Work in progress from Mike Leigh
Director Mike Leigh is renowned for making movies the hard way, as he tells Alison Jones.
Film maker Mike Leigh is notorious for his lengthy collaborations with actors.
Script and characters are literally a blank page at the start of the story-telling process, the words to be thrashed out through improvisation, the backgrounds meticulously researched over many months.
Even regular collaborators, like actor Jim Broadbent, say the experience, though rewarding, is too intense for him to contemplate working on back-to-back projects with Leigh.
What might not be so well known is that Leigh developed his singular method of working while at the Mac back in the mid-60s.
“I went to work in the Midland Arts Centre in Birmingham when it opened in 1965 and had the opportunity to start doing what I’d realised was what I wanted to experiment with – that writing and rehearsal could potentially be part of the same process,” explains Leigh.
“If I wrote scripts conventionally I’d sit in a room with a pen and paper or a word processor and I’d improvise onto it, then I would put order to it, then I would get actors to do it.
“I shift the whole process so I collaborate with the actors and create an environment in which they, once we have created the characters, then improvise and we explore situations and bring into existence the whole of the film.
“The journey of making the film is the journey of discovery as to what the film is.”
It means that, when they sign up for a Mike Leigh movie, his stars know next-to-nothing about it. Not the dialogue, not the plot structure, nor where their character fits into the grand scheme of things.
It is an approach that demands they place a great deal of trust in their director.
But with a back catalogue that includes such acclaimed films as Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake, Life is Sweet, Topsy-Turvy, Naked and Happy Go Lucky, as well as the Plays for Today series that includes Nuts in May and the near iconic Abigail’s Party, it is trust that is usually amply rewarded.
“They know that, broadly speaking, I know what I am doing or, if I don’t, own up to it. It is a mutual thing.
‘‘We go on this shared adventure together and it is very, very dangerous. It is a serious, dangerous, confronting, thorough experience.
“That being the case it is a very rich experience for everybody.”
He allows himself and his cast the luxury of an extraordinary amount of time to work on the project before the cameras even start rolling.
He acknowledges it is not a method that would sit well in Hollywood where he describes film-making as “an industrial process where everything is predetermined and pre-packaged”.
However, he feels it is far more rooted in the tradition of performance and, indeed, cinema.
“Long before anybody ever wrote down the script of a play, people were making drama in the way that I do.
“It is how films were made universally before the talkies came in. In the days of silent cinema people went out and created stuff. They got up every day and said ‘what shall we make up today?’ basically.”
