In the Limelight: Mike Leigh

"In the Limelight: Mike Leigh" – Mike Leigh in conversation with Ben Gibson. Berlinale Talent Campus, February 11, 2008.

FILM IS ABOUT BEING DANGEROUS

Ben Gibson: HAPPY GO LUCKY (2008) is your tenth film in the second half of your career making cinema. And now, the world seems to be full of experts in Mike Leigh. It’s like the great moment in Woody Allen’s ANNIE HALL (1977) where somebody is going on about Marshall McLuhan in the cinema, and Marshall McLuhan comes up and says, you know nothing about my ideas. Woody Allen says, wouldn’t it be great if life was like that. I have been in so many places where I hear people saying, well, we are doing it the "Mike Leigh way". You know, we just let the cameras roll and the actors make stuff up, or whatever. Because we are a room full of filmmakers here, so can we talk seriously about your method, which has developed over that time. About you as a writer, and what materials you use when you begin writing on a project. Because we know that you are the only filmmaker in the world who walks in and says, hey, would you like to make a film, I am not going to tell you what it is about, but we will start sometime soon, and then people actually finance that. But, beyond that, it is really just a matter for our fantasy, what happens next.

Mike Leigh: It is a big and open sort of question. Perhaps a useful place to start thinking about what I do and how I do it, which I can only talk about in a basic way, is that where I am concerned, the most important thing is what ends up on the screen. And what ends up on the screen has to be, as far as I am concerned, absolutely distilled and disciplined and very thoroughly prepared, and if you like scripted and organised, but must live organically in the moment. It must have the absolute juice of life that makes something live on the screen in the moment when you experience it. And I say that because all of us here would aspire to doing precisely that however you go about making your films. And mostly that means writing your script and soforth. Now, I want to preface everything I say with, in the end I don’t actually think that anybody should try and make films the way I do, I think only I should do that because it is completely eccentric, it is absolutely idiosyncratic and it only really works for me. That isn’t to say that there isn’t all sorts of different ways you can make films and you can make anything you like. So, I wouldn’t like anything I might say to be misinterpreted to be a kind of attack on conventional ways of working with script. Because there is no question that in the body of world cinema, and also Hollywood cinema, there are endless great movies that have been made in a so-called conventional way. For me, the whole experience of making a film, which is to say conceiving and particularly shooting a film, is a journey of discovery where what we discover is what the film is. I think it is probably not completely insignificant that I did in my early years as a student… what are you laughing at? (to someone in audience). There is someone guffawing in the front row here because I said in my former years… Why is that funny?

Audience member: Because the way you said it was funny.

Mike Leigh: Alright, fair enough. But that proves that none of us get any less insecure the older we get. I was going to say, before this lady roared with laughter, which she is still doing I have to tell you, I did spend time as an art student, and I was going to say that the creative process, the relationship between the painter and the canvas, or the composer and the process of composing, or if you like, the writer and the page, is that journey. All art is a synthesis of improvisation and order. So all I really do basically is to make the journey of discovering what the film is, one where the so-called process of scripting is part of the whole process of making the film. In other words, when I and everybody I work with, go out and shoot the film, what we really do is to go out and make the film up as we go along, to invent the material in the location to arrive at something by working it up in the location as part of the actual process, and then shooting it. By creating something that is actually organic and three-dimensional which becomes that two-dimensional thing which is film.

CREATING THE RAW MATERIALS OUT OF WHICH YOU WILL MAKE THE FILM

So in other words, the scripting, the shooting, the rehearsing, all are part of the same process. Now, when you asked me the question about sitting down with a group of actors and all of that, that is asking me to talk about what I do before I actually go out on location. But the important key to understanding anything I might say about what I do before I go out on location is to remember that it is all about what happens when we actually shoot the film. And all we are doing before that is to prepare. In fact, normally for all of these films which we have just seen clips from (SECRETS AND LIES [1996], VERA DRAKE [2004], HAPPY GO LUCKY) we rehearsed, which is to say we prepared and created and invented the world of the film for, in each case, around six months. At the beginning of that period of time I always get together the actors and some of the people who are going to be involved, and the first thing I always say is, in six months time on such and such a date, we are going to go out and make a film, and everything we are going to do between now and then is simply to prepare ourselves to be able to do that then. In other words, the important thing about it, is that what we do in the preliminary period is not creating an artefact but merely preparing ourselves to create that artefact. And of course, it goes without saying that since we are talking about film, that of course even when you shoot a film, you are not making a film, you are merely creating the raw materials out of which you will make the film. Because as we all know, all films are made in the cutting room. Now, in order to bring the whole world of the film into existence sufficiently, that we are prepared when we go out to shoot it, basically what happens, and all that happens, is that we invent all the characters, we invent their world, we research their world, we investigate in depth all the relationships between them, we investigate in depth every aspect of every character, we do incredible amounts of work collectively to bring into existence the history of their lives. So characters, as it were, live through the years and years of the development of their relationships.

IN-DEPTH INVESTIGATION INTO THE CHARACTER’S WHOLE BACK-STORY

Ben Gibson: In the case where they don’t have a relationship that is known, like Brenda Blethyn and Marianne Jean-Baptiste in SECRETS AND LIES…

Mike Leigh: Well, if you analyse the three scenes that we have just seen in those terms, the first scene, which as you know is about a mother and a daughter who are meeting for the first time. The daughter was given away as a baby, that is what the scene is about, and was adopted, and the mother has always thought the circumstances were different, though she knows she had a baby, obviously. So in terms of that actual moment in the film, that is a meeting in the film between two people, who, for all intents and purposes, don’t know each other at all. In the second of the scenes we saw, we have substantial material even in that short extract of relationships that have been ongoing all their lives. It is very close family relationships. In the third extract you have a teacher and a headmistress to work with each other but beyond that it is a scene in which everybody is meeting each other for the first time and there is no particularly significant agenda other than the fact that they are there at this flamenco class. Nevertheless, for all of those scenes, you can be sure that they all came out of, or were preceded by in-depth investigation into the whole back-story if you like of the characters lives leading up to those moments. So, in the case of SECRETS AND LIES, which we saw first, lots of months of development went into the relationship between the central character and her brother, also the brother and his wife, the central character and her white daughter, and all these things were investigated through every detail of the years and years of their relationships. Similarly in VERA DRAKE, the second clip we saw. There are ways that we investigate relationships between parents and children, starting from when the children were born. But of course, we have gone before that, for weeks, investigating the previous relationship and how the parents met each other and what their backgrounds were, and so on and so forth. And the third film is more obvious, we got the back-story, and the central character is the girl with the red stripes, and we had obviously investigated her back-story, and developed it, and when you see the film, you see her sisters, so they were very much part of the development. What I have to make clear is that when I embark on this journey, and now I am talking about how it works just for me, I have in my head, depending on the film, ideas or thoughts as to what it is going to be, or a conception of what it is going to be, to a greater or lesser extent.

Ben Gibson: Are they thematic, or are they locations or individuals…?

Mike Leigh: No, they are not really locations. They are more about feelings and ideas and thoughts. In the case of SECRETS AND LIES, I knew that I wanted to make a film about adoption, about people who are adopted, because there are in my life close to me, people who have adoption-related experiences. Once I started to investigate the whole area of adoption, I realised that what is in some senses, more usefully interesting, is to focus on the person who is given away as a baby, rather than to just look at an adoptive family into which a person has been adopted. In the case of VERA DRAKE again, I had nurtured for a very long time the plan to make a film about abortion before it was legal. So, this was to look at the issues.

CASTING THE ACTORS

Ben Gibson: Could I interrupt you? You had a group of actors there, and in each case, often you have a company of actors with whom you often work on many occasions, and these group of actors… you don’t know what roles they are going to play as you cast them?

Mike Leigh: It varies. I was going to say that the third film HAPPY GO LUCKY has in common if you like with my film NAKED (1993), which is where I had more of a feeling of what I was going to do rather than an actual clear scheme. I had notions behind NAKED of doing something to do with the impending apocalypse at the end of the millennium, and all the things to do with men and women and sex. In a way it was very much a feeling really, and the same is true of HAPPY GO LUCKY. So, in answer to your question, whereas in VERA DRAKE it was very clear that someone was going to be this central character who was going to be an abortionist, and indeed, once I had decided this was going to be what the film was about, I had a much clearer scheme of the structure of the film. I knew there were going to be doctors and police and judges and all of those things. Whereas often, and it is always the case to some extent with some of the films to a considerable extent, like HAPPY GO LUCKY and NAKED, I don’t know when I cast an actor. I often cast actors without any idea really what they are going to be. But the very fact that you cast a particular actor, even though it is important to say that I work with actors because they are character actors, which is to say that they are versatile, they don’t just play themselves, they can do a whole range of different kinds of people. But if you decide you cast a guy or a woman, that in itself is a decision. If you cast somebody who is old, then that is a decision and if you cast somebody who is black or white, that is another decision. There are potentials, but the job is to sit down with the actor and to create a character.

A SENSE OF OWNERSHIP OVER THE CHARACTER

Even in the case of VERA DRAKE, where I knew this woman was going to be an abortionist, that is all we knew. We then had to create the character. So, it is very much about collaborating with each actor to make a character. And I suppose one of the keys to the whole so-called process is that, when I ask any actor to take part in one of these films, I always say: "Please be in the film, there isn’t a script, I am not going to tell you what it is about, either I don’t know, or if I did I wouldn’t tell you, and also, you will never know anything about the film except what your character knows, at any stage of the whole procedure." And, actors not only go for that, but they also enjoy it because they really have a sense of ownership over their character. They see the whole experience as we do in real life, with their character at the centre of his or her universe, and they are really able to investigate it truthfully. Because obviously this is one of the keys to the whole thing. How it works is, of course there is a lot of discussion to start with and various different ways of getting going to create a character, but a great bulk of the actual work is doing improvisations in character. And, if you are an actor, and many of you here will have the experience of acting, and are in an improvisation workshop situation, and the person in charge says, okay, let’s do an improvisation. You are the husband, you are the wife, and you are having an affair and the other one doesn’t know, and now act it and pretend you don’t know and be truthful. Well of course, it’s bullshit. That is just a crude illustration of the point. In order to create a way of bringing into existence in a very complex and real and sophisticated and organic and truthful way, the way I do it with actors, is to maintain a strict discipline, so that everybody really is able to be absolutely spontaneous. Now of course, that goes on for a long time, and gradually you accumulate the whole thing.

LEARN FROM EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS

The other thing I wanted to say was this. It would be easy for you to fall into the trap or the assumption of immediately assuming that what I am doing is simply setting something up and I know where it is going and I am just really going through a kind of ritual to make it better. The truth is, that even when there is a scheme, such as this film is about abortion, or this film is about adoption, even so, it remains for me that I really don’t know what is going to happen when we get there. The job is, as I have already said, to really explore it so that you don’t just carry out what is already in your head, but are really opening up so that I can learn from everything that happens and feed back into it, and take from it, and it really is an interaction between me and the material, which is shared with the actors. Now, we are talking about filmmaking, we are not talking about theatre, and therefore it is important not just to talk about actors. There are creative people involved who are just as important as the actors. So, there comes a point in the development of all these films, and there must come a point because there are deadlines and disciplines and plans that have to be made, where as soon as I reach a point where I have got hold of the basic conception of the thing clearly enough, I can sit down with the cinematographer, with the production designer, and the costume designer and make-up designer, and we can start to talk about… I can share my feeling about it. No question of any script, it is just talking about it. So, they can start to tune in and they can start to get the sense of it, and the production designer and the costume designer and the make-up designer will also sit down with the actors and start to talk with the actors as well as me to tune in on the world that we have created. Because we do create this whole fictitious world in great detail. So, again, we are all preparing ourselves for when we get to the shoot, and when we get to the shoot, we have not only done obvious practical things like deciding on what stock we are going to use and how it is going to look and shoot tests, and all the planned things to do such as scheduling and locations and all the rest, but that we are doing so in a focussed and ensemble way. We are all sorting out the language of how we are going to work and what we are about. I think there are more advantages to doing what I am talking about than merely the fact that it is an improvised kind of film. It is the case that the kind of preparation that we are able to do on these films of mine is in some ways, and again I am cautious about being too smug, because we have to all talk a language, and we have to all be pulling in the same direction, you cannot just sort of do it by formula. It makes us up and running by the time we come to shoot. But again, the important thing is, when we get to the shoot – the only kind of script that I write is sort of a 6-10 page thing, which is very simple and contains information that you only understand if you are already in the film.

ABOUT THE "6-10 PAGE THING"

Ben Gibson: Only you have got that?

Mike Leigh: No, everybody behind the camera has got it. And the actors have got their own version of that. That is important because for example a costume designer has to have the right costumes there on the right day, the cinematographer has to have some idea of the shape of the film. But it does mean, because we are not tied to a script, because we are actually creating the detailed script when it comes to the shoot, which we do by the way by going to each location and building up on location, through improvisations and rehearsing it till it is finished, it does mean that we are able to be very flexible. Things keep growing and changing, expanding and contracting as we go. There is one technical thing that I ought to say, which I didn’t. The work that we do for six months is not on location. We always take an empty building of some kind, which we can use for all kinds of things and places just to get going. As it were, it is like a kind of greenhouse in which we can grow the characters and grow the ideas and discuss everything, and then gradually we can, and do, go out and do things in real places, and then, as we find the actual locations, we can work there.

WORKING WITH EDITOR JIM CLARK

Ben Gibson: This may be an idle question but it always occurs to me: Can you describe the type of person who just cannot do this, who can’t collaborate with you in this way? Not just actors but technicians?

Mike Leigh: On the whole, me and my producer try to avoid it. Obviously, I mean you get an instinct. But it does happen, indeed it has happened rather horrendously on occasions. I suppose the simple and short answer to that question is, there are plenty of people who work on movies, on both sides of the camera, who like to know where they are, who like to know what is what, who like to be safe, who like to be able to work it all out and know exactly what the whole campaign is and don’t want to be caught out making mistakes. If that is a person’s frame of mind then probably this kind of film is not for them, but there are plenty of people out there, actors and creative people who work behind the camera in all aspects of filmmaking, who are not only good at being open and creative and inventive, but actually are turned on by it and think it is great. Present in the room today is Jim Clarke, very distinguished film editor of VERA DRAKE and HAPPY GO LUCKY, and I hope you don’t mind me saying this about you Jim, but you are 76. He has cut everything for the last 500 years. I mention it because I had never worked with him before VERA DRAKE and when we asked him to do it, but of course we didn’t know, because he has cut all these distinguished films for a very long time… So, here is this guy who has been around for a long time and he comes to a film where there is no script, the footage comes and he has some indication of what it is about, and I think I am right in saying, you were very positive about the experience?

Jim Clark: Very.

Mike Leigh: So, that was just to illustrate the point. This question you are asking me is about spirit, it is about a sense of what film is about. It is not about time-serving and doing an easy safe job, it is about being dangerous.

IS THERE REALISM IN CINEMA?

Ben Gibson: Before we move on, I would like to thank you for that because now we have got a roomful of experts who now know what really happens when you prepare a film. I wanted to ask you a critical type of question because people get very confused about realism and what realism is, or what kind of realisms there can be. You don’t work with non-actors, non-inflected sense of the everyday. You have got much more to do with strong lines of characterisation along the lines of Beckett, Hogarth, Dickens, people who are more strongly inflected. There has been a debate going on, certainly in the UK, about how people aren’t like that, or everyday life is more boring than in Mike Leigh films. But what is interesting to me, especially in the last couple of films, is the sense of people putting drama into their everyday lives. In other words there is a kind of sense that there is a way in which ordinary people are like actors. They see a sense of drama in their everyday behaviour, so that heightened sense is also very real. In your notes in the catalogue this year, you say, you want to create a real documentary world that you can slice right into. But you are still looking for the heightened moments. And there is a strong sense of what kind of scene there is going to be in a Mike Leigh film.

Mike Leigh: So, what are you asking?

Ben Gibson: So, I am asking, ten films along the line, there is a sense that you have of exactly what kind of moments in these characters lives are going to be the ones that motivate you.

Mike Leigh: I can’t really answer that. In the first place, any discussion about what is real, and all of that, I can’t really take part in, in relation to my own films, because what motivates me, and it is no different now from how it has always been, but what motivates me is to put on the screen life in a way that seems real to me. Just as life feels real to me. Maybe what you are asking me is to do with what sort of choices go into deciding what are the moments.

Ben Gibson: I can ask you in one sentence. Are there things that you would call realism that would strongly influence you in the cinema…

Mike Leigh: Well, it is interesting, because if I say an influence, or an inspiration, on one end of the spectrum would be Ermanno Olmi. Now, I don’t, as you mentioned, work with non-professional actors, but having said that, if you look at Olmi’s film which in English is called THE TREE WITH THE WOODEN CLOGS (L’ALBERO DEGLI ZOCCOLI, 1978), the remarkable thing about that very thorough and rich and real, but actually cinematically very dramatic and sophisticated film, is there is not one professional actor in it. They are all people from Lombardi. There also aren’t in that film anything that you would obviously identify what in a kind of way is a kind of heightened realism that I think you could find in my film. But there are other things that go on in my films by way of influences, for example, there is undoubtedly some influence at a certain stage of development of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, but again, you couldn’t quite say that that is what the films are. Although you can find moments that I think are quite Beckett-ish. Certainly, I like to work in a very detailed way, to look at the behaviour of people. And you mentioned McLuhan at the beginning of your introduction, there is a way in which the medium is the message in my work, in the sense that a lot of the actual substance of the narrative isn’t so much plot but the way we are, the way people behave. I am sure lots of us here who are filmmakers share a fascination for just looking at people, and that is certainly what motivates me. You then start to think about their lives, and then you think about what is significant about those lives in relation to how we live, and then you are on to the meanings, the politics, the ideologies, the emotional currency of the stories that you want to tell. But at the end of the day I don’t think about those things consciously at all because I am just motivated to look at the world and want to capture it and breathe life into it and make it happen on the screen.

FOCUSING YOUR MIND

Ben Gibson: But on those six pages, there is also the question of how much plot or detail…

Mike Leigh: Well, yes, but working from a conceptual idea and gradually… Here is a thing which is also important I think to share. They say that nothing focuses someone’s mind more clearly than being on the evening before your execution. The truth of it is, when I make these films, the project exists. When I start working with the actors, the date is there, the crew is in place, the budget is in the bank. We have to go and start shooting on that particular day and end shooting on that day, and the editor is there waiting for something to cut. So, the notion of, is this a film, or – I go through all of that. I’ve gone through five weeks and there is nothing going on.

Ben Gibson: It must also be quite a lonely business, because people know what their part is, yet your producer who works very closely with you has no idea, so it must be a lonely position.

Mike Leigh: Yes, but the point is, that is the name of the game. And that is what is exciting, and what I hope what is productive in the end.

Ben Gibson: Could we talk about the way you incorporate observation? In the new film, for example the flamenco scene we just saw, you see people in the background at the flamenco class, but I can see they haven’t just been rented in as extras. Could you describe in that scene, how many times had they all done a flamenco class?

Mike Leigh: In fact, in that particular scene, the two women who arrive are two central characters in the story, and they are actors, obviously. The flamenco teacher is an actress. There are also a couple of other actors there. Everybody else however had backgrounds in flamenco classes, but I think that is what any of you would do.

INVENTING THINGS ON THE SPOT

Ben Gibson: But the improvisation that you do, the way you prepare the scene, seems to me, way more profoundly related to the cinematic. There is a scene where somebody says goodbye and they walk to the left to an open space outside the door, and then realise they are going the other way, so they have to say goodbye again, and they turn around and go in the other direction. It is a moment which is incredibly about their specificity in that frame.

Mike Leigh: That is really what I was talking about earlier when I said it is about working with the actual medium of film. There are all sorts of things in my films, perhaps everything you might say, that I don’t know how they would be in an ordinary script. I can’t imagine the script of the film written in advance given to people to raise money or for any other purpose. You have described something that simply came into existence when we were there. We invented it on the spot. Now obviously we all do that when we make films, and all I do is carry that to its ultimate conclusion.

Ben Gibson: I would like to ask you about you as a British filmmaker. You are making films about a reality which is out there, and there is a strong sense of engagement through these characters with a social reality. I mean David Thewlis in NAKED defined 1993 for us in a way. Do you think that you are getting closer to films that are essentially social, with strong social themes.

Mike Leigh: No. I have always done that. If you go back to my first feature film, BLEAK MOMENTS (1971) it does precisely that. I don’t think that is different how ever it was.

Ben Gibson: I would like now to open it out to the audience.

A STRUCTURE FOR THE ACTORS‘ SECURITY

Question: Do you shoot with multi-camera, or how do you edit the scenes? The actors are doing the same things in the scene, so presumably once they have done the scene once, then they do know where the scene is going from start to finish.

Mike Leigh: Let me repeat what I said at the beginning. Everything in my films that you see is very thoroughly rehearsed, more than in most films, right down to the last syllable. Therefore you can shoot it over and over again, from as many angles as you like, and therefore you get absolutely consistent, matching material. Of course, we can carry on developing it if we want, and as for example in the scene in SECRETS AND LIES, you can see that the two actors in that scene in the café, that is nearly a nine-minute single, static two-shot. And they are absolutely flawless in their performance. Now, of course, you could say, that is just one shot, so it doesn’t matter. But if you think about the performances, plainly they are not just improvising. And that is because, although we shot it in one shot, we rehearsed it and rehearsed it and rehearsed it, so that, and this is the key to the whole thing, when they did it, and they really took off, and they had the freedom to soar with it, to be completely creative and inventive without deviating from the structure. Because the structure is there for their security, and indeed to make sure it is that it is precise. But the actual nuances of the performances are absolutely organic. So, it is about preparing the material in such a way that it becomes in that sense very conventional.

SIMPLE, DIRECT, STATIC SCENES

Question: So said that you rehearse for six months usually, and I wanted to ask your advice because obviously we don’t have six months to rehearse. Some of us may have a month, or shorter for rehearsing, and I wanted to ask you if you think it is possible to create the same emotional authentic acting in less time? My second question is, in all your work, short movies, television and films, you have a lot of static one shots of two people sitting on a couch for example, and it is always interesting, and emotional and strong, and I wanted to know when you do this if you ask yourself if it is anti-cinema or something?

Mike Leigh: Let’s deal with the first question first. Nowadays I can get six months, but I have made films where the rehearsals have been six weeks. If your question was, can you arrive at emotional truth in much less time – you can do whatever you like. The important thing is to do something by way of preparation. Six months, four months, one month, one week, three days, it is all as long as a piece of string, the important thing is to do something. Of course, the more time there is, the more you can do more complicated things, or have more people, or whatever it is, but there are no rules about it. There is nothing holy about six months. Do whatever you like. That’s the answer to that question. I wasn‘t born with this silver spoon in my mouth, which had six months written on it. It is an arrangement that I have been lucky enough to arrive at more recently. Your second question, although it is not so much a question I think as a thesis. I am totally unconcerned with anything that you could describe as anti-cinema. I am absolutely concerned with cinema and with making cinema and with making cinematic cinema. It is absolutely true that throughout all of my films you will find material shot, scenes, which are simple, direct, very often static, and where the investment is in what is happening in front of the camera. That is no less cinematic as far as I am concerned, a) than any film by Ozu, or b) than all those things you will find in all of my films where my camera is extremely lively. It is not only about whether the camera is static or moving, but it is also about editing. Part of the whole potential and joy of the moving aspect of movies is not just the nature of the separate identity of shots, but the juxtaposition and the relation of shots, obviously. So, for example, if you think about the very opening shot of NAKED, where the first thing the camera does is running in a very jagged way down an alleyway towards this man and woman having a fuck. To me, this is no more or no less cinematic than any number of times it is static and it is on two people in a two-shot. Both are cinematic, both are what I feel cinema is about for me. We have talked about what is interesting in front of the camera. If it lives and it is interesting and it is compelling and coherent, that is cinema. I hope I have answered your question.

Audience member: In a way, yes.

Mike Leigh: What do you mean, in a way?

Audience member: You gave reasons why your films are not anti-cinema, and I agree that it is not anti-cinema, but the question was actually, how do you do it? How do you make it interesting? I am sure that 99% of us would do it and it would be boring.

Mike Leigh: Ok, I see what you’re saying. Fair enough, it is a serious point. The only answer to that is, all I expect an audience to experience when they are watching my film, is to be involved and fascinated and moved and amused and horrified, and to be made to think about your own life, and to care, all those things, but the only way that I know that I have contributed to that happening when the audience watches my film, is that I feel all of those things about the material. So, your question, how do I make it work, I can only say because it is motivated by the very nature of how I work. I look at all kinds of material, even in all the improvisations I am seeing something that I either like or don’t like. So, in other words, my answer to you is, I put on the screen what I think is interesting, what I think is moving, and all those other things, and therefore becomes something through which I have something implicit to say politically or otherwise. The only thing I would add to that is that: We all know how easy it is to be filming material and deep down you know that you are not really interested in it. We have all experienced this. Where you feel, we have only got to do this scene, because we need to get to the next one. And the minute you feel that, then you are failing to do the thing that you are asking about in your question. Does that make sense? Of course, in a way, that goes for me, personally, it goes back to the good fortune I have, which is that I am not tied to some script that already exists. Often I will be working on something and I can see it doesn’t work. What I am actually acknowledging to myself is that it is not bloody interesting enough. To try to answer this question in another language. This question goes back to the previous one, how do you choose the moment. And that is to me, all about distilling the essence of things. I think, if one of my films works, it is because you go from the essence of something to the essence of something else. Rather than something that blandly records something. That is really all I can say. Thank you for a really interesting and stimulating question.

THE ACTOR IS THE ACTOR AND THE CHARACTER IS THE CHARACTER

Question: I am a character actress from Israel. I want to ask, when I improvise, the character I am playing and me, the limit is vague…

Mike Leigh: I think I see. What you are talking about is that your emotions and your reactions are going to be going on as well as those of your characters. There is a very strict discipline we say, that the actor is the actor and the character is the character. I am very strict on this. I insist that the actors all, when we are working on the film, when they are in character they are totally in character. But when the improvisation work stops, they come out of character. When actors talk about the character I don’t allow them to say, "I did this" or "I would do that". They have to say "he" or "she", so that they can be objective about the character. But when they are in the character, they are absolutely inside it. And again, the way they behave as the character, the way they walk, talk, think etc, is very much something that we work on and that they draw from other people. It is very much somebody who isn’t them but is somebody else. That is the whole convention of what we do and how we go about it, but we know, that despite the fact that we do that, that that in itself is a kind of trick in a way, at a very sophisticated level. Not a trick in a deceitful way, it is an artistic discipline. By that I mean that it enables the actor to be liberated from being just themselves, it opens up all kinds of possibilities for me as well. It means the film isn’t just drawing on what the actors are. But at the same time, there is no question that the character is very much plugged into the actor’s emotions. So, it is a sophisticated thing. It is a question of how you deal with it, and how you find ways of opening up the possibilities so that you can have greater scope. But at the end of the day, your emotions are in there.

Ben Gibson: Just to fine-tune that. You want your actors to think how their characters think, rather than just how they feel, so you need some analytical input from your actors. If you had someone doing a very crude version of the Actors Studio method, and they went into the trailer in character, or the cantine in character, presumably that wouldn’t work at all for you?

Mike Leigh: No, that is right. The method idea of making the character become the actor, rather than the actor become the character, and to be in character all the time, I think is counter-productive.

SAVING THE EMOTIONS FOR THE SCENE

Question: When you rehearse a scene, do you ask the actors to rehearse with the same emotional intensity as when you want to shoot the scene, or do they hold back?

Mike Leigh: This is a very good question. The convention of rehearsing, and not expending the emotions but saving the emotions for the scene, is very logical and makes a lot of sense. The problem we have with this work is that when you are creating a scene, and especially when we get to the stage when we are actually structuring the scene and bringing it into existence, because it comes out of a totally improvised situation, where the actors are completely emotionally there in character, because you do it again and again, and start to pin it down, and you work on it to see what comes out of that, unless you are really there 100%, you cannot reliably go on to the next bit. So in fact, unfortunately, the reality is, when we are rehearsing they have to expend a great deal of emotional energy even though they are doing it over and over again. You can get to a stage and this is something of a technicality, where we are just really refining lines of dialogue, but generally speaking, because of the nature of the material and the acting itself, they kind of have to get right in there when we rehearse it, and this does demand a great deal of emotional energy. It is a problem but it is the name of the game, you know.

Question: I very much enjoyed your film TOPSY TURVY (1999), which deals with Gilbert and Sullivan, two people who really lived, and about whom we know a little bit. Did your creative process differ in any extent on that project, and could you elaborate on that?

Mike Leigh: Well, it didn’t and it did. It is actually quite an interesting question. There are a number of characters in that film that really existed, or who are portraits of people who really existed. However, what we are talking about here is screen reality, that is to say, the organic thing that happens in front of the camera. So yes, you can read extensively, particularly about Gilbert and about Sullivan, but also about other characters in the film too, but you can read about them for a million years, that doesn’t put them in front of the camera. Something has to happen to make them occur in front of the camera when the camera turns over. So, of course we absorbed all the stuff that we read, but we still had to find a way of creating a character in an organic way, and that character had to live in improvised situations, and the actors had to learn to talk how people talked in the 19th century and so on. Therefore, all the processes that I have developed over the years for creating original characters simply were used to make that happen. A large proportion of characters in that film were indeed inventions. And, there are things that happen in that film, events that take place in the narrative of the film, which are again depictions of events that actually took place. But the fact you can read about them doesn’t mean you really know what happened. You have still got to activate it and make it happen in detail in the moment.

SETTING UP DIFFERENT SITUATIONS

Question: I have a question about the scene in SECRETS AND LIES with the two women. Could you explain how you worked with the task that you gave to the actors in order to let the scene live? What specific task you gave them and how you worked together on it.

Mike Leigh: How I arrived at the scene? I mean I have already talked about this, but I can be more specific if you like. Over the months of the preparation and rehearsals, we slowly built up the life of the mother. Over the 47 years of her life. At some stage when she was 16, we very incidentally went through a moment where she was drunk at a party and had sex with a black guy. And there were two other guys around at the same time, two white guys. And I deliberately put that it when working with the actress. So that was plotted in. the great bulk of what she did was the relationship with her other daughter. Parallel to that, and unknown to her, I worked with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the other actress who plays the daughter, and created her own story. So at a certain stage of the game, at the rehearsals, I was able to set up and improvise a situation. First of all I set up a situation where, using actual mobile phones, the daughter called her up, when they were both in character, and we actually went through all of that, and we arranged to meet, and they actually met, in an improvisation. The actress playing the mother actually didn’t know who she was going to meet, and some little part of her brain, thought that it was another actress who she knew was in the film, who was white. So, when she went to meet her, and she didn’t at that time know the other actress, when she met her, she didn’t even recognise her. When the daughter approached her and said: "I think you are looking for me", she said: "No no…", because they were actually improvising the scene in the street for real, and she thought it was a member of the public. Then they went to a real café and had an improvisation, and it went on from there. Sometime later, when it came to the distilled dramatised story, we reinvestigated those events and structured them and rehearsed them, but drawing from that improvisation. That is what you see in the film, which draws from that organic improvised experience. This is an important footnote to my answer to your question. If behind your question is what did I say to them on the day to make the scene happen, that is not a relevant thing that I can answer because I can only report the entire evolution of the process to the point of the scene, which is the end of a journey.

BUILDING UP THE ACCUMULATED EXPERIENCE OF THE CHARACTER

Question: My question is: How much time can pass before an actor starts to forget about the experiences that they have made in the improvisation. Is it important that there is not longer than some specific time passing by before you actually work in front of the camera? I could imagine, after six months of work, some of it is forgotten. My second question is: When, if ever, are you putting down the actual words of a scene?

Mike Leigh: The first part of the question first. You are asking, if the actors have done something a long time before we shoot it, how do they remember it?

Audience member: How long does the memory stay?

Mike Leigh: Well, it stays an indefinite length of time. Because don’t forget, what we are actually talking about is emotional recall. You are simulating if you like the character’s life and the memory and experience. You are building up the accumulated experience of the character. And actually you know sometimes what happens, we may go back and revisit something that happened in our terms a long time ago, which in real terms might be two or three months ago, and that might represent something that happened to the character twenty years ago. And when we go back it may well have changed organically because of other things that have happened. Well, that is there to be either used, or we go back, and plug in to remember. It is an organic, ongoing thing. So, to be honest, the actual question you are asking me, has never occurred to me actually. It is not an issue at all. As to writing it down, when we rehearse finally, we rehearse and rehearse and they remember it very precisely, and I am very precise about the words. It doesn’t have to be written down. It so happens, that generally, the person doing continuity will keep notes and write it down, but that is a by-product and not really part of the process. However, if you buy the script of some of my films, which are available, I have made those by sitting down long after the film is finished with a tape of the film and written it from the finished film.

HAVING TRAINED AS AN ACTOR

Ben Gibson: One thing I would like to ask you in case nobody here asks it. We have a lot of people here from all over the world who are in one way or another at the beginning of their careers, or training to be filmmakers, and so can you talk about your rather unique background, because you trained in art school, you worked in the theatre, you trained as an actor, you’ve been to film school. You have worked in a huge number of contexts in order to create the specific method that you have. What do you think are the key elements that allow you to have created so specific a method?

Mike Leigh: I find that very difficult to answer.

Ben Gibson: Well, for example, was it critical for you to have trained as an actor?

Mike Leigh: Well, I think so for me. Having trained as an actor, and I embarked on actor training without any intention of being an actor really, and I think the world is a better place for my not having been an actor in it. In a way, if people say about a certain director that he is just a frustrated actor – for me, here in my heart there is a little actor, and when I am directing, and in a scene I want to give a note to someone about the performance or the emotion or whatever, that moment where it looks as if I am apparently thinking about it, what is actually happening is, I am actually acting out that moment in my head. I would never, never act it out in a performance. It is about intuiting… What I didn’t say before is that of course all these characters, I start off for ages working just one-to-one with each actor. So, I have a very close relationship with each actor and their character, but I feel I can only do that because I can also feel it. I don’t direct intellectually. Having trained as an actor, and being in art school, particularly doing life-drawing, where I realised we were all investigating some truth in a way that we hadn’t done in those days as acting students. But I am loath to say, that is what you should do because we are all different and we all have different experiences. Some people come to filmmaking from being very successful architects. It depends you know. I think, for me, all those things helped, not least going to the London Film School, of which you are the Director and I am the Chairman of the Governors.

A FILM IS MADE IN THE CUTTING ROOM

Question: I am not sure if this is really a question but I would like to hear you talk about your editing process. You talked about how you distilled the material in terms of creating it, leading up to the shoot, and the shooting process, what is it like when you are sitting down in the editing suite?

Mike Leigh: I have the luxury of having a co-worker with me, so he may well contradict what I am about to say, but I don’t think he will. As I have already said: Of course a film is made in the cutting room. I suppose, like many films, but more than some, my films divide the material, which is structured and organised, and some material, which is either improvised or partly improvised. But, even when you have got sequences that are highly distilled and organised, and on the face of it, straightforward, they are not. Also, what I said earlier, it is very much about behaviour. I will often go for another take when we are shooting, and the producer might come to me later and say, why did you do that again? Why did you do four takes, when the first two were so good? And it is because you get different nuances in performance, in behaviour. And when you get to the editing there is an infinite variety of nuances to pull together. So, it is conventionally I suppose about being conscious of the structure of the film and going for the best moments. There will be a structure, which I will have started off with, and deviated off from in some parts of the film, and adhered to in others, but at the end of the day you go to the cutting room, and it is up for grabs, you can do what you want with it basically. It is there to investigate and experiment with. First of all to organise the way it was intended and then to explore. Was there anything else you wanted to know about the editing work?

Question: You went into detail with working with the actors and what you were looking for and how you achieved what you were looking for. I guess I would like to know what is that process like when you sit down with your editor?

Mike Leigh: Can we give a microphone to my editor Jim Clarke? What we do in the cutting room is as we edit the film, and it goes without saying that for me, working with the editor is collaborative just as it is with my work with the cinematographer, but finally it will always be my decision. And obviously we both talk about what we think works and doesn’t work, but of course, there will always be a discussion on the go in filmic terms, about the meaning of what we are doing. If you were to listen in on the kind of language we talk, we talk about what we think the audience would see or understand or care about. And at another level we will talk about what it means, and what the whole thing is about. But at the end of the day, those things are the given, are the premise, and most of what we do is about not being frightened when you are editing of being relentlessly thorough about details. Even if you have to spend a whole day battling with a detail then that is what you have to do. But other times it is about standing back and looking at the whole thing and remembering you have to deal with structure as well.

Jim Clark: All I can say is, as a very old man, the pleasure of working with Mike is enormous for me, because I don’t have a script that I have to read and analyse. Everyday I get the rushes in of the previous day’s work, and it always comes as a surprise to me, which I find extremely beneficial, because I can take that material and do what I like with it for the editor’s cut. On VERA DRAKE I think we ended up with a 2 hour 5 minute film. We started with about 2 and a half hours. And Mike is one of those directors who knows exactly what he wants, and fortunately on VERA DRAKE I managed to provide him with a version, which was very close to what he wanted anyway. So in fact, the process of editing VERA DRAKE was quite quick. On the current film HAPPY GO LUCKY it was slightly more difficult for me, and I think also for Mike at the time, because we were unsure how the film was going. And I was worried about it for a time, and in the end we had to find the film in the cutting room more than we did on VERA DRAKE.

Mike Leigh: I think that is right. And I think the reason for that is quite straightforward. The thing about VERA DRAKE is that, certainly before we went into rehearsal, we knew what was going to happen. This is a film about a woman in 1950, where abortion is illegal, she does abortions, one will go wrong, the police will get involved, she gets arrested and finally she will go to prison. Those things we knew had to happen because in terms of the ideological and political meaning of the film, that is what it was about basically. Whereas, this film HAPPY GO LUCKY, that we have just cut, I went into it only with a feeling about the spirit of the atmosphere, and that there is something even when you see it, and if you like it, I suspect you will not know quite why it works because there is something kind of elusive about it. It was much more difficult when this footage was arriving. I knew what I wanted but…

Ben Gibson: You had that similar process with NAKED…

Mike Leigh: Absolutely. The truth is, and what I said at the beginning, it is about going on a journey to discover what the film is. These particular films that we are talking about, including this new one, are films where it is about looking for it, not looking for it in a vague way, but being open to all kinds of things. Therefore it was much more difficult for Jim when it was arriving at his cutting room for him to immediately put all the bits together, there were less obvious set pieces. But, once we had wrapped the picture, and started really tackling it, as we started to strip away, to distil it down to its essences, once we started to do that, the film really did start to emerge and come out of its shell. That was absolutely a cutting room investigation.

Ben Gibson: Since the subject at the moment is editing, I’m afraid I am going to have to be the one who is going to say "cut". I think it is an incredible moment to stop because I wanted to ask if you wanted to close with something for your audience of tomorrow but you already have.

Mike Leigh: Sometimes I get asked if I have any words of advice, and I haven’t been asked that because obviously you don’t want any, but in case anybody does, my only words of advice would be: Never compromise!

Ben Gibson: Very good. Thank you very much.