A Sit-Down with Mike Leigh

I trained as an actor, but I didn’t really want to be an actor. I knew I wanted to write and direct. This is no longer the case, but when I was at RADA it was very old-fashioned and very stale in many ways. You did a very superficial kind of acting, which is to say you didn’t improvise or explore what a thing is really about. You didn’t do background or character research—you just did it. You learned the lines and tried not to fall over the furnace.

So my instincts from the word go were to react against that, which happened of course at the same time as all this other stuff was happening, not only in the cinema but in theater as well, with the work of people like Peter Brook. Before too long there was also what were called “happenings.” All this made me begin to question and challenge the conventions of just sitting in a closet writing a script on paper and then giving it to an actor. I realized that what really interested me was combining writing, rehearsing, performing, and directing. I made a lot of what they called “improvised plays,” which is a misnomer in a way because they were very finished pieces of work that came out of improvisation, like what I’ve worked on ever since. I did that throughout the sixties in various places, wherever I could, until we made Bleak Moments, my first feature.

Bleak Moments has no score, but it has music within it, people play songs—that’s a characteristic of some of my work. At that stage in my life I had very strong feelings about making a film that wasn’t dressed up in music but was pure, in a sense. It wasn’t until my fourth film that I had a score with a composer. When used organically and appropriately, not in a clichéd, robotic way, obviously a score brings out the flavor. I’ve worked with Gary Yershon, who’s great, on my last few films. We made a decision very quickly and easily in Peterloo that once you get to the big day there wouldn’t be a note played, not until the very end. We couldn’t have anything that could run the risk of degenerating into a movie cliché.

What’s important about the approach to music in my films is that I like to work with composers who start from their own emotional response to what they see and can’t do anything until we’ve got a cut of the film. Also, I work with a composer exclusively. There’s no committee, which a lot of movies suffer from. The thing we don’t do is have temp tracks, which I think are completely ridiculous. All they do is create a false and irrelevant ambiance. We have none of that bullshit, that Hollywood stuff. For me, one of the best bits of the entire making of a film is the day or two when the musicians show up to play the score in a recording studio. It’s just a hoot. I love it. They’re all top-end guys from the orchestras and it’s always live, organic music. You can be sure they only saw it for the first time yesterday, but they show up, they pick up the instruments and they play it the way musicians can do. And then they rush into the control room to watch it back with the film because they’re fascinated by what it is they’re doing. It’s just lovely because, in a way, you suddenly feel it. 

[Laughs.] I don’t really know how to answer that—in a way, you’ve got to ask other people that. But I will say that my shoots are famously pleasant. There’s no nonsense. No wobblies and people behaving badly, partly because they’re all nice guys that I work with and partly because I’m a nice guy. But not least—and this is quite serious—because we spend so much time with the actors preparing, what you don’t get on my films (and if it happens it’s very rarely and for exceptional circumstances of some kind) is actor insecurity. Most of what causes neurosis and time-wasting on movies are actors who can’t remember their lines or haven’t been given the chance to work out how to play the character or they’re insecure because they’ve put on a costume they’ve never worn before or are in a location they don’t fit in . . . all of that stuff. But none of that’s the case because it’s all been prepared and collaborated on, so it’s all organic and relaxed and they’re on top of it. You start shooting and after a week or two you hear an electrician who’s never worked on one of my films say, “I don’t understand it, there’s no script, and they all know the lines and they’re all very nice.” It’s because we prepare and we do it in this organic way.

Because I’m not a jobbing filmmaker and people don’t send me scripts, I just go out and make up these idiosyncratic pieces of work. Therefore, my modus operandi as an artist is much like a painter or novelist, whether I’m actually in the process of making or preparing a film or just simply gestating. At this moment I am in the early stages of this endless process of talking about a bloody film, but we’re also going to make another film in a couple of years. Right now I’m gestating and that’s fine! Even if it involves reading a whole bunch of novels that have got nothing to do with what I’m thinking about, everything feeds in because that’s what the creative process is.