Mike Leigh
Interview here. Leigh has managed to straddle film and theatre, very successfully. In the interview, it describes his very particular process:
“For the uninitiated, though, it’s important to know that when he begins auditioning actors, he has only vague ideas about the nature of what lies ahead; the material is conceived and honed by Leigh and his cast over months of improvisation. Even in projects where the territory is predetermined – such as Four Days in July, set in Belfast, or Topsy-Turvy, which drew for the first time in Leigh’s career on factual material – nothing is fixed until just before the cameras roll. “We had shot four-fifths of Secrets and Lies before we did the massive improvisation that yielded up the barbecue scene at the end. Similarly, I couldn’t have told you the ending of Naked until two or three days before we shot it because I couldn’t work out what it was going to be. Then I was driving to the location one morning and I thought: ‘Fuck!’ Or, put another way, ‘Eureka!’”
Any actor chosen to work with Leigh will have a fair idea of the process, which is one sign of how things have changed since the early days. “I remember sitting on the phone to agents and saying endlessly: ‘No, there’s no script, you see, what we do is …’ Eventually they’d say, ‘My client is not getting involved with this.’ Now it takes me months to get through a tiny slice of the people who want to audition.”
I’d love to be able to try working that way at least once. But, given that the powers that be are still hesitant to give money to Leigh for films, I think it would take quite an intrepid set of people (and time and money) to try it out.
“The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it’s not all about characters, relationships and themes, it’s also about place and the poetry of place. It’s about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.”
Mike Leigh
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About me
I'm a playwright and investment analyst. I have a broad range of interests: food, gardening, innovation & intellectual property, sustainability, architecture & design, writing and the arts. I sit on the board of Talawa Theatre Company and advise a CIS investment trust on socially responsible investments.
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Recent Work
Recent plays include, for theatre: Nakamitsu, Yellow Gentlemen, Lost in Peru, Lemon Love. For radio: Places in Between (R4), Patent Breaking Life Saving (WS).
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Nakamitsu
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Yellow Gentlemen
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