Life Is Complex

Mike Leigh is an innovative and uncompromising filmmaker whose latest feature is the highly-praised All Or Nothing. Paul Farren and Lir Mac Cárthaigh ganged up on him during a recent trip to Dublin. [Extract]

Technique
PF You're well known for your use of improvisation. Does it bother you that people focus on your technique rather than on your stories?

ML Yes, of course. In any case, it's impossible to talk about it usefully. You call it a technique, and there are techniques involved, but it's obviously quite a complex and, without wanting to sound pretentious or wankery, it's quite a sophisticated, elaborate, telepathic sort of thing that goes on. I realise it's interesting, and has proved a degree of fascination and mystique, but the truth is that what's on the screen is what it's about, and that's more important.

PF You work with the actors for months before going on set. At what stage are you thinking about things like cinematography?

ML As soon as you have any conception of a story then you start to have images. I mean I am in a continuous state of imagining a film, and the film I'm imagining is changing all the time. All creative processes involve that sort of thing. The very act of doing that involves thinking cinematically, so you're thinking about shots without necessarily thinking about this shot and that shot. Moreover, we don't just show up on day one with any old stock and any old camera and any old lenses and just start shooting. I arrive at decisions with the cinematographer and the designer about what kind of stock, what kind of look it's going to have, and we shoot tests, so you're making decisions of a cinematic nature. It's an organic process. By the time we get down to saying "What's the first shot?" there's a lot of stuff on the go, and we've got a conception on the go, and that's got us to this point, and we're motivated.

But then again, for example, if you look at All Or Nothing, you've got this extraordinary central location. When I decided "Right, it's going to be a housing estate," everyone said "Oh, Christ!" They are a real bugger to shoot in, and I know because I shot Meantime and others on a housing estate. Then one day the location manager showed up and said "You'll never guess; there's this housing estate right down the road, just where we want it, and it's empty! All 320 people have been moved out, the flats have been emptied, it's going to be demolished, and it's available. We can have it for a knock-down price and we'll control it." It could have been boring, it could have been bland and not interesting, but the minute we got in there, Dick Pope wanted to start shooting it straight away, the dynamic of the place is amazing. The texture and the greyness and the configuration, and so again you start to see shots way before we get to the point where we're actually going to shoot anything.

PF Timothy Spall's character, Phil, is like a somnambulist throughout the film, but you understand what he's going through without using a lot of dialogue.

ML It's all happening internally. You see again, I don't know how I or anybody could arrive at that by any means other than the way I do it, because I don't know how you'd commit it to paper in such a way that anyone would know what you meant. Because what he says is on the whole minimal, and yet suddenly comes out with these bursts of philosophy. I mean it all works organically because of the complexity of what he's doing in the performance. The problem, as we know, with the conventions of scriptwriting, particularly when you've got to sell the script to someone, which is a fucking nightmare, is that you are almost forced to put things on the page that are inorganic. I don't know how you'd express that character in that language.

PF Words are a very limited form of expression anyway, when you put them on paper even less so.

ML Well, it depends on what you're talking about. If you apply the same argument, for example, to Johnny in Naked, you get a much clearer idea of it because it's all verbal, it's all mouth. It's great on paper. It's great literature, and it's a great character, so you wouldn't have a problem with that. So it depends on the character really.

LM A character like Andy in Life Is Sweet wouldn't come across as well on the printed page.

ML No, because he talks in sort-of Goon Show speech. No, you're right.

The full text of this article is printed in Film Ireland 89