Mike Leigh: Bard of Bleakness

Arriving at the GFT’s Art Deco bar to meet perhaps our finest indigenous filmmaker, Mike Leigh, I’m greeted warmly by a large fleece pullover that has enveloped its small sexagenarian wearer. Leigh, who has a reputation as a curmudgeon, appears casual and relaxed throughout the interview, which he performs slouched in a leather armchair like a discarded marionette. Throughout I’m drawn to his wonderfully idiosyncratic facial hair, particularly his moustache, an unwieldy and lopsided mop of white. Hanging lower to the right of his face, it gives the impression of a constant sneer. That may be exactly what it is, in fact, as he’s notoriously suspicious of journalists (even lovely ones from The Skinny). Near the beginning his answers are slow and deliberate, peppered with long guarded pauses. But he eventually warms, or perhaps I begin to ask the right questions.

I start with the genesis of his latest film, Another Year. “It’s very hard to talk about the idea because it’s about a lot of things.” says Leigh. “It comes out of a whole lot of ongoing themes and preoccupations about the way we live: work, families, relationships, parents, children, togetherness, warmth, generosity, loneliness... you name it. One thing that is a bit specific, I suppose, is that having made Happy-Go-Lucky, which focuses, for the most part, on youngish people, I decided to make a film that, apart from anything else, starts from where I and people of my age are. I’ve been about a bit you know,” he says with a gentle chortle. “I’m looking at a shrinking future.”

So it’s a personal film? “All my films are personal, and this one is a particularly personal one,” Leigh tells me. He’s reluctant, though, to concede when pressed that any of his characters are autobiographical. And who could blame him from distancing himself from the oddballs he’s created throughout his 40-year career – particularly the degenerate males. From tightly-wound authoritarian Keith (Roger Sloman) in Nuts in May, to David Thewlis’ tour-de-force of misanthropy as Johnny in Naked, right up to Happy-Go-Lucky’s unhinged driving instructor Scott (Eddie Marsan), Leigh’s men tend to be neurotic, frustrated and seething. “It’s complicated, really. Given that we’re talking about Another Year you’d have to agree that Tom, Jim Broadbent’s character, and his son character Joe are not in that category. So not all my males characters are like that. But, I suppose I would have to concede the notion that we males are an oppressed species, of course we are,” he says, only half jokingly.

Perhaps his male characters tend towards life’s darker recesses because they’re surrounded by such indomitable women – few male filmmakers can claim to have helped create so many strong female characters. “That’s also complex. There’s Mary [Lesley Manville's character in Another Year] and there’s Cynthia in Secrets and Lies, who are very vulnerable and weak,” he says defensively. “The truth is I don’t think in terms of weak men, strong women or vice-versa, I do people. And society, or at least the heterosexual world that I mostly deal with, is made up of the compound experiences of men and women.”

This may be so, but apart from perhaps Thewlis as Johnny, the most commanding, memorable performances in his films have come from the female contingent of his unofficial repertory group. As Beverly in Abigail’s Party, Alison Steadman gave the 70s a monstrous icon of bad taste; for her emotionally wrought performance in Secrets and Lies, Brenda Blethyn was garlanded with awards from Cannes and BAFTA; and Imelda Stanton, who has a small role in Another Year, was similarly awards laden for her stoic and heartbreaking turn as the titular backstreet abortionist in 2004's Vera Drake. “That’s one thing I do consciously do,” Leigh concedes, “I make it my business to create good parts for women. Most female characters in film and television are subordinate to men. I try to address that.”

In a bid to find less contentious ground I move onto an extraordinary moment in Another Year where Tom and Gerri, the happily married middle-age couple of the piece (played gracefully by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), discover that their only son Joe (a mischievous Oliver Maltman) has been seeing Katie (Katrina Fernandez) surreptitiously for several months when he brings her round to the family home for an impromptu lunch. Tom and Gerri are delighted that their “dark horse” son has found a companion, but this sweet scene between two loving couples at opposite ends of life’s spectrum turns rather ugly when Gerri’s needy co-worker Mary (a scene stealing Lesley Manville), who has in earlier scenes made clear her desire to be more than just “auntie Mary” to Joe, arrives unannounced. This scene, like all others in Leigh’s oeuvre, is a result of the director’s singular improvisation stage of preproduction. His assembled cast, having already created their characters in one-to-one sessions with director, create dialogue and conflict from scenarios masterminded by Leigh, who acts as omniscient puppet-master.

Did Broadbent, Sheen and Manville know that Maltman’s character was in a relationship before this rehearsal? “Absolutely not, that’s how it works. I set it up and they had no idea, it happens for real – horrible. I knew [Lesley’s character, Mary] wasn’t going to be pleased, but everything in my films is manufactured this way. When it works it’s remarkable, it's magic.” From this improvisation session the scene is “distilled down to something that’s dramatic and cinematic”.

This unique approach has won Leigh and his actors many admirers, but there is a vociferous group of critics unappreciative of this dramatic alchemy who accuse the director and his cast of creating grotesque caricatures, a conclusion which I believe comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of Leigh’s films. Lazy critics tend to lump them, along with all British films that deal in a serious way with the issues in society, into the catch-all category of British social realism. But Leigh’s films have as much in common with the Ealing Comedies or the Boulting Brothers as they have to do with kitchen sink dramas. Leigh agrees: “People talk about Ken Loach and Mike Leigh in the same breath,” he explains in third person. “They see them as similar. We both know, you and I and indeed Ken and I, that they make, fundamentally, very different films.”

Of course, in this context of social realism many of his characters appear to be caricatures. Take, for example, Aubrey (Timothy Spall) from Life is Sweet (1990), a supposed “culinary genius” chef with a bizarre Mid-Atlantic accent and wardrobe that suggest a blindfolded shopping spree at T.K. Maxx, whose crumby restaurant serves dishes such as 'Tongue in a rhubarb hollandaise' and 'Tripe soufflé' (this, of course, was an age before Heston Blumenthal made such concoctions de rigueur). Compared to the naturalism of the British New Wave, Spall's performance is positively cartoonish.

Consider, however, Aubrey and Leigh’s other extreme creations in terms of the varied influences that he cites: “pantomime, variety, circus, in theatre it’s Beckett, Pinter, Chekhov. I’m also influenced by the likes of Ronald Searle [legendary British cartoonist].” It seems to me that those who criticise Leigh’s films' lapses in realism miss the point: he’s not interested in trying to recreate a facsimile of life on screen; he’s getting to the essence of things – sometimes through naturalism, sometimes through vaudeville.

At 67, Leigh is unlikely to change his ways. But, as one of the few directors improving with age, why would he?