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Balls in Blizzards
The Magic and Mystery of Mike Leigh
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| Mike Leigh |
The characters in Mike Leigh's new picture, All Or Nothing, are so fully realized, so three dimensional, that at times you'll want to question whether you're watching fiction film or documentary drama. This story about a working-class couple raising their two teenaged children in a depressed London housing estate is stark, honest and unflinching, but for all its blunt realism, All Or Nothing is ultimately a film about love, hope and redemption. Starring Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville as a couple refusing to face the poverty of their troubled relationship, the picture features the sort of rich performances that fans have come to expect from a Mike Leigh project.
On a recent visit to Los Angeles to promote the new film, Mike Leigh sat down with MM to chat about his unique approach to moviemaking and how it all came together on All Or Nothing.
Phillip Williams (MM): How did you stretch yourself on this picture in ways that you hadn't done before?
Mike Leigh (ML): I feel-I don't want to be too self-congratulatory-that what worked in this film better than any film previously is the complexity of the narrative and the integration of the narrative with thematic dynamics of the film. There are, technically speaking, two kinds of narratives: cumulative narratives, where you have an event and another event that aren't necessarily related to each other causally, but by accumulation they become the narration of the film. And there are causal narratives where everything has a dramatic function which effects the next thing. [In All or Nothing] I've got a number of different stories, [each of which] moves in its own orbit, but they're all interlocked and interrelate to each other and therefore add up. So in that sense, I feel I've been able to carry out something that I haven't quite achieved with such complexity before.
MM: Could you talk about the atmosphere during filming? Were the actors in character all the time, or were they able to lighten up between takes?
ML: Well, I am very strict about how actors operate when doing this kind of work. As you know, we spent a considerable amount of time doing a huge amount of improvisation. It's a very complex and very involving kind of acting, and the actors have to be able to really inhabit those characters-be in their skin-and really take off. The characters are quite different from themselves, although each actor plugs into his or her emotional battery. I make sure that people are disciplined about going into character, staying in character while they are in character and then coming out of character.
MM: Do you ever have a clear idea of who the characters are going to be when you start the process, or do they evolve during it?
ML: I make films like other people write novels, paint pictures, make sculptures and so forth: All art-real art-is a synthesis of improvisation and order. I discover what my films are by the journey of making them. So no, I don't know anything. I have a starting set of conceptions, but these evolve and grow organically as I start to work into the material.
MM: What is your relationship with your cinematographer like? You've been working with Dick Pope for several years now.
ML: It's special. It's the same as with some actors, a designer and so forth, we have a very special relationship. We talk the same visual language and we like each other. so that's the number one ingredient. He's great because he is a cinematographer that understands what I am about and what I am trying to do, but he also has taste himself. He is not the kind of cinematographer that needs to do elaborate pyrotechnics to justify his existence. He is as in love with a static, subtle shot in which things happen (and making that work and painting with light to make that precise and atmospheric) as he is with complex and elaborate things if that's what it needs.
MM: In the movie there is a lot of depression and anger. I wonder if that was in your original conception of the piece.
ML: Yes. The film obviously establishes a status quo of pain and despair, and there is anger, repression and depression. But ultimately we move on from that. As far as the core journey of the film is concerned, that depressing status quo only has any meaning when viewed from the point of view of where the film goes: the hope and redemption and fulfillment and potential possibilities that I hope the film points at.
MM: Even with your years of experience, I assume that it still takes a certain amount of courage to make a picture the way you do: pulling a group of people together to undertake a journey in which you aren't exactly sure where you're going.
ML: First of all I have to say that it's not that I'm not exactly sure where I'm going. The truth is I don't know where I'm going at all! And it is always dangerous. So your question is right on the button. The truth is, it is always, always dangerous, and in some ways it gets more dangerous because when I was doing work in total obscurity the world would not have blinked if I created a disaster. If I perpetrate a disaster now, the world will want to know about it-and so will the backers. So it is dangerous, but in a way, all art is dangerous. And actually, dare I say, all filmmaking is dangerous, except that the danger element is in some way apparently taken out of it when it becomes an industrial process. But it is dangerous in any real sense. So yes, I'm inviting a load of people to come and juggle balls in blizzards on Vaseline-covered tightropes. [laughs]
MM: But you must bring certain tools to the process which give you, if not safety, but something to stand on.
ML: Yes, sure. The fact is it's a) very hard to talk about what I do, and b) harder still to talk about it in the sort of shorthand that these short interviews require. Obviously I'm talking about a very intuitive process, imagining things and communicating things; making things happen between people which are in themselves psychological, emotional and in some way-without sounding too pretentious about it-kind of spiritual and psychic.
Apart from all that, there is a whole system of technical craft which I have invented in order to make it all happen. Even that is constantly under review. On any new project I will suddenly think of a whole new way of getting things to happen. But at the end of the day what matters most is the process of filmmaking, and a way of creating action and finding ways of looking at it cinematically. Film is about time: the control of time and the drawing of moments. It's about rhythm; the tempo of life.
MM: Speaking of time: why did you choose to shoot the final scene in real time? You took a lot of time with that, shooting for perhaps 10 minutes without cutting.
ML: There seemed no other way to do it. In a way [single shot] is no less or more real time than if you're intercutting. But if it's in one shot you feel like it's unquestionably "real time." It just seemed very natural. I'm not just letting it happen; it's still very distilled, very carefully constructed. And because we are talking about traditional 35mm film as opposed to DV, it couldn't be any longer than 10 minutes because of the length of a roll of film. The point is it just seemed right; it seemed natural. It seemed natural to see a man and woman in a room, and to stay with them and gradually and imperceptibly move in on them until it's a very intimate close-up.
MM: When you look back at the films that you've made, are you sometimes surprised by the issues you've dealt with? Do you learn about yourself in retrospect?
ML: Well, yes. The first thing is I actually look back at my films and think 'How the hell did we do that?' A few weeks ago there was a retrospective in Sarajevo and I sat through all of my films because I had to discuss them at the end and I needed to refresh myself. It's very exhilarating to look at a film-at the age of 59-that I made when I was 29, and to see how I was dealing with quite mature things. To be quite honest, I don't really know the answer to that question.
MM: I do think that your films are treasures in that, as time passes-in 100 years, for example-there will only be a select group of films that has actually recorded the whole strata of society that exists now and won't exist then. Do you feel like there will be people around in 100 years like the characters you've created?
ML: Yes, sure there will. Absolutely.
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