There’s a mythology that surrounds Mike Leigh’s films. And like with any shared lore, not all of it is true. One misconception, for instance, is that his storytelling is largely improvised, as if his actors conjure scenes from midair once the camera starts rolling. But although the British director, 81, does create the characters and scenes alongside his actors during months of intense rehearsal and not beforehand, nothing in Leigh’s work is left to chance.
It’s a famous methodology he’s cultivated over decades, from his early stage work to his film debut, 1971’s “Bleak Moments,” to his string of acclaimed titles — including “Naked” (1993), “Topsy-Turvy” (1999) and “Happy-Go-Lucky” (2008) — through his most recent effort, the emotionally jarring “Hard Truths.” In fact, the filmmaker is incredulous that anyone might think that he could, as he puts it, “just point the camera at some actors and say, ‘Do whatever you feel like.’”
“The idea that you could arrive at ‘Hard Truths’ that way is impossible,” Leigh tells me, sitting in StudioCanal’s London office with frequent collaborator Marianne Jean-Baptiste, 57, who stars as the hard-worn, furiously disconsolate Pansy Deacon in the film. Seated opposite Jean-Baptiste at a small conference room table, Leigh is generous with his thoughts but has no time for pretense, perhaps because he arrived for the press day two hours early since no one told him his interviews had been pushed back. Instead of going home, he sat in King’s Cross station and watched people go by — a very Mike Leigh thing to do.
“Improvising is a way of making films,” he continues, leaning back on his chair as Jean-Baptiste nods. She’s dressed for a photo shoot in a neat black suit, a juxtaposition to Leigh’s crumpled fleece vest that only makes their dynamic that much more entertaining.
“People can do that and go away with an incredible amount of footage and piece it together in a way that embraces the potential of making films,” he continues. “No question about that. But apart from anything else, for me it’s not useful or interesting.”
Says Leigh of his directing style, “My instructions are very clear: Don’t try and be interesting. Don’t try and make anything happen. You’re in character. Just react how the character would react. That’s the job.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Instead, “Hard Truths” is the result of 14 weeks of rehearsals and six weeks of filming. It marks Leigh’s second time working onscreen with Jean-Baptiste, who was nominated for an Oscar for his 1996 opus “Secrets & Lies,” but their fourth collaboration overall (they’ve also done a play and a film score together). For “Hard Truths,” the director had initially approached Jean-Baptiste, who is based in Los Angeles, before the pandemic, but those plans were put on pause until early 2023.
“Mike was very adamant that we do it when you can be in a room with people,” Jean-Baptiste says. “You can’t work like this from six feet away, wearing masks.”
In fact, Leigh is horrified when asked if the conversations or rehearsals are ever done virtually. “It’s not something you could do by Zoom,” he replies, indignant. “Any more than you could perform an appendectomy by Zoom.”
The director brought Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin — who plays Pansy’s far more content and optimistic sister Chantelle — and the rest of the cast together in an empty office building in London’s Chalk Farm. He prefers to use existing spaces with multiple rooms and floors: “Vera Drake” was rehearsed in an old hospital, while “Secrets & Lies” was conceived in an unused school. Leigh calls it “a job of work,” emphasizing that the actors are paid to be available during the entire rehearsal process for strict hours.
It’s an opportunity for character actors, he says, not movie stars, because it requires patience.
“You have to be willing to go into this process knowing that you don’t know what it’s about, and you don’t know how big or small your role is going to be,” Jean-Baptiste says. “And I think for a lot of actors, that’s like, ‘Oh, I might give up that whole time and I might only be in two scenes.’ It’s about the process when you say yes to working with Mike. But I love it.”
Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths.”
(Bleecker Street)
Her character began as a list: people Jean-Baptiste either knows or has encountered. It could be anyone — a neighbor, a clerk she remembers interacting with, a friend. Making a list of interesting people is something Leigh says he always asks his actors to do, which is perhaps why Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy, a woman hardened and angry at the world as a way to cover up her sorrow, reminds us so much of those we know.
“We draw from that [list] and distill a few into a character,” Leigh says. “That’s a starting point. Just a way of plugging into them. What we’re about is not making movies about movies but making films about real people out there in the real world.”
Jean-Baptiste confirms that none of the real-world people on her list would be recognizable to them as Pansy. “We draw on real people,” she says. “And then we build something quite different, taking into existence their lives, where they grew up, their habits, their likes, their dislikes, their disappointments, their heartbreaks.” That research is extensive, from visiting London neighborhoods to imagining backstories and learning practical skills.
The rehearsals involve the main cast, not those with smaller, one-scene roles. An average day might involve conversations, walking around the space as the characters, research and, yes, some improvisation. All of this allows the actors to distill a complete sense of their roles, their relationships and their experience of the world, which eventually results in an inherent understanding of who they are.
“Depending on where we were in the process, it would mean coming in and maybe chatting to Mike for a bit, and we’d go and get changed into the characters’ clothes and warm up into character,” Jean-Baptiste says. “And then, just be.”
The actor was familiar with the process, having done it on “Secrets & Lies.” In that film, she played a London optometrist named Hortense Cumberbatch who discovers that her birth mother is a white woman (Brenda Blethyn). Leigh had previously cast Jean-Baptiste in his stage play “It’s a Great Big Shame!,” and it felt like an easy yes to make her Hortense. Jean-Baptiste vividly remembers those rehearsals for “Secrets & Lies.”
“We started to talk about what [Hortense] would do for a living,” she recalls. “He said, ‘What would she do?’ And I said, ‘She’d be a pilot.’ And he was like, ‘Shut up.’ I knew I’d get to go off and have flying lessons.”
Leigh interjects, “No chance!”
“I was chancing my arm seeing if I could get flying lessons,” Jean-Baptiste continues, laughing. “He was like, ‘No, not a chance in hell.’”
“She’s slightly exaggerating the way I did it,” Leigh says. “I would have been subtler than that. But of course, she did go off and learn how to be an optometrist. You create the whole iceberg, and [the audience] just sees the tip.”
Pansy is an even more specific character than Hortense. She lives in North London with her husband, Curtley (David Webber), and their adult son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Her house is pristine and lifeless, reflecting Pansy’s own sense of joylessness. She’s afraid of pigeons and foxes, which seem to threaten her through the windows. She complains about anything and everything.
“We had a bloody huge list of things that she was afraid of,” Jean-Baptiste says. “And the list of things that she didn’t like was even longer. I don’t think you’d ever get to read a character like that in a script that was handed to you.”
As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that Pansy contains a deep well of sadness and pain. She’s still suffering from her childhood and the death of her mother, something her sister Chantelle can’t quite understand. It’s that tension Leigh first landed on as rehearsals began.
“We got a very solid relationship between these two sisters and their mother, who we talked into existence even though she wasn’t played by an actor,” Leigh remembers. “But they affected each other, just as in life.”
“People have very different ideas about how they were brought up in the same home,” adds Jean-Baptiste.
As the narrative started to take shape, the director would “slightly move things in one direction or another” in hopes of approaching a coherent structure. “My job, as with any artist in any medium, is to take from and learn from what’s happening — and that informs where we go next,” he says.
There is never a physical script in the traditional sense on one of Leigh’s films, but he does create a document of sorts at the end of rehearsals. It doesn’t have any dialogue. Instead, he uses it to help schedule the locations — Leigh prefers to shoot in real places rather than a studio — and to keep things on track.
“Then scene by scene, sequence by sequence, location by location, we will build the scenes through it,” he explains. “We go to the location, improvise, then stop, break it down and script through rehearsal. So while there isn’t [a script], the dialogue that we wind up with is always very precise. There’s virtually no improvisation on camera, despite the mythology. And, of course, a script supervisor will jot it down so that when we come back to it, it’s there to help with remembrance.”
This foundation means most scenes require only a few takes. “We spend so much time working on these characters and establishing their habits and things like that, so that when you come to improvise you’re coming in fully loaded,” Jean-Baptiste says. “It’s not like you’re on the fly trying to think stuff up. That thought process has been locked from the word go.”
Leigh adds, “My instructions are very clear: Don’t try and be interesting. Don’t try and make anything happen. You’re in character. Just react how the character would react. That’s the job. You’re not being a writer or a dramatist or an entertainer.”
But despite the complete immersion into Pansy, Jean-Baptiste says she never stayed in character after work. In fact, Leigh insists that his cast members not be Method actors.
“It’s about the process when you say yes to working with Mike,” says Jean-Baptiste. “But I love it.”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s really dangerous,” he says. “And it’s also not helpful.” He looks over at Jean-Baptiste, as enraptured with Leigh’s pronouncements as I am. “You can go into character, totally be Pansy, come out of character, and then we can objectively analyze what happened so we can deal with it and use it and deploy it.”
Jean-Baptiste nods, adding, “Imagine the arguments if I stayed in character the whole time.”
Leigh agrees, “It would be impossible to work with her.”
Still, Pansy lingered. Jean-Baptiste could hear the character’s intrusive thoughts, even when she tried to let her go at the end of the day.
“They’d stay around, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, shut up, Pansy,’” Jean-Baptiste recalls. “Because when you go home, you’re Marianne. You’re doing your thing, but you’re doing your homework. So you’ll be watching TV and you’ll hear Pansy’s voice commenting on what you’re seeing. On your way to work, you’ll see some pigeons, and you’ll be like, ‘Oh, God, she’d be complaining, and she’d probably cross the road.’ You’re always looking for stuff that’s going to help the character.”
Leigh likens his filmmaking to writing a novel, where everything slowly emerges rather than being premeditated. It’s natural to him, and it’s how he’s always done things, despite Hollywood being obsessed with making films that are done in the exact opposite way.
“It’s how painters paint and people make music and sculptors make sculptures,” he says of his style. “It’s a journey of discovery, really. How many novelists have you heard say, ‘I didn’t know what was going to happen next’? But at the same time, obviously, my responsibility is to have some sense of what it’s about and where it might go.”
“Like a conductor,” Jean-Baptiste says. He nods.
There’s one question Leigh refuses to answer: How does he arrive at a particular film’s ending? The conclusion of “Hard Truths” is “for the audience to deal with,” he says. “What’s important is what we hand over to the audience. There’s nothing I can say beyond that because that’s the way it is.”
Having already succeeded with Leigh, Jean-Baptiste knows it’s hard to leave this particular process behind. “You have to if you’re going to eat, because the majority of work is not done in this way,” she laughs. “And there are great experiences out there.”
“You’ve been in some brilliant things,” Leigh encourages her. “Some really good stuff.”
“Somebody asked me what would be my ideal next job and who would be the director,” she replies. “It would be a Mike Leigh heist movie.”
Leigh is uninterested. “Let me know how that goes,” he cracks. “I’d watch it as long as I don’t have to make it.”
He pauses, leaning over to Jean-Baptiste with a slight smirk. “Now,” he says, “are you free for my next film? It’s about a woman pilot.”
