A Sit-Down with Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh’s endless fascination with human behavior is palpable in every one of the films he’s made over the course of his nearly fifty-year career. With an acute sensitivity to rhythm, character, and setting, he extracts extraordinary moments from the flow of ordinary life. And while his preoccupations with class tensions and strained family dynamics have followed him throughout the years, his work has taken on a variety of forms, from domestic dramas like Life Is Sweet and All or Nothing to period films like Topsy-Turvy and Peterloo, which is coming to theaters this weekend. Even at their most melancholy, his movies are fueled by a sense of constant motion that gives even the heaviest of subjects a kind of buoyancy—a feeling that recalls a line Brenda Blethyn delivers in Secrets and Lies: “You gotta laugh, ain’t ya, sweetheart? Or else you’d cry.”
After growing up in postwar Manchester, Leigh experienced his artistic awakening in the cultural ferment of 1960s London, where he studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). He spent several years pursuing his passion for writing and directing by making plays and television films, and the methods he developed in those early works—long periods of improvisation and rehearsal, close collaboration with his actors—would go on to influence his approach to cinema. He’s been honing these strategies for nearly half a century now, and at seventy-six, he shows no sign of changing his ways.
I had a chance to sit down with Leigh on a rain-soaked morning during the Toronto International Film Festival, where he was premiering Peterloo, a stirring re-creation of a bloody massacre that occurred in Manchester in 1819. Over tea we discussed his early days as a filmgoer, the amount of research that goes into making his films feel so lived-in, and what he enjoys about postproduction.