Mike Leigh

Interview with Mike Leigh

Interview with Mike Leigh The following represents a distillation of a series of interviews conducted by the author. Two of these took place in London in July 2004; the third took place in New York City in October 2004. sean o’sullivan: We often think about generations of film movements based in certain countries—such as Italian cinema during and after World War II, or German cinema in the twenties or later on in the seventies, or, obviously, French cinema in the sixties, or New Hollywood in the seventies. And these generations are often predicated on people who have similar attitudes or beliefs or experiences with cinema. So, let me name ten British filmmakers. They were all born within ten years of each other, and on the surface they may seem to be far apart, but I wonder whether we can think of them as being in some sort of dialogue about filmmaking. Between 1935 and 1945 we have: Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott; Derek Jarman, Terence Davies, Peter Greenaway; Ken Loach, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh. Can one talk about this, at all, as a generation of filmmaking? i-xii_1-196_O'Sul.indd 145 6/24/11 8:33 AM mike leigh: Well, it’s interesting that a group of people born, and growing up from different class backgrounds, in different parts of the U.K., exposed, broadly speaking, to the pre–World War/postwar culture, and movie culture presumably, should manage to wind up doing such a diverse collection of things. But my own view of these things—and indeed my actual hands-on practical experience of it—is that the Italian postwar neorealism and the nouvelle vague, for instance, are absolutely more at the center of movements in culture and film culture that I feel part of and inspired by and influenced by and motivated by as much as anything else. Normally I get asked the question, “Were you influenced by the Free Cinema?” And the answer to that is, “No.” Because the truth of the matter is that as far as the Free Cinema was concerned, that is to say, the documentaries they were making, when that was happening I had no idea about it, because I was still tucked away in Manchester, ignorant of everything except what was on at the local picture house—i.e., commercial British and American movies. Certainly, for those who came from a provincial background, films were British and American cinema. I never really saw a film not in English until 1960, when I came to London at the age of seventeen. Then it was a massive liberating experience and a sort of massive opening-up. I knew about Eisenstein, I’d read about him, but I hadn’t actually seen any of his films. I’d got Roger Manville’s book, Film, and so I knew—if you’d showed me stills from the Odessa steps scene I could tell you what it was. But I hadn’t seen it. so’s: What is interesting about that list, to me, is the way it doesn’t seem to be a list at all. It seems to be all over the place. This suggests that British cinema is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. There are three clear clusters here. First, if you think of some of the signature eighties Hollywood films, the movies that seem to typify that period of American filmmaking—Blade Runner, Fatal Attraction, Top Gun, Angel Heart—they are made by British directors, by people on that list. Those would represent, somewhat polemically, a triumph of style over substance. Second, if you think of modernist, individualist approaches to filmmaking, that’s something that clearly Jarman and Greenaway and in many ways Davies fit into. And then, something more contentious for you, there’s this third group that would include you and Ken Loach and Stephen Frears. You would be designated, typically, as the realist cluster . So it’s interesting that three radically different areas, three clusters 146 | Mike Leigh i-xii_1-196_O'Sul.indd 146 6/24/11 8:33 AM of ideas or approaches, are represented there. These could be said to represent the three dominant movements in the history of cinema. ml: Yes, that’s right. And obviously, there are overlaps. What is interesting is that it was actually Ken Loach and Stephen Frears and I who worked inside...