critic as ‘they were still making it up when they were acting it…’ You sometimes rather cruelly expose Irving Wardle to this solecism on his part.
ML: Always, at every opportunity.
MC: But this is the play that was presented at the Open Space, run by Charles Marowitz, who had been an associate of Peter Brook, and you then, fortuitously, or, thank God for us, as it were, translated that into a film, due to the intervention of a company that was run by Albert Finney, who was also from your neck of the woods. Was that the start of everything, really? That was your first feature film, it was 1971. Is that when you felt you’d reached where you were then going to go from?
ML: Well I don’t know about that. It’s hard to talk about those sorts of things. In a way you never actually feel you’ve reached… you always feel you’ve just started and you’ve just about started getting it right… and even that remains to be seen.
Certainly my objective throughout the 60s was to get to make films and obviously, implicit in that meant to get to make feature films. And that was the first opportunity and the first time it happened. Obviously it was a great leap forward. What I would have been more than horrified to be told at the time we made Bleak Moments, is that I wouldn’t make a feature film, that is to say a film on 35mm for theatrical release, for another seventeen years. And that’s exactly how it was.
Of course what that’s about is… for all intents and purposes, nobody was able to make indigenous, independent serious films — with very few exceptions anyhow — in that period and a large number of us were only able to make films — if we were lucky enough to make films at all, there were plenty of very talented people who never got that opportunity — for television, and that’s what a proportion of the films from that period that are being shown here, are.
MC: This is very important, because for a lot of your generation of filmmakers, the BBC — and then subsequently Channel Four — were your haven really, and your supporters, and the next clip we’re going to show is from the first film you made for the BBC, in 1973, ten years before Meantime, which we saw this evening, and this was at… the producer was Tony Garnett, who had spotted your talent and had taken you to the BBC and given you… I don’t know about carte blanche, but you went back to your home town of Salford, you shot this movie, which is a kind of pre-echo of Vera Drake (2004).
The central character is played by Liz Smith, who is a cleaning lady, and there are themes also of… abortion in the film comes up, all sorts of wonderful echoes, wonderful actors in it: Polly Hemingway, Alison Steadman — your first collaboration with her, and Ben Kingsley as an Asian taxi driver.
But this scene, which we’re going to see, shows Liz Smith in a bedroom. I think we should talk about bedroom scenes, which figure large in Mike Leigh films, but this is a scene where her husband is coming back after a hard night’s day in the pub and this is what we’re going to see now…
ML: And it ought to be said that the actor, who is no longer with us, Clifford Kershaw, who plays Jim, the husband, was a great and much underused character actor. I just wanted to say that because he was special. Okay…
Clip Hard Labour
MC: Well it’s not Last Tango in Paris (L’ultimo tango a Parigi, d. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)… [laughter] What other filmmaker would show a scene of a chap fiddling about with his pyjamas, with the camera held on that profile in the bed? It’s quite extraordinary. It’s like you’re showing life as lived, that isn’t turned into movies, in a way, in that scene.
ML: I don’t want to get into that discussion.
MC: Why not?
ML: Well because I don’t know about that, actually. I think that’s a… the thing about holding the camera and apparently allowing things to happen only makes sense if that’s one thing that happens, within the overall context of film, where all kinds of different sorts of dynamic take place. In a way I’m cautious about fetishising that particular mode of doing things because it’s one way of telling the story at a particular moment.
There are films, Gertrud (1964), by Dreyer springs to mind, where the entire film does that and on the whole it’s hard work, and if this entire film was like that, I think it would be more hard work than you could justify really. So I think it’s important to see it as one of the tools in the kit and a good way of liberating things… sometimes.
MC: You mentioned Clifford Kershaw, who played the husband who’s come back from the pub that evening, prior to the prenuptial… the nuptial arrangements as it were, but he was a walk-on actor in Coronation Street; he was an Oldham stallholder — he wasn’t an actor at all. And it’s unusual for you because most of your actors are actors, but he brought some kind of reality which is more associated, I think, with perhaps Ken Loach, your great contemporary, who uses non-actors in that kind of way, and it’s unusual in your work to have that performance.
ML: It’s true. I like to work with actors, as everybody knows, and the more sophisticated the actors are the better the work as far as I’m concerned. Actually Clifford Kershaw had some background as an actor, way back when, before this time, but had become a stallholder and a walk-on in Coronation Street, an extra. But yes, it’s true.
I think there are great films: we saw in here the other day Los olvidados of Buñuel, in a new restoration. Obviously that’s a film about kids on the street in Mexico City and it was actually fantastic — real kids playing real kids. Obviously there’s a whole area of the potential of what you can do with real people playing themselves.
Again, I don’t personally, particularly get very excited by Bresson’s films because I feel, with Bresson, who very much doesn’t work with professional actors but gets real people to in a way be themselves… He’s so concerned to create a kind of language of naturalism in some way, or of ‘realness’, if you like, that it’s almost… the natural exuberance of reality is battened down, and I don’t quite believe in it.
For me… I wouldn’t want to… I think there’s all kinds of things that other people do, including Ken Loach, which is very exciting, but for me it is all about collaborating with really inventive, creative people who are turned on by the whole thing of doing real people like the people out there, and arriving at a reality in a sophisticated way, rather than simply being that reality in an unsophisticated way.
MC: Could I, at this point, ask you then, given that your debut film with the BBC that, for the next fifteen years, you were working, making films with television — for BBC and with Channel Four… I’ve forgotten what I was going to ask now. Oh yes, when we saw this film tonight, Meantime… this is 1983, which is the start of Mrs Thatcher’s second term of office, and I just looked up my records and it may… not amuse you, but it may interest you, it may not, it may interest you, that this film was premiered — Meantime — at the London Film Festival of 1983 and a few weeks later was shown on Channel Four.
The day it was shown on Channel Four, three days previous to that, on British terrestrial television, there were three British films: on BBC1 was Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad, directed by John Schlesinger, with Alan Bates and Coral Browne; on BBC2 there was an adaptation of The Blue Dress [d. Peter Hammond] by William Trevor, starring Denholm Elliott; and on ITV, as it used to be called, was Saigon — Year of the Cat [d. Stephen Frears], written by David Hare, starting Judi Dench and Frederic Forrest.
That was just one ordinary, natural night. A bit special, but it was a night in the life of British television — we had three great films for television on three terrestrial channels, preceded, indeed heralded by Meantime. That’s where filmmaking went in the 70s and 80s, and you were brought to the BBC by Tony Garnett, and now, fortunately, you’ve moved into a new area of finance and backing, but this is what kept British film alive, wasn’t it, in this period?
ML: It’s complicated because obviously there was a film industry — a lot of what happened was the Americans using the British facilities to make film which were effectively Hollywood films. There were things going on but really, as I’ve already said, the indigenous, original work was alive and well and hiding in television.
In fact what happened was that throughout that period everybody who made television would, on the on hand, enthusiastically and regularly turn out films and at the BBC it was very free — I made, I think, eight or nine films in the twelve years between the first one, Hard Labour, and the last one, which was Four Days in July (1985), which we did in Belfast. There was complete freedom. There was no interference. You could do all kinds of things and people did. Everything that Alan Bennett wrote and that Stephen Frears directed and that all kinds of people did were all going on in television.
We used to say ‘why can’t we make these films for television, but make them on 35mm and then couldn’t they then have a theatrical release as well?’ And of course the answer was ‘absolutely not.’ The arrangement with the unions would preclude it and the people have already seen it on television — they won’t go and see it at the pictures, and all kinds of stuff.
But of course the other thing that we were all aware of was that out there in the world, that is to say outside the UK, nobody knew what was going on or what we were doing, and there was this international cinema which was not only a culture, with all those festivals and all the rest of it, but a market, with people who wanted to see films.
And so when Channel Four started, Jeremy Isaacs and indeed David Rose, who was the Head of — is David Rose here at all? — who was the Head of Drama… they’d been at the BBC and of course they’d been listening, and of course the whole thing was that… the notion was to do precisely that, to make films, give them a theatrical life and thus television will be funding cinema and thus films could actually happen — movies. And of course that really changed the entire landscape.
The film that I collaborated with Graham Benson to make — Graham Benson is here this evening and I’d love you to give him a round of applause because he’s the producer of Meantime… [applause] Really, this was the great breakthrough moment, because this was making an independent film in a feature mode, which is exactly what Channel Four was all about.
Sadly, we were slightly ahead of the game and when we asked if we could shoot it on 35mm and for it to have a theatrical release, the answer was ‘well we’re not really… we haven’t quite got that in place yet.’ And so we shot it on 16mm and it was a television film and it never really had the theatrical life that it, I think frankly would have enjoyed, and would have helped our lives.
MC: Absolutely right. Before we go on to… when you go back into movie mode in 1988, it may be a source of pride, regret, whatever, but Abigail’s Party (1977) is your best-loved work in a general popular sense and it’s ironic that this is a filmed studio version of a stage play. It does, however, contain one of the great definitive performances in your work and we’re going to watch a little bit of this now, which is a scene where Beverly, former beautician, is advising Janine Duvitski on what she might do to improve her superficial appearance.
Clip: Abigail’s Party
ML: I hate it. I’m very happy with the play, which was fine in the theatre but we rushed into a television studio and it was one of those dreadful old-fashioned television studios with five cameras… and the light is all over the place, it looks hideous, we rushed at it, there are boom shadows here and there. It looks crude, it has no… I can’t bear watching it. But of course the irony is that everybody thinks it’s… and people talk about it as a film, and it’s here in the retrospective… I actually said to them ‘I don’t mind if you don’t show Abigail’s Party’ but obviously they thought I was mad [laughter]… so…
I just want to say one thing. There are one or two of my friends here who were involved with the films that I made at the BBC, and what we were talking about, just before, was how we all, who made films, we wanted to make features and we were frustrated about that, but be that as it may, the important thing is we did actually get the freedom to do what I think was really good work, and a lot of people watched.
I think if Vera Drake, for example had had as many… if as many people went too see it at the pictures in the last year as watched Abigail’s Party or Nuts in May (1976) or Grown-ups (1980) or a number of those films, in one sitting throughout the UK, I think we’d have done better than we did actually, but mostly it was very creative and I think it was good news, the work that we did actually.
MC: There’s sometimes… it’s talked about now that drama on television isn’t what it was, or there isn’t the same impetus or there isn’t the same support or investment in it, and I just wonder whether that period that you were operating in, doing the television films, whether nowadays… is it because television has changed, the world has changed, or is it because people now absorb their drama in different ways, for instance, do they watch soap operas and The West Wing and The Sopranos…
ML: Well I think that the main thing is… there are interesting things on television, but certainly the focus on solid single dramas… apart from anything else, there were only three and then four channels. Really, the whole thing about ratings wars and worrying about the competition of ratings wasn’t really… it was a bit of an issue, but it wasn’t a cutthroat issue…
I have friends, writers particularly, who have got ten or twelve scripts kicking around that they’ve written and that they’ve developed and worked with producers, and they haven’t been made, and years go by, because television is run by a great number of neurotic procrastinators, who really have got to watch out for their jobs and are concerned about ratings and all kinds of criteria.
But then the independent sector was spawned out of the whole way that Channel Four operates, and there are lots of people out there, including me and my producer partner Simon Channing-Williams, who are still committed to finding ways of getting things done, getting things made with freedom, and independently.
MC: You’ve mentioned Simon Channing-Williams, who was, I think, your first assistant director on Grown-ups, in 1980, was where you first met and you have a great team of people who you’ve worked with consistently, and built up a sort of informal studio, in a sense.
For many people and I think I’m going to be boringly predictable in this, when it came to Naked in 1993, this was the film that really surprised, I mean it really took me by surprise. It was the Hamlet for the modern generation, it was a new, sort of picaresque, movie, that was built into something so desperate and so interesting and so vivid, about a guy coming from the north to the south, and barging his way through various rather unsavoury relationships and difficult circumstances… until he gets to this final scene, not final scene, but this scene that we’re going to show now, which is where he ends up in a strange workplace where one of your regular actors, Peter Wight, who’s appeared in several of your films, plays the official in charge…
ML: The night security man…
MC: And Johnny, by this time — the character — has been through so much… what it’s covered three days, this film? Two or three days? And he’s almost seen it all and it comes to this moment, where this bizarre confrontation… and I do think it’s in a sense a theatrical confrontation, and it’s one of the most extraordinary films, I think, in British film of the last 20 or 30 years, and now we’re going to watch it and then we can pick up after that. So it’s Naked.
Clip: Naked
MC: One of the most extraordinary things about that film is the lighting, the look of it, it’s… I don’t know… it’s shot through some kind of blue wash in many scenes, I don’t know how technically you did that, and the other question I’d like to ask at this point is location, because you don’t build studio sets, you go and find places to film in. and when you’ve found the location that must alter what the film is, to a certain extent. In a scene like this — I think it was an abandoned building in Tottenham Court Road…
ML: No, it’s not, it wasn’t an abandoned building, it was a building up for let, it was an office space, it’s in Charlotte Street… the thing about the locations altering… location and being on location, and place is part of what making the film is about. The actual thing of place is as important as character and the atmosphere, everything is interrelated.
MC: If you found a location, would that then alter the film you’re making?
ML: It doesn’t so much alter it as defines it. It’s very much… it’s an integral part of what happens. Yes it does alter it, but to talk about altering it would suggest that it previously existed at all. It in fact is part of the chemistry of what makes the whole cinematic moment or event.
The look of this film… this film Naked, shot by Dick Pope and designed by Alison Chitty, costume designs by Lindy Hemming, who’s here this evening, and we went to great lengths to discuss and experiment and shoot tests to work out how to create the look of it. For anyone that’s interested, what’s know as ‘bleach bypass’, where you miss out a certain bit that happens in the laboratory, gives the effect that you’re talking about.
But once I’d got the clue as to what the spirit of the film was going to be, this nocturnal journey, in a sense, then I was able to share that with that team and we were able to go out and find… experiment and work out how to make it look the way it does.
MC: Was moving out of the television ambiance into film production again, was that a liberation, because your films became, I think, bigger after that. Are we therefore to conclude that the films up to that point were defined by the constrictions of budget and possibility and that since then you’ve become more… not imagistic… metaphorical… there’s all sorts of larger backgrounds to your films now.
ML: I think that’s true although…
MC: Is it just money, or…
ML: There’s a lot of things involved, apart from anything else… some things have changed because things have moved on, I’ve moved on and, apart from anything else the more films you make, the more new territory you need to investigate in subsequent films.
But I think the thing about… we looked at Meantime before and, as I’ve said, although that was made outside of the institutional constraints such as they were and, as I say, I never really experienced them as such at the BBC, it was made in television mode and yet I would say that it has… there are resonances and things that… there’s the surface story, the surface events, but there is a great deal of stuff — I hope — going on beyond it and around it and underneath it that goes beyond merely the surface narrative.
And I think that’s probably… if I’m honest — not wanting to make too much of it — but in a way that’s true of quite a lot of the things I did for television. But the truth is that once we had got out there and had the freedom to get a little bit more money and spend more time and be more adventurous with the medium, in these feature films we made, then of course… it has been possible to do precisely that and to paint a bigger canvas, but never quite as big a canvas as I yet would like to paint, because we’ve never actually managed to get enough money to do that, although I suppose the biggest, obviously, the biggest canvas so far was that strange contribution called Topsy-Turvy (1999).
MC: Well, you take me there now, because this was a period piece. You’d done a piece in the theatre twelve years ago, which was also set in the Victorian times, which you made specially, I think, for Stratford East, and you used a parallel murder and a parallel story separated by 100 years, and that was your first delve into the past as a director, and Topsy-Turvy, obviously sating your boyhood enthusiasm for the chirpy tunes and merry satire of Gilbert and Sullivan, and now Vera Drake, which is set immediately post-war. There is a thing immediately post-war and Victorian are almost closer to us, or our generation. Is that what you feel about…
ML: It depends what you mean.
MC: Well, that you have a contact with the Victorian times through your family background… you know about it… and the war obviously…
ML: Yes, anyone of my age — I’m 62 — we all grew up with contact with the Victorian world. One was taught by Victorian people in a Victorian school, and Manchester is a very Victorian city, and so on and so forth. Victorian mores and values still hung in the relatively recent air in the 1940s and 50s if you like. So in a way… all of us can remember things that are from a time prior to when we actually were born. I was born in 1943, but somehow, in some way, the 30s and the 20s are in one’s received memory, even though I wasn’t actually there… and so forth.
MC: The question of imagery is also important because even in a short film like The Short & Curlies (1987), which we saw the other evening, there’s this imagery of sexual protection and rubber and… pulling on the mask and the hair thing… it’s a very explicit visual imagery in that film.
In Secrets & Lies (1996), which we’re now going to see an excerpt from, there’s recurring imagery of how people see things, or ways of seeing, as John Berger called it, and you’ve got a photographer, you’ve got a theme of colour blindness, or the black girl discovering that her mother is a white woman, when she, courtesy of the 1975 legislation, tracks down her real blood mother, and there is a kind of coherence about this film in terms of its imagery, although it exists entirely as well on a narrative level, and we’re going to show a scene now whereby… it’s the first encounter between the girl who’s discovered who her blood mother is and she meets her for the first time in this extraordinary scene from Secrets & Lies.
Clip: Secrets & Lies
MC: I want to move on quite quickly to the next extract, because then we must bring the audience in before we finish.
ML: Aren’t they already here? [laughter]
MC: They’re there… some of them are still awake.
ML: Yes, there’s a guy in the back row… he can’t get to sleep…
MC: But this extraordinary scene… it reminds us how a lot of your films — most of them, in fact all of them are based in social issues. I must just ask you a technical question about this scene. This wonderful contrast between Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Brenda Blethyn’s rather more busy performance was taken up by one film critic as saying, well if these two people had never met before, would they sit next to each other in an abandoned café, or would they not sit opposite each other. And my feeling was that, well that’s the way you filmed the scene, that was the maximum impact… but presumably you could have filmed it with the two opposite each other. It was a question asked about the staging of that kind of scene in a film.
ML: The truth of the matter is… the shape of the screen is this… and if you sit them side by side, that is an image… and the dynamics of what goes on when you can see them both side by side says one kind of thing, and also the fact that they are side by side makes them… in a way if you sit by side with someone in a restaurant or a café, you don’t naturally interrelate, it’s slightly awkward in a way.
But on another level, it is a device, obviously, so that… I remember that when we started to rehearse it, improvise and stuff, to arrive at the scene, they were sitting opposite each other, and then it just seemed logical to put them side by side because we were making a film, and you can… go next door and see 2000 Years, some of whose cast are here tonight because they’ve got the night off this week, and… people say ‘God it was like sitting in a real room.’ But actually it’s a massive contrivance, because actually sitting in a theatre, looking at the most artful collection of things going on.
So it’s all about… and the real point is this: if, when watching this scene, if real people — as opposed to critics — if the audience is actually worried about that, then it fails. Hopefully, and on the whole I think it is the case, the audience is taken up with being concerned about these two women and their not-inconsiderable predicament really. And that’s what it’s about.
MC: Fair enough. Before we move on to a general discussion, we must end with the final clip we have this evening, from… Secrets & Lies was a breakthrough film for you in the sense that it had some kind of international recognition at Cannes, and, of course Vera Drake, your latest film has had a marvellous reception: five Oscar nominations, fantastic performances, absolutely detailed, meticulous design, which is, when you look back at it, even the cardigans in all your early films are right.
Everything is… you’re such a costume freak, you’re so exact about all the… you and your colleagues… everything is… nobody has a bad wig, nobody has a wrong costume, there’s not a wrong prop, there’s not a wrong setting. Everything is absolutely meticulous, this whole question of truth and reality which has been diverted into some argument about ‘The Method’ and Stanislavsky and in your case is so interesting and different from that line of argument.
We’d like to end, I think, tonight, with this extraordinary early scene from Vera Drake, in which the… they’ve just finished the evening meal… oh God, I’m now on a microphone… and the men are lighting up their cigarettes, and if you just look at the detail of the setting, the costumes, the acting, the tenseness of it all, I think it really sums up the art of…
ML: I have to say that… I’m glad you’ve said all those things, but of course what also makes it work is how it’s shot and how it’s edited and all those other things too…
MC: I think one of the things… people think because you’re just filming real things, people forget that there is a kind of cinematic process involved here. There is… those elements that you mentioned and they are hard won and long conquered and absorbed in all your work, and this is a very good example of it, in Vera Drake.
MC: Well we’re almost up to date now, so it’s now time to ask the questions that I didn’t ask that you would want to. I’d love to take some questions from anyone here this evening, if someone’s bursting with some comment or… question or… there you are, thank you…
Audience: I was wondering if your approach to working with the actors differs at all when you’re making a period film like Topsy-Turvy or Vera Drake, as opposed to your usual contemporary setting.
ML: It doesn’t… it’s inherently the same complicated, complex process, but obviously… all films, all these films have different requirements, and obviously the role of research, which involves everybody, not least the actors, is, in a sense greater when the job is to get ourselves back into a different time.
At an obvious level it’s a question of how people talked and all of that, but it goes much deeper than that — how people lived, what people’s lives were about, what influenced and conditioned the way people were, and when, for example, when we did Topsy-Turvy, quite apart from all the work that went on to do with the singing and dancing and all the stuff specifically to do with that industrial process that the film was about, of theatre, there was… a great deal of work went on in the context of… to investigate how people behaved socially.
We actually had, at one stage, we had etiquette workshops on the go because the way people behaved in middle-class late Victorian England was very specific, with all its codes and mores, for example. Quite apart from questions of language and so forth. So it’s just a question of… like all work, and all creative work, it’s a question of doing what needs to be done in order to bring it to life. But the basic principle of creating characters in an organic way is the same, whether it’s a contemporary or a period piece, or indeed, whether it’s a play or a film… a film or a play I should say.
Audience: Are there any actors or actresses in particular that you enjoyed working with, and you’d like to work with again?
MC: All of them sitting here tonight.
ML: Well they’re all here… [laughter] All the ones that have bothered to come tonight are my favourites. [laughter] I’ll tell you what, just for fun, can you put your hand up if you’re an actor that’s worked with me in a play or a film… Just have a look round, see how many there are.
MC: Oh dear.
ML: Thank you very much. You will understand that it would be difficult for me to answer that question and to get out in one piece. [laughter]
Audience: People say I look like Tim Roth…
ML: I think people should get glasses. [laughter]
Audience: … Made in Britain period. Given that you’ve just had that question, who isn’t here among those actors that you’ve worked with that you’d like to be here tonight?
ML: Like a dog with a bone… [laughter] I can’t answer that, that’s terrible. The truth of the matter is that I can count on the fingers of one hand the actors that I’ve worked with that I definitely don’t want to work with again. There are some, and some people here know who they are [laughter], that’s to say actors who are perfectly good but didn’t know how to behave themselves and were a pain in the arse. But you can count them on the fingers of one hand, and on the whole, one of the joys of my life is working with really nice people who are very creative, very stimulating, good people to spend time with and we’ve delivered — they’ve delivered — amazing performances, and it honestly would be ridiculous for me to talk about anybody individually, frankly. I’m sorry…
MC: Lady on the end there…
Audience: Not a lady, but…
MC: I’m sorry… [laughter]
ML: I think you should try and contact your feminine side… [laughter] in order to ask this question.
Audience: I won’t go falsetto but… given your working methods, how on earth did you pitch films in the early stages of your career?
ML: The thing is I was really lucky, because… the whole thing about… the person I most… the two people I most have to thank are Albert Finney for taking a blind gamble on giving us some money to make Bleak Moments and especially Tony Garnett, who wheeled me into the BBC and persuaded them to let me do it, and having done it… the thing about the BBC — as I’ve said earlier — it was such a liberal atmosphere… liberal place, that I was able to go in on quite a number of occasions and they would say ‘okay here’s the dates, there’s the budget, go away and make a film.’
And so really I was… I think that’s the luckiest thing that could possibly have happened to me, so I did go and make all these films, and very seldom did I say what they were going to be. In fact the only… three times I said what they were going to be. The first one was the first one, which was Hard Labour, where I indicated… actually I did a little drawing, a little map of characters with arrows pointing at each other as a sort of… which really bore no resemblance to the film we finally made, which Tony Garnett needed in order to help the powers that be… be persuaded.
The second one was in fact Nuts in May, because what we’d done is created… we’d done a stage play about Keith and Candice-Marie… we said even at the time it would be great to see them out in the countryside and when I got the opportunity to make a film I suggested that as an idea.
And the only other time was the last film at the BBC, Four Days in July, where I suggested that… what I wanted to do was to go and explore and make a film in some way related to the so-called Troubles in the north of Ireland, and that’s what happened. But otherwise I was able just to go in and out and make things up without saying what they were going to be.
By the time Channel Four… we were able to start doing features, I’d been established sufficiently for it to be plausible. But even now it’s a problem, having said all of that, and Simon Channing-Williams, my producer, who is here, would — were he to say anything about this, which I know he won’t — would confirm that the fact that people don’t know what it’s going to be, and there isn’t a script etc. is still quite a problem.
MC: But Mike, given you say all that, Heaven forfend there should be another Mike Leigh coming forth, but what would he do… he or she do? Because that climate of giving you a budget to go out and make a film, that system of patronage that you refer to… You mix with young film directors now, what are they going to do?
ML: I think the answer to that, apart from anything else, is the great thing that’s changed is new technology, and that young filmmakers… it is now possible… the access to technology which makes it far easier to find ways of getting films made with complete freedom. You don’t necessarily have to make a film in the cumbersome mode of conventional feature film making. So in a way that is the answer to that, and I think there are people, including my illustrious son Leo Leigh, who is a very talented filmmaker himself, who is able to get out there and make stuff with technology that’s instantly available.
MC: Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll have one more question, because we have a special announcement to make in a minute. Can we have one more question, please? Thank you.
Audience: Mike, do you find that the characters you create are similar to yourself, and why do you like… play music and what does it mean when you play music instead of dialogue? Do you understand?
ML: I understand. [laughter] I presume those are two separate questions.
Audience: Yes.
ML: I don’t think the characters that I create are similar to me. Some people think that I bear some similarities to Maurice, the photographer in Secrets & Lies, as played by Timothy Spall. I personally can’t see it. I suppose some people might think there are some similarities between me and Dave, the character played by John Burgess, who is here this evening, in 2000 Years next door, but I certainly can’t see that connection… [laughter]
And I think the use of music in films is a general thing. It’s part of a way of creating… telling the story and creating atmosphere. I think how we do that in my films is, in principle, what you find in all kinds of movies really.
MC: Thank you for that, and thank you for the questions. As a bonus this evening I have to say we have I suppose a special guest, a special arrival, because… I’d like to introduce to you the Chair of the BFI who, rather like Mike himself, but in a different way I think, started off in theatre for many years, and has lately returned to the theatre, as you have done with your… triumphant? I’m just quoting other people’s reviews… of 2000 Years, and has just had the most spectacular — and I mean that word advisedly — success with Madam Butterfly at the ENO, and it gives me great, great pleasure to introduce to you, Mike’s fellow filmmaker, and Chair of the BFI, Anthony Minghella. [applause]
Anthony Minghella: Good evening. Why am I here? I feel like Eamonn Andrews… [laughter] I’m hopeful because it seems that the BFI, which I’m representing the governors of this evening, loves filmmakers whose names come in the middle of the alphabet. And so people like Kiarostami, Kieslowski, Kurosawa, Ken Loach, have been some of the very few and very rare recipients of a BFI Fellowship. So K, K, K, L… Leigh, that’s an L…
I don’t think that I’ve ever been in a shorter meeting at the BFI than the one that was held when it was suggested that Mike Leigh might be the next recipient of a BFI Fellowship. The meeting lasted about seven seconds because everybody in the governors said ‘that’s obvious, haven’t we done it already?’
I love Mike Leigh’s films, I watched them when I was a student, I learned to recite some of the lines of Abigail’s Party, I know how long it takes to chew your food… from Nuts in May. He’s a brilliant filmmaker, he’s one of the very few filmmakers whose name you can say in any country in the world and people have an idea of what that movie will be like: beautiful, observed, true…
He’s a wonderful, wonderful filmmaker, and he talks about the dispossessed and the people who haven’t been in other cinemas, haven’t been in other people’s films, and he’s made so many people go and make films like his, or make series on television like his people. He’s a unique voice, he’s ploughed the same furrow for a long, long time, and I’m so privileged and honoured to be representing the BFI tonight to give Mike his BFI Fellowship. [applause]
ML: What happens next? Is that the end? [laughter]
MC: You can say something if you like… break the habit of a lifetime. [laughter]
ML: Well I just want to say thank you. I’m really overwhelmed… thank you. And thank you to the BFI. This is a very special honour and… the only thing I would like to say is that it’s always great to be here. I love this cinema and I always have and continue to spend a lot of time here, in the NFT. It’s not lovey talk, I really do love it and therefore I love the BFI and I’ve been a member, an ordinary member of the BFI since 1961.
Just lately because I’ve been working for the first time next door at the National, it’s been great to… I’ve always linked the two because, apart from anything else I often, when I go to a play at the National, you can’t get into the loo at the National, so I always come to the NFT… [laughter]
It’s great that both… my films are on… there’s a great sense of the South Bank, and it’s wonderful that the NFT is on the South Bank, and I’m horrified at the possible prospect that the NFT, when the lease runs out, is going to move to King’s Cross, which I regard with — as do a lot of people — with absolute horror, and so I’d like to take this opportunity, if I’m not being too ungrateful in saying so, that I hope that those fears are totally unfounded and that we can all go on celebrating this very special riverside shrine to film, for a very long time to come, and thank you, BFI, thank you everybody here this evening. [applause] And I’d like to thank Michael Coveney for his contribution and his guidance. Thanks you. [applause]
Interview © BFI 2005
