Mike Leigh speaks to Arts Hub

Mike Leigh's latest film Happy Go Lucky (Photo courtesy flickr/pj mac)  

Interviews have never been easy for me, and interviewing Mike Leigh was no exception. As a matter of fact, because he has the reputation of being ‘shirty’ with journalists, I was more nervous than usual. So you can understand how flustered I became when, having arrived early, Leigh greeted me with a growl: ‘Your interview is not for another 20 minutes.’ ‘Oh, I could go out, have a coffee and come back.’ ‘No, let’ get it over with.’

And on that note we departed from the Thin Man production offices into Leigh’s pied-a-terre next door. Humble as ever, Leigh acknowledges one of the neighbours (an Asian woman) whom we pass on the stairwell. She smiles decently, oblivious to a remark putatively ascribed to Leigh that the place is crawling with prostitutes. Still it’s anyone’s guess why Leigh remains stuck in to the same digs as those taken when he and Simon Channing-Williams began their own production company in 1989.

The ‘enfant terrible’ of British cinema is the only living native filmmaker who still makes films in Britain and outside both the UK and USA systems and which are critically acclaimed and financially successful.

Significantly his films, whilst possibly being shot in ‘studio mode’, avoid the studio sound stages because for Leigh an entire London street is the set (and not just the house or garage or cafe). Leigh’s films are also organic, amorphous wholes which evolve as they go, Leigh foreswearing the storyboard and/or the written script.

Looking like a set from one of his films, the apartment could be construed as John Osborne modern, very similar to Leigh’s own niche as progeny of Wesker, Osborne and Pinter. Motioning me to take the sofa opposite the chair in which he slumps, Leigh’s rabbinical look conjures up an image of Stanley Kubrick’s twin brother. He embarks upon a monologue about location in a voice he has never bothered to cultivate and which is almost impossible to understand as it is a Lancaster burr. (I pull up a chair next to him instead so as to be able to retain eye contact).

‘The thing about my films is that I find somewhere and then I kind of create characters within the environment where characters and ideas grow into each other’.

There’s been a great deal written about the world of Mike Leigh and there have been many attempts to assess whether his world is misogynist or misanthropic or both? To my mind, these kinds of criticisms come from people who don’t understand the English mentality. If you want to look for the key to Leigh you have to go back to Dickens or Hogarth, as his characters are caricatures of the times and the reasons why they are caricatures is because the system in Britain has not really improved or changed since the 18th and 19th centuries. Britain is still, by and large, an anarchic country with no real middle class and an even greater contempt for middle-class mores.

Leigh himself, despite his fame and acclaim, prefers to remain in a sleazy pad in Soho rather than take a place (as has Cameron Macintosh) in Bloomsbury He still sticks to so tight a budget that Happy-Go-Lucky was shot in a dumpy flat above a Polish deli in Finsbury Park despite the fact that the combined incomes of the working girls would have predicated a more salubrious abode.

According to Leigh, it’s a way to keep artistic freedom. ‘We shot Vera Drake in the old Hornsey Central Hospital (which has since been pulled down) because it was cheap. All the films are made on low budget. I want to keep artistic control and don’t want to be beholden. So all the things we are talking about are ways of making them and you have to be really inventive'.

‘Sometimes these things are serendipitous and random. We put an advert in The Evening Standard I think (which you wouldn’t nowadays) looking for a house we could rent (for Bleak Moments), take over and pay to do thing with when we were filming. And the guy had inherited the house and said we could do what we want with it.’

‘It so happened it was in Tulse Hill (In Leigh’s play it was set in Croydon). We didn’t choose the district. Tulse Hill chose us’.

Mike Leigh’s films chronicle London life and include almost as many locations as he himself has lived in whilst at RADA, the Camberwell College of Art and the London Film School. This is why, I shall assume, the films have been called ‘autobiographical’.

As well as chronicles, they are documents of ‘social change’ and auger gentrification and loss of identity. The characters are in flux because the environment itself is unstable and changing all the time.

Of all the films about physical and spiritual dislocation, Naked is Leigh’s most heroic indictment and in its pursuit of a homeless character in the wasteland of London after dark, the film recalls something of Leopold Bloom’s odyssey through Dublin at night in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

No-one gets off lightly in a Mike Leigh film and the Yuppies who have made it into conurbations of outer London such as Southgate or Wood Green or Enfield are plagued by the same demons as their working-class counterparts. Thus Julie Burchill’s criticisms that Leigh’s films are contemptibly patronising toward middle-class values and that Leigh himself is a self-hating ‘toff’ are both unfair and unfounded.

‘There are dozens of reasons that make me choose a place – some of them are artistic, dramatic, cinematic and some are completely practical and logistic’.

‘By the time we filmed on Quilter Street in Secrets and Lies the area was more gentrified than the street she would have lived on. But when we filmed you didn’t see the gentrification. And actually, whilst we filmed in Bethnal Green the place was supposed to be Walworth – south of the river; because in our heads we had given them a southeast postcode.’

‘In High Hopes the gentrification wasn’t in St. Pancras (and please refrain from prounouncing it as a part of the body) it was near Victoria Park where the old lady lives next door to the Yuppies and on the Roman Road at a time when Thatcher was selling off Council properties for redevelopment and refurbishment’.

So what’s next for the director of Vera Drake and Happy-Go-Lucky?
Who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised to find him off London’s streets and in an office in Hollywood. I wouldn’t be surprised but I would be disappointed. Very, very disappointed…