Called "the bard of
bleakness", Mike Leigh has established himself as one of Britain's foremost
dramatists and film-makers, an uncompromising, often controversial maverick
who has consistently tackled some of the country's thorniest issues of class,
race, politics and sexuality. He has produced a vision of this country that
is close to definitive: a critic for the New York Review of Books once said,
"Like other wholly original artists, he has staked out his own territory.
Leigh's London is as distinctive as Fellini's Rome or Ozu's Tokyo."
Perhaps the most noted aspect of Leigh's work is the manner in which it is produced.
Instead of writing on paper at a desk, Leigh works in the rehearsal space using
the live medium of his actors. The actor and Leigh regular Timothy Spall says,
"You create the character on the basis of someone you know, and you build
an entire reservoir of information about that character. What you don't know
you invent. And through a painstaking moment-by-moment creation of this person's
life - where they went to school, what their preoccupations are - you produce
a character." Leigh fashions this raw material into a plot, issuing simple
commands, such as "Character A meets Character B in the pub" or "C
sleeps with Character D". "He may not be sitting at a typewriter,"
says Alison Steadman, star of numerous Leigh projects, and his former wife,
"but he is creating, moulding, writing and distilling all the information."
As a result, a Mike Leigh film is something of an act of faith. During a shoot,
each scene is rehearsed right up to the moment it is ready for shooting (there
is rarely any improvisation in front of camera). "I often don't get to
see any scene until I arrive on set," says Dick Pope, Leigh's director
of photography, "and like Mike, the actors, and everybody else involved,
I have no idea where this journey of discovery will take us. It's a bit of a
magical mystery tour but with Mike very firmly in the driving seat."
Leigh's work has frequently been attacked for everything from its methodology
to its gloomy content to its depiction of women: it is "about as political
as a mugging," fumed Julie Burchill about 1993's Naked . "In the British
films of the 1960s, men were weak, confused, but basically decent; old women
were battleaxes, and young women got pregnant...Today, men are weak, confused
but basically decent; old women are battleaxes, and young women get raped, or
bulimic. Progress: don't you just love it?" However, these critical sallies
have never deflected Leigh. His biographer Michael Coveney says, "What
I admire about him is this absolute tenacity of not being shaken from the way
he wants to work." This has paid off with a huge and loyal following, most
notably in France, which provides the lion's share of his finances, and in the
US. "In looking at 'everyday lives' and finding strangeness, contradiction,
secrecy and compulsion in them," says US critic Roger Ebert, "he invented
the genre now also occupied by Todd Haynes, Paul Thomas Anderson and Todd Solondz."
Leigh is combative in defence of his work, and enraged by accusations that he
is condescending towards the working classes, or in the case of Naked , aggressively
sexist: "The serious, mature feminist position has no problems with the
film at all," he claims. "I would argue that, whilst in no way, obviously,
does one condone any kind of rape, every situation that's shown is of people
who are there by choice, for whatever sad reasons." He is equally infuriated
by the notion that his improvisational approach is somehow haphazard or arbitrary:
"There are all sorts of choices that I make that are actually no different
from anyone who writes a novel or paints a picture or anything else," he
says. "The very act of casting a piece is a choice." What he is striving
for, he says, is a kind of fictional documentary, where the reality of characters'
lives is captured in all of its compulsive banality: "The minute anything
extraordinary or exotic happens, I get bored. Most movies are about extraordinary
or charmed lifestyles. For me, what's exciting is finding heightened drama,
the extraordinary in the ordinary, what happens to ordinary people."
Mike Leigh was born on February 20 1943, the son of Abe Leigh, a doctor who
ran a surgery in Salford, near Manchester. When, at 17, Leigh won a scholarship
to Rada, no one was more surprised than him: "The most wonderful and the
most mystifying thing that had ever happened to me," he says. While he
was captivated by London, the courses at Rada fell short of expectation: "At
that time it was sterile, uncreative, prescriptive," Leigh says. "The
basic tenets were: 'Learn the lines, don't fall over the furniture'. You never
talked about character or motivation or the world of the pieces or improvisation.
So, I learned as lots of people do, by reaction."
In 1967, Leigh was appointed assistant director at the RSC and worked on Peter
Hall's Macbeth and Trevor Nunn's Taming of the Shrew . By the end of the 1960s,
Leigh had arrived at a methodology that would be the basis of his approach on
all his improvised plays thereafter. But his career was going nowhere and his
ambition to direct films lay dormant. Then in 1970, Charles Marowitz offered
him a late-night slot at his experimental Open Space Theatre in Tottenham Court
Road, London. The result was Bleak Moments, and when Marowitz saw a run through,
he was horrified, saying it was "naive, slice-of-life naturalism"
that was absolutely worthless. Reviewers were equally baffled, with the Times's
Irving Wardle mistakenly believing that the actors "come on cold and improvise
a play, left entirely to their own resources".
After its two week run the piece might have disappeared were it not for Les
Blair, an old school friend of Leigh's, who felt it might make a good film.
Appointing himself producer, Blair sent off begging letters to the rich and
famous of the film industry saying "we want to make this film, but we are
going to improvise it from this play and could you give us the money please".
One of the few positive responses came from Albert Finney, then running his
own production company, Memorial Films. Blair says: "He was amused to discover
that we had all been to the same school and he encouraged us." In the end
Finney's company paid for the film.
The result was hailed by the New Statesman as "The most remarkable debut
by a British director working on an absurdly low budget and with unknown actors."
Roger Ebert, of the Chicago Sun Times, was even more effusive: " Bleak
Moments is a masterpiece, plain and simple," he wrote. "Its greatness
is not just in the direction or subject, but in the complete singularity of
the performances." Success attracted the attention of BBC producer Tony
Garnett. The first fruit of this new partnership was Hard Labour , a one-hour
TV play about a loveless marriage set in Salford. In the cast was a young actress,
Alison Steadman, whom Leigh had first met at the E15 acting school: "I
remember he had this big black car with a tiny windscreen," says Steadman
of her first impression, "and because he was quite short it looked as though
he needed a big cushion to see through it." Leigh's working methods appealed
to her, and when he offered her a part in Hard Labour , she jumped at the chance.
During rehearsals, a relationship developed and they were married in 1973.
After Hard Labour , Leigh went back into theatre with piece called Wholesome
Glory , about a health-freak couple, Keith and Candice-Marie, at the Royal Court
Theatre Upstairs. Believing that the characters had some more mileage, Leigh
decided to take them for a romp in the Dorset countryside for his next major
TV play, Nuts in May. None of this matched the success of Leigh's next major
stage project, which began under the most inauspicious circumstances, as a stop-gap
filler at the Hampstead Theatre: the result was Abigail's Party, a comedy of
lower middle-class mores, dominated by Steadman's monstrously pretentious character
of Beverly. After a sellout run, a televised version was seen on BBC1 by 16
million viewers.
By the end of the decade the Thatcher revolution was getting into gear and Leigh's
work began to acquire an even sharper sense of political purpose, most notably
in Meantime (1981), a dark, wrenchingly funny evocation of the 1980s dole-drawing
underclass: "I was lying in the bath, listening to the radio very early
in the morning," Leigh recalls of the inspiration for the piece, which
gave an early break to two unknown young actors, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, "and
this story came on about two unemployed kids who had committed suicide. And
I thought: 'That's what we should be doing.'"
In 1985, Leigh embarked on High Hopes, his first feature film since Bleak Moments
17 years previously. The story of a frail old woman, played by Edna Doré,
and her bickering and often insensitive family, it also explored through the
character of the son Cyril, a politically committed motorcycle courier, what
it meant to be a socialist. Somewhat overlooked in Britain, High Hopes was feted
abroad as a humanist antidote to the expansion of Thatcherism.
There was a significant change of tack for the next project, Life Is Sweet,
a much gentler evocation of a suburban family, with Steadman as the mother,
Wendy, and Jane Horrocks her dysfunctional, bulimic screen daughter Nicola.
It was only at the screening that Steadman learned that Nicola had been indulging
in kinky sex sessions in which she smeared chocolate all over her body: "I
said, 'She was doing what?' Whenever I'd come home, her character would be in
the bath, but I suspected the problem was that she had a washing disorder. I
had the wrong end of the stick, as we do in life." Though the film received
generally good reviews, it was again left to foreign critics, including Roger
Ebert - who described it as a masterpiece - to fully appreciate its understated
power.
Thewlis played a central character in Leigh's next project, Naked, a hugely
fruitful collaboration, resulting in the zeitgeist-defining character of Johnny,
a misogynist malcontent. Naked was a significant breakthrough for Leigh, picking
up Best Actor and Best Director awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993.
It has also perhaps generated more controversy than all his other films. Feminist
protesters picketed cinemas with banners that read "Five pounds for Five
Rapes" while commentator Suzanne Moore wrote: "What sort of realism
is this? To show a misogynist and surround him with such walking doormats has
the effect, intentional or not, of justifying this behaviour."
Leigh's next film, Secrets & Lies , released in 1996, couldn't have been
more different: "I had a reputation of playing idiosyncratic and grotesque
characters," says Timothy Spall, who had played just such a character in
Leigh's 1988 pest-control play, Smelling a Rat , "and I think we knew that
it was time to work on someone who was the complete opposite. We decided on
a character who was a little quiet man who had a certain quiet dignity and a
very good heart." Though the film couldn't match Naked for raw energy,
carefully crafted performances from Spall and Brenda Blethyn as his sister Cynthia
Rose, who is revisited by a child she gave up for adoption, picked up the Palme
d'Or at Cannes in 1996 and earned a clutch of Oscar nominations. The film took
$50m worldwide, propelling Leigh into the directorial front rank.
Since Secrets & Lies , Leigh has made Career Girls in 1997, and the Gilbert
and Sullivan costume drama Topsy-Turvy in 1999, a spectacular departure from
the usual grimy contemporary landscapes. His new film All or Nothing , about
a London cabbie and his deeply unpleasant overweight family, is perhaps his
most uncompromisingly downbeat. However, as Leigh points out, no one has yet
dismissed its unremittingly grim portrait of a deprived housing estate as implausible,
even under the current "socialist government with an enormous majority".
All or Nothing also shows Leigh at his most abrasive, confirming him as a film-maker
at the height of his powers to exasperate and challenge: "I'm in rehearsals
now preparing for the next thing, which will be another departure, though I'm
not going to say more. I suppose if I did have an outstanding ambition it would
be to paint on a bigger canvas. But who is going to put up the dosh, when there
is no script, no Julia Roberts or any of those other things they think important?
I'll just have to keep on doing what I'm doing." John O'Mahony, The
Guardian