When the British filmmaker Mike Leigh was 6, his father, a doctor who would oppose his son becoming an artist, told him to quit drawing pictures of people.
In a way, Leigh never stopped. In his six decades making movies, the 81-year-old Leigh has made some of the most humanistic movies in cinema, many of them character studies of ordinary, working-class people — though the films, from “Secret & Lies” to “Mr. Turner,” run the whole gamut.
“I walk down the street and I see characters,” Leigh says. “Looking at people is what it’s about.”
Leigh is sitting in a Toronto restaurant the morning after the premiere of his latest film and first in six years, “Hard Truths.” It reunites him with Marielle Jean-Baptiste, who was Oscar-nominated for her role in 1996’s “Secrets & Lies.”
In “Hard Truths,” which will open for a qualifying release Dec. 6 and nationwide Jan. 10, Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a bitter and rageful woman whose unexplained internal suffering spews out in venom directed at her husband, son and most anyone she encounters in her few, anxious trips out of their London home.
The film was made in Leigh’s trademark way. He sets without a script and instead builds the character and story through months of rehearsal with his actors. It’s an approach that Leigh says has gotten increasingly difficult to pull off in today’s movie industry. He spoke about that struggle and others in an interview.
Q: Pansy seems unable to enjoy life. We probably all know people like Pansy, and sometimes feel like her. What made you interested in a character like her?
LEIGH: That’s an interesting question because it won’t surprise you if I say there isn’t anything I’m not interested in when it comes to human behavior. If you mean that it’s something I identify with, yes, I do. But it would be untruthful if I said that’s what I had in mind. In fact, it probably never occurred to me until this conversation that there are bits of me in the thing you’re talking about. What is for sure is that, like everybody, I know Pansys of one kind or another. Some of them are quite close to me.
Q: Given the collaborative nature of how you draw out a character and a film, is it possible for you to identify the germ that you began with?
LEIGH: It’s very, very difficult, if not impossible. In the end it’s intuitive and organic. Start with Marianne and Michele (Austin). I wanted to get the two of them together for the third time with me. I decided, OK, let’s just look at the world of these Black folk. I actually can’t remember, let alone want to talk about, exactly the combination. Because we do genuinely embark on a journey of discovery as to what the film is — which is not news to anyone who writes paints pictures, writes novels, writes plays, writes screenplays, makes music, writes poetry, creates sculpture or anything else. How many novelists have said, “I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and then the character told me.” We really do do that, basically. My films are, for me, a consist part of an ongoing personal investigation. They’re not movies about movies. They’re not genre movies. They’re films about stuff, life.
Q: Many scenes capture how people, in stores and parking lots, respond to Pansy’s irritability. The same could be said of audiences getting to know a difficult protagonist. Did you consider how moviegoers would respond to her?
LEIGH: I never at any stage thought in those terms because you’re motivated by the reality of it. But, obviously, lining up these antagonists, if you like, that is what that was about.
Q: Do you think about how we collectively or individually treat someone like Pansy, who rejects help but needs it?
LEIGH: Yes. The world is full of Pansys. People live with other people’s conditions. They don’t think about it being something wrong with them that needs to be treated. It’s how she is and it’s a damn nuisance, a drag, it pisses them off. It’s a running condition of awfulness. People don’t go around, mostly, thinking: My relation has a mental condition that needs to be treated.
Q: You’ve spoken about the difficulty of getting a film off the ground the way you make them. Has it gotten harder?
LEIGH: It’s 100% impossible. It’s very tough, and it’s gotten tougher. Make no mistake. I’ve made 20-odd films, 28, I think, and over the years, working the way I do and saying no script, no discussion about casting, no interference, it’s got worse. It’s got bad. This is as low a budget as I’ve had in a long time. It is reflected in the lack of complexity in the narrative. It’s fine. You cut your cloth according to its length. It’s a 97-minute film. On the whole, my films have been 120, 130 minutes. Indeed, I am frustrated. We made this and it’s great, and I hope we get to do another one. But what’s frustrating is having done the likes of “Peterloo,” I’d love to have the freedom to make a big-scale contemporary film where I don’t declare what it is so I can explore society. Nobody will cough up.
Q: Do you feel at all let down by the festivals? Cannes and Venice reportedly passed on “Hard Truths.”
LEIGH: Incidentally, so did Telluride, which is odd. It’s hard to know what to feel about Cannes. If you look at the lineup, you think, maybe you can see that they wanted glitz and glamour. People say, “This is ridiculous. You’ve won the Palme d’Or. You’ve won the Golden Lion.” Blah blah blah. It means jack (expletive). I mean, I’ve been around too long. You think, whatever. I mean, if nobody wanted it at all — it’s here (in Toronto) and at the New York Film Festival — then I’d start to twitch.
Q: I would think that your notions for movies are vast, that big or small, they can come from anywhere.
LEIGH: Yes, that’s right. Even as we speak, we’re trying to raise the money for another film. I do start, quite unashamedly, like: If we get him or her to be in it. Let’s start with the notion that we’ll have Marianne. That’s what happened here. OK, we’ve got Marianne Jean-Baptiste and that immediately opens up a whole rich seam of character possibilities. That’s really what I’ve always done. You get these brilliant character actors who come and do it. And they all are character actors. They’re not narcissists who come and play themselves. They want to play real people out there on the street.
