Life is a rehearsal; Boyd Farrow on Mike Leigh

 

With another film gathering awards as he approaches his 40th year in the business, Boyd Farrow finds Mike Leigh as highly-charged as ever. 

 

It is hard to tell if Mike Leigh really does dislike being interviewed as much as he professes to do. After all, most film journalists adore his films, which must surely help his distributors to shift a few more tickets, and that, in turn, must make meetings with prospective financiers a more pleasant experience. Or maybe Leigh actually enjoys being prickly and grouchy – reflexively, he answers the question “what is he most proud of in his professional career?” with “avoiding doing ridiculous interviews” – and perhaps the Grumpy Old Man act is just part of his schtick, like Jack Dee or Gordon Brown. But, at least his opacity is consistent: “I have always made films where I tend to ask more questions than give answers.”

 

Last month Leigh was once again being bludgeoned by questions and garlands for Vera Drake, his latest, rich, warm, funny and sad perspective on English life, which had just wowed audiences at the London Film Festival, as it had impressed the jury at the Venice Film Festival. Clearly, a film about a part-time abortionist in 1950s London is bound to reheat – especially in the British press – the hoary old chestnut about polemically-driven art, but Leigh has always insisted that he carries no agenda whatsoever. “My films are full of ideas, lots of different ones – things working on all kinds of different levels. For me, making a film is an exploration into what we feel. I’m not concerned with making films that are conclusive or prescriptive, and certainly not propaganda. I feel that the audience should have something to work with when the film’s over, something to discuss and argue about”.

 

One thing Leigh does believe strongly is that it is filmmakers who are dumbing down and not the audiences: “The attention span of audiences has not shrunk – that whole issue annoys me; it has been invented by people who are not making high-quality films that have stories worth telling. The idea that in the age of the computer chip people cannot sit through a film is complete rubbish. If a film is compelling, people will sit through it just like they always have. It is basically just lazy filmmakers”.

 

Really knowing his characters, of course, is as crucial to Leigh as knowing how to prevent audiences fidgeting. Ironically, in the so-called year of the documentary feature, there has been a surfeit of dramas with convincing ‘real people’. Leigh believes that this is partly because filmmakers do not aspire to the condition of documentary, in other words “it wouldn’t be able to go on if the camera weren’t there”. Then there is the what-would-the-character-have-had-for-breakfast? approach that Leigh is renowned for. He worked with his actors for five months on Secrets and Lies before a single frame was shot. In Leigh’s dictum:  “None of this sees the light of day in tangible terms, as action in front of the camera. But we really know who these people are. We know everything there is to know about them socially, economically and in every detail of their lives. And it all informs what happens.” 

 

Famously, Leigh’s films are scripted through rehearsal. He writes them by working with the actors as they improvise, making suggestions, adding and removing things. They are then scripted sequence by sequence during the shoot. Again, this is only possible by having created the whole premise of the film in advance and, implicit in that, the characters’ relationships and background.

 

He is concerned about opportunities for young directors to learn their craft in a timely fashion. “Certainly I was extremely lucky to have been working in television during a period in which there was great creative freedom,” he acknowledges. “Actually, all I experienced at the BBC was freedom but that was a special period I cannot imagine what it would be like today.  In fact, I’m not sure if I would be allowed to work in TV now. The truth is that television companies are really slow to take more risks or encourage people who take risks. There is less interference in the independent film world but then I am fortunate because have been making films in a certain way for a long time and they are tiny things really”.

 

Leigh knows he is damn lucky to be able to say things like “I make films about things I care about” or  “I don’t know how I would compromise if I wanted to” and he is genuinely committed to putting something back a lot back into the profession. Over the years he has taught at RADA, The Drama Centre, the National Film And Television School and the Royal College of Art film department. He is chairman of The London Film School, where he graduated and he regularly gets involved in events there to “continue our traditional commitment to original, indigenous, independent British films and filmmakers”. At the LFS’s Showreel Show” and Awards Ceremony in September he said: “We don’t believe you can make national cinema by formula, either commercial or ideological. True British films can only come out of honesty and imagination”.  

 

As always, he currently has a handful of projects he is working on and naturally he cannot say anything about. He cannot say anything about the upcoming play he is attached to write and direct for the National Theatre because it is “improvised” and he says one possible film is the ‘Flight Attendants’ project he has variously planed since 1992 but he is irritated by talk of post-9/11 postponement. “That’s a red herring,” he grumbles.

 

The next few weeks, however, will be spent doing a few more cursed interviews to promote Vera Drake and, who knows, possibly receiving a few Oscar and BAFTA nominations. He says really what he is really proud of is “having made 17 full-length films with no script, no big stars and no interference for nearly 40 years” but he attributes this to luck and the generosity of others. “I have always considered myself to have been extremely lucky. I’ve been lucky enough to meet some pretty generous people and I’ve been in the right place at the right time”. He singles out Tony Garnett, who gave him his big break at the BBC with Hard Labour and Albert Finney who underwrote the transformation of Bleak Moments play into a film in 1971. And, although he says he still finds it “genuinely amazing” that his charmed life has lasted so long, his advice to young film directors is a resounding “Never compromise.”

 

Source: Direct Magazine Winter 2004-2005