Vera Drake

'I'm allowed to do what I want - that amazes me'
Interview with Mike Leigh, by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, Sunday December 5, 2004

Mike Leigh's flat-cum-office in Soho is situated above a pub and below a knocking shop. You pass a handwritten sign advertising 'Models for Hire' on your way in. It seems somehow appropriate that our greatest cinematic chronicler of oddballs, misfits and malcontents should hold court here in a functional-going-on-drab space where the only distraction is the sound of the human traffic that passes beneath his window, who seem, even at this early hour of the morning, to have wandered, fully formed, out of Leighland.

The man himself is smaller and less Eeyore-like than I had expected from my various sightings of him over the years, usually ambling through Soho, always woolly-jumpered and woolly-faced, seeming to eye the world with heavy-lidded suspicion. Today, both the jumper and the beard are in place, but he seems accommodating, if brusque - not at all the grumpy sod that emerges from his ample press cuttings. He is, however, defensive from the off.

'One develops a strange parallel existence that is not to do with oneself but is defined by some journalists,' he says, when I broach the subject of his famous antipathy towards interviews, 'In my case, I'm supposed to be this - how does it go exactly? - "melancholic soul given to brooding silences".' He throws back his head and emits a belly laugh at the very thought. Then he is suddenly serious again, and says pointedly, 'I've long since stopped worrying about how I'm portrayed in the press because ultimately it's not that important. Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity.'

His integrity has never been the issue. Since he emerged in 1971 with the statement of intent that was Bleak Moments, Leigh has made films that could be grouped generically under the title melancholic realism. There have been laughs aplenty, of course, but, as his first great success Abigail's Party illustrated, there are times when we are never quite sure whether we are laughing with his protagonists or at them. His critics insist that the latter is the case, that Leigh patronises the working (and the middle) class - even as he tries to reflect the often unseen tribulations of their lives. His films, they say, are populated by caricatures, by types rather than characters. In the past, Leigh has summoned up Dickens in his defence. Today, he rebuts the accusation outright with a weary sigh.

'Actually, the last thing my characters are is stereotypes because they are far too specific and idiosyncratic, like we all are, to be able to qualify in a million years as stereotypes.

Vera Drake arrives already garlanded in praise from the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion, and earned Imelda Staunton the best actress award for her astonishing portrayal of Vera, the good-hearted housewife and mother who supplements her earnings as a domestic with a secret sideline in illegal abortions. On the strength of Staunton's performance alone, it is Leigh's most powerful film since Naked in which David Thewlis ranted and raged as the passionate misanthrope Johnny, adrift in an urban landscape blighted by Thatcherism.

Vera Drake, though, set in Islington in 1950, offers a more rose-tinted social realism. It is the first time Leigh has tackled that in-between decade. 'I obviously had to set it before the law on abortion changed in 1967,' he says, 'and I settled on 1950 because the war was still fresh in the collective memory, but the Fifties as we have come to know them hadn't really started yet. It was a world of post-war togetherness, of putting things back together, of solidarity and great hope. That's the backdrop to Vera's story.' It is also a world of unremitting drabness. Trapped in that strange limbo between the end of the war and the beginning of pop culture, the characters, young and old, share a sense of what might be termed optimistic stoicism, their conversations clipped and halting, their faith in the future tempered by their wartime experiences, which are never referred to except in the most oblique and glancing ways.

For all its dramatic strengths, though, and its painterly formal beauty, Vera Drake is, in places, a curiously heavy-handed film in which the upper class are portrayed as mostly cold and emotionally dysfunctional, and the lower orders as mostly poor but happy. If not quite stereotypical, these Leigh 'types' are certainly drawn in the broadest of brush strokes. In the press screening I attended, the Reg and Ethel factor loomed large. People seemed to giggle nervously each time Ethel, Vera's hapless daughter, played by Alex Kelly, or her oddball suitor Reg (Eddie Marsan), appeared on screen.

Would it worry him if people were laughing at a character for reasons he didn't intend? 'Oh, that's a complex question,' he replies. 'I mean, I've been to screenings of the film where the laughter came at quite surprising - to me - points. But, you know, people laugh for a variety of reasons - with, or at, or out of embarrassment, or nervousness even. It's not always a function of mirth.'

These abiding quibbles aside, Vera Drake is a compelling and complex film. Though much has been made of the controversial subject matter - back street abortion - its main theme is the buried family secret, the ticking time bomb that can lurk underneath even the most stable marriage. Much of the film's cumulative power lies in its delineation of a rock solid family suddenly rocked to the core by a revelation that is literally beyond their comprehension: the fact that their beloved, and loving, mother is an abortionist. Why, I ask Leigh, does she keep her secret for so long?

'To protect her family. Not herself. Vera's not ashamed of what she does, but she knows the pain and ignominy it will bring. They don't need to know, basically. Plus, as her husband says, had he known about it, he would have put a stop to it.'

One of Leigh's bravest moves is to make Vera almost saint-like in her goodness, and to make even her illegal sideline seem like a calling. 'Exactly,' says Leigh, 'she's there to help. She is doing something that thousands of people, mostly women, in all societies in all times have done. Vera knows it's illegal obviously but she does it without a grain of guilt. What I am interested in, as always, is the moral dilemma between good and bad. What is good? And why is goodness criminalised by society?'

As always, too, Leigh draws exceptional performances from a familiar cast, and the performance of a lifetime from Staunton. The protracted scene in which Vera tries to tell her husband why she has been arrested and incarcerated is cinema at its most powerfully intimate and intimately powerful; Staunton's stricken face and faltering words remaining in the mind long after the credits have rolled. The end result emerged out of months of improvisation, the actors creating their characters from scratch, and working to one of Leigh's cardinal rules; that the actor never knows more than the character he or she portrays.

'The only person who knows the bigger picture during all those months of preparation is Mike,' says Phil Davis, who plays Stan, Vera's husband. 'I was totally immersed in Stan's character to the point that I knew what he had done in the war, I knew he was an orphan, but, until very close to the moment we started actually shooting, I had no idea of the plot.'

It is this painstaking methodology that makes Leigh, our greatest living director, what used to be called an auteur. Born in Salford in 1943, he comes from solid middle-class stock, and came to film via a brief flirtation with acting at Rada, then a successful career as a stage director. His father, interestingly, was a doctor, and both his parents are name-checked in the film's end credits.

'I would have loved to have talked to my father about the sort of dilemmas the film broaches,' he says wistfully. 'Given that he had a one-man, working-class practice in Salford in the period that the film is set, he would undoubtedly have had to face the dilemma of unwanted pregnancies, the aftermath of abortions. I happen to doubt that he ever performed one: that would have been very, very unlikely.' Leigh's father did admit to his son that he had occasionally practised euthanasia, administering lethal morphine shots to very old, very sick patients.

'He put people out of their misery. Absolutely,' says Leigh, 'but it was not a moral dilemma to him. He saw it as something that was positive, that had to be done, that was merciful. In that way, he was not unlike Vera.'

Throughout his 27 films, Leigh has tackled the kind of thorny subject matter that the mainstream film industry has tended to avoid. His films tend to be about ordinary lives lived against stacked odds. He has consistently worked on shoestring budgets and followed no one's rules but his own. After the initial success of Bleak Moments he worked solely in television for 17 years. Sometimes, as in the case of Nuts in May and particularly Abigail's Party, his characters' language has entered the vernacular; at other times his latent anger has informed some powerful state-of-the-nation dramas, most notably Naked and 1984's hard-edged family drama Meantime.

For 25 years Leigh has lived in the same house in unfashionable Wood Green in North London, well away from the Hampstead luvvie set, and immune to the temptations of Hollywood, whose more alert denizens have occasionally beaten a path to his door. 'I've had some great Hollywood actors on that very couch,' he says, 'but really they inhabit a different world. To ask them to be on call for months on end, maybe doing nothing for a lot of the time until I need them is just unrealistic. Plus I have great British actors on my doorstep. Why would I use American ones to play British roles?'

Famously private, Leigh refuses outright to talk about his life outside films, though he recently described the break-up of his marriage to the actress Alison Steadman as 'all very amicable'. If informed rumours are to be believed, he has embarked on a new relationship which, some say, has led to a general brightening of his mood - he once described himself as a 'complete pessimist'.

For all his mastery, Leigh occupies a strange place in British film, and lately his local worldview has captivated audiences abroad more than it has wooed cinema-goers at home. In 1996 Secrets & Lies won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and earned him five Oscar nominations, but his last film, the often extraordinary All or Nothing, while critically acclaimed, performed pitifully at the domestic box office. The British cinema-going public seem oddly ambivalent to Leigh's films. I wondered, in conclusion, whether he felt like a prophet without acknowledgement in his own land.

'Oh no,' he retorts. 'I mean, that's a complicated issue. I've gotten off a plane at JFK and the immigration guy has gone, "Oh, Secrets & Lies, great film." Then I can get into a London taxi, as I did just the other day, and the driver's gone, "So, what do you do then?" And, when I tell him, he's like, "Sorry mate, means fuck all to me."'

Does that kind of thing depress him? 'Not really. If it's the case that there are a lot of people who can't or don't see my films, I don't really think that's to do with me, or the nature of my films, or neglect of me. It's to do with the continuing problem of the dissemination of British films on British screens. It's to do with the domination of Hollywood. But, do I feel neglected? No, hand on heart, not at all, I feel lucky. I get to make films without even showing a script. To be honest, the fact that I'm allowed to do what I do in the way that I do it never ceases to amaze me.'

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