After all these years, Mike Leigh still won’t take a job “if there’s the remotest possibility anybody is going to interfere”
After all these years, the fascinating British director still won’t take a job “if there’s the remotest possibility that anybody is going to interfere.” Photo: Simon Mein/Kobal/Shutterstock Mike Leigh doesn’t have a new film out, but this is a good time to be a Mike Leigh fan. For starters, one of his greatest and most underrated films, 2002’s All or Nothing, starring Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville , has finally been released on Blu-ray, ahead of its 20th anniversary.
Yes, it was. I don’t really understand why. For anyone that was open to it or isn’t putting up barriers or prejudices, if it doesn’t get through to you on an emotional level, well then, forget it. It may be that it followed on from Topsy-Turvy. I thought, having done that previous, chocolate-box period film, so to speak, let’s go back to basics and look at issues that working-class people struggle with — the struggle on various levels, socially and economically, to survive.
James Corden now rules the world, so that’s in a class by itself. [Laughs] But they came through the ordinary processes of a casting director suggesting I see people. I saw a lot of young actors at that time. Sally Hawkins was one of them. Sally Hawkins is a consummate character actor. And when I say “character actor” — one of the things that’s important about the work that I do is it is about character actors, people who don’t play themselves.
Young James Corden in All or Nothing. Photo: Simon Mein/Thin Man/Alain Sarde/Studio Canal/Kobal/Shutterstock How do you determine whether an actor can handle this process? Vera Drake comes after this. Were you already thinking about the ideas behind Vera Drake? Because abortion is an element in All or Nothing as well.
There are elements of autobiography sneaking through my films. I grew up in a provincial, suburban place. A part of my very early life was in an industrial area. I was born in the war, in 1943, so I was a child in the 1940s. I was a repressed teenager in the 1950s in the decade when we all lived in this Catcher in the Rye, squeaky-clean, respectable world, and “the done thing” and all of that, because our folks had actually been to hell and back in World War II.
I started to try it in 1965 in what was called the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham, where I got a job as an assistant director. For various reasons, they had a very impressive, state-of-the-art studio theater, but they hadn’t got actors. But they had got a so-called arts club for 16- to 25-year-olds. I was hired to do whatever I wanted with these young people. I had these ideas about trying this sort of thing. Soon as we did it, we thought, Okay, this works.
I saw Naked in college, which is probably the exact right time for a movie like that. So for me, it’ll always be your greatest film. But it’s fascinating to revisit, because it changes with every viewing. Since Naked is being rereleased, have you noticed any changes with the way people respond to it?
Well, we have to be clear as to which film culture we’re talking about. You are on the other side of the Atlantic, which means that there’s a possibility that you’re talking about people whose terms of reference are defined by Hollywood. Now, I personally regard what I do as being part of that other major operation, which is what we call world cinema.
Here’s the thing. Abigail’s Party is a stage play, which we wheeled into an old-fashioned, five-camera television studio … a terrible medium. If you look at Abigail’s Party, you’ll see boom shadows and inconsistent lighting and all of that. But we did it after the actors had performed it 104 times in the theater, so it was rock-solid. It was screened on BBC Television, and the third time it was screened was on a very, very stormy night throughout the British Isles. It was on Channel One.
Godard used to say that the point was not to make political films but to make films politically. I feel like in many ways, your whole process is fundamentally a political process, because it’s about getting into people’s worlds and understanding the lives of people who you might not know. That seems to me an incredibly political thing for an artist to do.This period in the ’70s when you were working in television is a fascinating time.
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