“People should have freedom to make the films they want to make”: Mike Leigh on rejection and the challenges for young filmmakers – LFF Screen Talk

“Thanks for coming out on this really shitty day,” said moderator Amy Raphael when introducing “the singular” Mike Leigh at his Screen Talk. She was referring to the rain that hammered everyone who made their way to NFT1 at BFI Southbank, though the wet weather for the festival’s final day didn’t dampen enthusiasm for the great filmmaker on stage, in jovial form himself. 

Part of that may be down to his established relationship with Raphael, to whom he opened up for the book Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh. Another factor may be that he’s still on a high from the recent reception of his latest film, Hard Truths (2024), following years of production delays and surprising exclusions from the Cannes, Telluride and Venice festival line-ups earlier this year.



“We really started to think that we’d made a shit film,” Leigh said of the rejection from institutions that had previously warmly embraced his work, including a Palme d’Or win for Secrets & Lies in 1996. “And then we sent it to Toronto, who were ecstatic about it. We have Spanish co-backers and they were very keen that we went to San Sebastián. We did, and it was amazing. And then we went to New York, which is always great.” 

The critical and audience responses to Hard Truths, including at London, suggest that Leigh has lost none of his skill in exploring complicated interpersonal dynamics with a rare intimacy, even with a large gap between this film and his most recent contemporary-set work, Another Year (2010). Leigh theorised that if what certain major festivals are looking for is “glitz and glamour, whatever you think about Hard Truths, you can’t accuse it of being glitz and glamour.”



Set in London, Hard Truths reunites Secrets & Lies stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin, here playing sisters Pansy and Chantal, whose relationship is at risk of crumbling due to the former’s relentless lashing out at her family and anyone else who crosses her path. “You do laugh a lot for the first half, and then the [humour] does stop, inevitably,” Leigh said when asked about the film’s structure. “Some people say, ‘Well, is that a deliberate construct?’ And it isn’t. Life is comic and tragic. It’s as simple as that. What’s going on is painful, but what’s hilarious is hilarious. How many people here have not laughed at a funeral?” Only a few people raised their hands.



The 70-minute Screen Talk couldn’t touch on everything that Leigh has given us across the decades, with clips and movie-specific discussion focusing on Hard Truths and career highlights from the 1990s onwards, including Another Year and Secrets & Lies, plus Naked (1993) and Vera Drake (2004). The latter was Leigh’s lone period piece given a spotlight in the session: his portrait of a selfless abortionist (Imelda Staunton) helping women induce miscarriages for unwanted pregnancies in 1950s Britain. “There was a retrospective of my films at Lincoln Center in New York just a couple of years ago,” said Leigh. “When they screened this and I said, ‘This ought to be on general release in the States’, the applause went on for minutes.”

“The film itself arose from the fact that I’m old enough to remember what it was like before the 1967 Abortion Act,” he said. “Although I was never responsible for an unwanted pregnancy myself, I was around people with that problem. The likes of Vera Drake and less savoury people too, both women and men, were around to [carry out] illegal abortions. For about 40 years, I sat on the idea. There was a private nurse [I knew] who was around, and then one day she wasn’t around for a long time. Years later, I found out that’s because she’d been in prison.”

When the chance came for questions from the audience, Leigh was asked if there were any emerging filmmakers he’s particularly excited by, and about how he views the landscape in which they’re starting out compared with the one that he started in. “I don’t want to list people’s names if you don’t mind,” replied Leigh. “There’s a lot of exciting stuff going on. But the more important part of your question is the second part. It is tougher. And the ridiculous thing is it shouldn’t be tougher. It should be easier, because when I started out, apart from anything else, however you got your film made or found the funding, you had to hire cameras. You had to get film stock. You had to go through laboratories and pay for that. Now, with new technology, it’s much more immediately accessible and cheaper, so it shouldn’t be more difficult.”



“As far as I’m concerned,” he continued, “young filmmakers are beset horribly by the preconceptions and so-called requirements on the part of central backers of various kinds, of a prescriptive nature. Box ticking of what’s respectable and what isn’t… about the nature of characters, stories, ethnicity and all the rest of it. People should have freedom to make the films they want to make without interference and with encouragement in a positive way.”

“Does that resonate with your own experience?” Leigh asked the audience member who had posed that question. “I’m not a filmmaker,” was the reply. 

“Well, you’re lucky!”