Mike Leigh’s Love Affair with Real Life

The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him, it’s a term of great respect, meaning a performer who’s highly skilled, versatile, creative, smart—qualities especially important for Leigh’s actors, who create his films with him, from plot to dialogue. His new film, “Hard Truths,” reunites him with the superlative Leighian character actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who co-starred in his drama “Secrets & Lies,” from 1996, for which they both received Oscar nominations. There, she played Hortense Cumberbatch, a serene young optometrist who seeks, and finds, her lovably chaotic birth mother; in “Hard Truths,” set in a working-class British Caribbean community, she’s Pansy, an anxious, middle-aged wife and mother who keeps a spotless house and rages at everybody she meets. As the movie begins, the camera pans across a series of cheerful row houses with gardens, landing on one that’s identical but for its unadorned severity. Inside, Pansy wakes up screaming; in some ways, she never stops. As the movie progresses, Pansy, constantly at her wits’ end, fights with shop clerks, a dentist, her long-suffering husband and son, her sister. Some fight back; many look baffled, at a loss. Her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a warm and kindhearted hair stylist, greets life with an easy openness, and keeps trying to connect. “I don’t understand you, but I love you,” she tells Pansy. Audiences might feel the same way.

“Hard Truths” is Leigh’s first new film in six years. His most recent before it, “Peterloo,” about the Peterloo Massacre, and “Mr. Turner,” about the painter J. M. W. Turner, were realism of a different kind: well-funded historical epics about actual people and events, à la his wonderful “Topsy-Turvy” (1999), about Gilbert and Sullivan. “Hard Truths” is a return to Leigh’s classic form: a contemporary, intimate ensemble drama exploring regular people’s lives. His famously rigorous and collaborative writing process, often drawing on a trusted cadre of recurring actor-collaborators, involves conversation, improvisation, and extensive preparation and rehearsal, from which a script of sorts is memorized by the cast but never written down. Leigh, a doctor’s son who grew up middle-class in a working-class neighborhood in Manchester, came up with his method after a youth spent studying traditional performance, from music hall to theatre to the circus, and wanting to see real people, real lives, onstage and onscreen.

Now eighty-one, Leigh was recently in town for the New York première of “Hard Truths.” We met in a sunny room overlooking Madison Square Park. In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, he was lively, exacting, and precise, prone to urgent gesticulating. We discussed the making of “Hard Truths,” his earliest plays, his real-life observations of Laurel and Hardy and the Beatles, his creative process, and the future, in which he plans to keep making movies.

Let’s start with “Hard Truths.” How did you decide to work with Marianne Jean-Baptiste again?

Well, as you know, we go back a long way. I mean, this is the third time I’ve worked with her.

The second time being when she did the music for “Career Girls”?

Sorry—it’s the fourth time I’ve worked with her, because yeah, she did the music for “Career Girls.” The first time was back in 1993, when she, and indeed Michele Austin, who plays Chantelle in “Hard Truths,” were sisters in a play called “It’s a Great Big Shame,” at the Royal Stratford East, in London. That was a play which, in the first act, dramatized this famous Victorian song. And we set it in the East End, and the first act was all white working-class folk. And the second act is in the same house a hundred years later, in 1993. It was a Black family, and the two sisters were played by Michele and Marianne.

Marianne was then two or three years out of drama school, and you just knew immediately that she was a hoot. She has a great sense of humor and she’s really good at characters. And, as you know, I work with character actors, that’s what it’s all about. And then, of course, she did “Secrets & Lies,” and Michele plays her friend in that.

They’re great together, those two.

Oh, absolutely. And a pair of actors who click don’t have to be buddies, but it’s a bonus, and they’ve kept up. Marianne lives in L.A. She’s had a terrific career, and she’s in her fifties and she’s raised daughters and all the rest of it. And so she brings a great perception to it. She’s very, very sharp and she’s very, very compassionate. And [with Pansy] she can go into this dark place, and know how to handle it. So that’s it, really.

What was it like being around this character, Pansy, so much?

Well, it’s not in the great misunderstood tradition of so-called method acting. Actors absolutely get into character, and then—I’m very strict about this—they come out of character so they’re able to be themselves. And, more importantly, they’re able to be objective about what happened when they were in character, so that we can then work with it. I mean, the thing that doesn’t make sense is when actors are just “I am the character.” It’s not viable artistic material. So, to answer your question, it’s not really an issue.

When you’re shooting, how much do you—I don’t know if “direct” is the right word, but do you weigh in on what they’re doing? Do you say, “Let’s try it this way,” or—

It’s an interesting question. I think it needs a bit of exposition. First of all, as you may know, we spend, in the case of this film, fourteen weeks creating the characters, exploring the relationships, the backstory, doing a lot of improvisation and all of that stuff, before we get to the shoot. So you know, scene by scene, sequence by sequence, location by location—we script through rehearsal, and arrive at something very precise, and then shoot it. So obviously that involves directing, writer-directing, on my part. So, in that sense, “A lot” is the answer to your question.

But one interesting thing that you said is “Let’s try it this way,” which is kind of—“Well, we’ve done it like that, let’s try a different and opposite interpretation.” But because of what we’ve done—in the sense of interpreting a script a different way, it doesn’t really arise, because the whole thing is grounded in a sort of, I’ll say this cautiously, inevitable way. But we’ve arrived at that through all sorts of choices in the foundation.

So they know their characters so well, you wouldn’t need to do that.

Yes. They’re not looking for a character. Of course, you get moments of inspiration, because, apart from everything I just said, the only thing that matters is the moment in front of the camera. What will often happen with my shoots is we’ll do a take and I say, “O.K., let’s go again.” And everyone says, “Why? That was great!” And I say, “Well, you never know.” It’s not about something obviously different. It’s about nuances in behavior, which you’ve then got in the cutting room to be very refined with.

So do you shoot many takes of the same scene?

Compared with most conventions, no. Because you don’t need to.

Right.

I mean, it isn’t for me to say this, but on many films umpteen takes happen, because the actors aren’t grounded. They can’t remember their lines, or there’s been no rehearsal, or they’re still looking for the character. But on ours that virtually never happens, because everybody’s grounded. Certainly, the biggest myth about my stuff is that what you’re looking at is improvised in front of the camera. It virtually never is. It’s very, very tightly rehearsed and distilled.

I think the dialogue is a little too good to be improvised on the spot.

I think that’s right. I mean, it should seem like real people behaving like people behave. But what I don’t do is let things happen and just shoot in a quasi-documentary way and then try and bail it all out. That just doesn’t interest me at all.

One of your techniques is not letting the actors know what’s happening in the scenes that they’re not in. Do you feel like there are moments that have paid off because of that, with the surprise or the freshness of—

Yeah. It’s fundamental. When I ask an actor to take part in a film, I say, “O.K., please be in it. I can’t tell you anything about the film because it doesn’t exist. I can’t tell you about the character because there is no character. You and I have got to collaborate to make the character. And here’s the thing: You will never know anything about anything except what your character knows.” So the actor doesn’t have an overview, which lets you explore truthfully, without any trace of bullshit, what the reaction of the character is and how they build relationships. That’s what it’s all about. So it’s interesting you call it a technique. It’s probably more than a technique. It’s a given requirement. It informs the entire process, and thus the story.

So does the process start with choosing an actor, or a couple of actors?

Yes. But there are several answers to that, perhaps. First of all, with some films I’ve made, there was a kind of agenda. “Secrets & Lies” arises from the fact that lots of people in my family adopted kids. And so I decided to explore that, because once I started to look into it, I realized that it was far more important to make a film about the baby that’s given away and the birth mother rather than the people who adopt, which is less interesting or less important, in a sense. “Vera Drake” arose from the fact that I’m old enough to remember what it was like before the 1967 Abortion Act in the U.K. I remember people with unwanted pregnancies, and abortionists around, and all of that. So in those contexts, I knew what I had as a premise. And also with the historical films—“Topsy-Turvy,” “Mr. Turner,” and “Peterloo”—we knew what we were dramatizing. So that’s one answer to the question.