There’s a mythology that surrounds Mike Leigh’s movies. And like with any shared lore, not all of it’s true. One false impression, as an example, is that his storytelling is basically improvised, as if his actors conjure scenes from midair as soon as the digital camera begins rolling. However though the British director, 81, does create the characters and scenes alongside his actors throughout months of intense rehearsal and never beforehand, nothing in Leigh’s work is left to likelihood.
It’s a well-known methodology he’s cultivated over many years, from his early stage work to his movie debut, 1971’s “Bleak Moments,” to his string of acclaimed titles — together with “Naked” (1993), “Topsy-Turvy” (1999) and “Happy-Go-Lucky” (2008) — by way of his most up-to-date effort, the emotionally jarring “Hard Truths.” The truth is, the filmmaker is incredulous that anybody may suppose that he may, as he places it, “just point the camera at some actors and say, ‘Do whatever you feel like.’”
“The idea that you could arrive at ‘Hard Truths’ that way is impossible,” Leigh tells me, sitting in StudioCanal’s London workplace with frequent collaborator Marianne Jean-Baptiste, 57, who stars because the hard-worn, furiously disconsolate Pansy Deacon within the movie. Seated reverse Jean-Baptiste at a small convention room desk, Leigh is beneficiant together with his ideas however has no time for pretense, maybe as a result of he arrived for the press day two hours early since nobody advised him his interviews had been pushed again. As a substitute of going house, he sat in King’s Cross station and watched folks go by — a really Mike Leigh factor to do.
“Improvising is a way of making films,” he continues, leaning again on his chair as Jean-Baptiste nods. She’s dressed for a photograph shoot in a neat black go well with, a juxtaposition to Leigh’s crumpled fleece vest that solely makes their dynamic that rather more entertaining.
“People can do that and go away with an incredible amount of footage and piece it together in a way that embraces the potential of making films,” he continues. “No question about that. But apart from anything else, for me it’s not useful or interesting.”
Says Leigh of his directing type, “My instructions are very clear: Don’t try and be interesting. Don’t try and make anything happen. You’re in character. Just react how the character would react. That’s the job.”
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Occasions)
As a substitute, “Hard Truths” is the results of 14 weeks of rehearsals and 6 weeks of filming. It marks Leigh’s second time working onscreen with Jean-Baptiste, who was nominated for an Oscar for his 1996 opus “Secrets & Lies,” however their fourth collaboration total (they’ve additionally performed a play and a movie rating collectively). For “Hard Truths,” the director had initially approached Jean-Baptiste, who is predicated in Los Angeles, earlier than the pandemic, however these plans have been placed on pause till early 2023.
“Mike was very adamant that we do it when you can be in a room with people,” Jean-Baptiste says. “You can’t work like this from six feet away, wearing masks.”
The truth is, Leigh is horrified when requested if the conversations or rehearsals are ever performed just about. “It’s not something you could do by Zoom,” he replies, indignant. “Any more than you could perform an appendectomy by Zoom.”
The director introduced Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin — who performs Pansy’s much more content material and optimistic sister Chantelle — and the remainder of the solid collectively in an empty workplace constructing in London’s Chalk Farm. He prefers to make use of current areas with a number of rooms and flooring: “Vera Drake” was rehearsed in an outdated hospital, whereas “Secrets & Lies” was conceived in an unused faculty. Leigh calls it “a job of work,” emphasizing that the actors are paid to be obtainable throughout your entire rehearsal course of for strict hours.
It’s a chance for character actors, he says, not film stars, as a result of it requires persistence.
“You have to be willing to go into this process knowing that you don’t know what it’s about, and you don’t know how big or small your role is going to be,” Jean-Baptiste says. “And I think for a lot of actors, that’s like, ‘Oh, I might give up that whole time and I might only be in two scenes.’ It’s about the process when you say yes to working with Mike. But I love it.”
Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths.”
(Bleecker Road)
Her character started as an inventory: folks Jean-Baptiste both is aware of or has encountered. It might be anybody — a neighbor, a clerk she remembers interacting with, a good friend. Making an inventory of fascinating folks is one thing Leigh says he at all times asks his actors to do, which is maybe why Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy, a girl hardened and indignant on the world as a approach to cowl up her sorrow, reminds us a lot of these we all know.
“We draw from that [list] and distill a few into a character,” Leigh says. “That’s a starting point. Just a way of plugging into them. What we’re about is not making movies about movies but making films about real people out there in the real world.”
Jean-Baptiste confirms that not one of the real-world folks on her record could be recognizable to them as Pansy. “We draw on real people,” she says. “And then we build something quite different, taking into existence their lives, where they grew up, their habits, their likes, their dislikes, their disappointments, their heartbreaks.” That analysis is intensive, from visiting London neighborhoods to imagining backstories and studying sensible abilities.
The rehearsals contain the primary solid, not these with smaller, one-scene roles. A mean day may contain conversations, strolling across the area because the characters, analysis and, sure, some improvisation. All of this enables the actors to distill a whole sense of their roles, their relationships and their expertise of the world, which ultimately leads to an inherent understanding of who they’re.
“Depending on where we were in the process, it would mean coming in and maybe chatting to Mike for a bit, and we’d go and get changed into the characters’ clothes and warm up into character,” Jean-Baptiste says. “And then, just be.”
The actor was aware of the method, having performed it on “Secrets & Lies.” In that movie, she performed a London optometrist named Hortense Cumberbatch who discovers that her beginning mom is a white girl (Brenda Blethyn). Leigh had beforehand solid Jean-Baptiste in his stage play “It’s a Great Big Shame!,” and it felt like a straightforward sure to make her Hortense. Jean-Baptiste vividly remembers these rehearsals for “Secrets & Lies.”
“We started to talk about what [Hortense] would do for a living,” she recollects. “He said, ‘What would she do?’ And I said, ‘She’d be a pilot.’ And he was like, ‘Shut up.’ I knew I’d get to go off and have flying lessons.”
Leigh interjects, “No chance!”
“I was chancing my arm seeing if I could get flying lessons,” Jean-Baptiste continues, laughing. “He was like, ‘No, not a chance in hell.’”
“She’s slightly exaggerating the way I did it,” Leigh says. “I would have been subtler than that. But of course, she did go off and learn how to be an optometrist. You create the whole iceberg, and [the audience] just sees the tip.”
Pansy is an much more particular character than Hortense. She lives in North London along with her husband, Curtley (David Webber), and their grownup son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Her home is pristine and lifeless, reflecting Pansy’s personal sense of joylessness. She’s afraid of pigeons and foxes, which appear to threaten her by way of the home windows. She complains about something and the whole lot.
“We had a bloody huge list of things that she was afraid of,” Jean-Baptiste says. “And the list of things that she didn’t like was even longer. I don’t think you’d ever get to read a character like that in a script that was handed to you.”
Because the movie unfolds, it turns into clear that Pansy comprises a deep properly of unhappiness and ache. She’s nonetheless affected by her childhood and the dying of her mom, one thing her sister Chantelle can’t fairly perceive. It’s that stress Leigh first landed on as rehearsals started.
“We got a very solid relationship between these two sisters and their mother, who we talked into existence even though she wasn’t played by an actor,” Leigh remembers. “But they affected each other, just as in life.”
“People have very different ideas about how they were brought up in the same home,” provides Jean-Baptiste.
Because the narrative began to take form, the director would “slightly move things in one direction or another” in hopes of approaching a coherent construction. “My job, as with any artist in any medium, is to take from and learn from what’s happening — and that informs where we go next,” he says.
There’s by no means a bodily script within the conventional sense on one among Leigh’s movies, however he does create a doc of kinds on the finish of rehearsals. It doesn’t have any dialogue. As a substitute, he makes use of it to assist schedule the places — Leigh prefers to shoot in actual locations fairly than a studio — and to maintain issues on observe.
“Then scene by scene, sequence by sequence, location by location, we will build the scenes through it,” he explains. “We go to the location, improvise, then stop, break it down and script through rehearsal. So while there isn’t [a script], the dialogue that we wind up with is always very precise. There’s virtually no improvisation on camera, despite the mythology. And, of course, a script supervisor will jot it down so that when we come back to it, it’s there to help with remembrance.”
This basis means most scenes require only some takes. “We spend so much time working on these characters and establishing their habits and things like that, so that when you come to improvise you’re coming in fully loaded,” Jean-Baptiste says. “It’s not like you’re on the fly trying to think stuff up. That thought process has been locked from the word go.”
Leigh provides, “My instructions are very clear: Don’t try and be interesting. Don’t try and make anything happen. You’re in character. Just react how the character would react. That’s the job. You’re not being a writer or a dramatist or an entertainer.”
However regardless of the whole immersion into Pansy, Jean-Baptiste says she by no means stayed in character after work. The truth is, Leigh insists that his solid members not be Methodology actors.
“It’s about the process when you say yes to working with Mike,” says Jean-Baptiste. “But I love it.”
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Occasions)
“It’s really dangerous,” he says. “And it’s also not helpful.” He appears over at Jean-Baptiste, as enraptured with Leigh’s pronouncements as I’m. “You can go into character, totally be Pansy, come out of character, and then we can objectively analyze what happened so we can deal with it and use it and deploy it.”
Jean-Baptiste nods, including, “Imagine the arguments if I stayed in character the whole time.”
Leigh agrees, “It would be impossible to work with her.”
Nonetheless, Pansy lingered. Jean-Baptiste may hear the character’s intrusive ideas, even when she tried to let her go on the finish of the day.
“They’d stay around, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, shut up, Pansy,’” Jean-Baptiste recollects. “Because when you go home, you’re Marianne. You’re doing your thing, but you’re doing your homework. So you’ll be watching TV and you’ll hear Pansy’s voice commenting on what you’re seeing. On your way to work, you’ll see some pigeons, and you’ll be like, ‘Oh, God, she’d be complaining, and she’d probably cross the road.’ You’re always looking for stuff that’s going to help the character.”
Leigh likens his filmmaking to writing a novel, the place the whole lot slowly emerges fairly than being premeditated. It’s pure to him, and it’s how he’s at all times performed issues, regardless of Hollywood being obsessive about making movies which are performed within the actual reverse approach.
“It’s how painters paint and people make music and sculptors make sculptures,” he says of his type. “It’s a journey of discovery, really. How many novelists have you heard say, ‘I didn’t know what was going to happen next’? But at the same time, obviously, my responsibility is to have some sense of what it’s about and where it might go.”
“Like a conductor,” Jean-Baptiste says. He nods.
There’s one query Leigh refuses to reply: How does he arrive at a specific movie’s ending? The conclusion of “Hard Truths” is “for the audience to deal with,” he says. “What’s important is what we hand over to the audience. There’s nothing I can say beyond that because that’s the way it is.”
Having already succeeded with Leigh, Jean-Baptiste is aware of it’s onerous to depart this explicit course of behind. “You have to if you’re going to eat, because the majority of work is not done in this way,” she laughs. “And there are great experiences out there.”
“You’ve been in some brilliant things,” Leigh encourages her. “Some really good stuff.”
“Somebody asked me what would be my ideal next job and who would be the director,” she replies. “It would be a Mike Leigh heist movie.”
Leigh is uninterested. “Let me know how that goes,” he cracks. “I’d watch it as long as I don’t have to make it.”
He pauses, leaning over to Jean-Baptiste with a slight smirk. “Now,” he says, “are you free for my next film? It’s about a woman pilot.”