Mike Leigh

In Mike Leigh’s new film, Topsy Turvy, the writer/director addresses a theme that seems to have a personal fascination for him: unusual relationships at some kind of defining moment. Though it may appear different in a number of ways from any film he has made to date, Topsy Turvy’s character-driven action, weighty human themes and powerful performances clearly identify the Leigh style.

Leigh won Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Naked in 1993, and three years later the Palm d’Or with Secrets and Lies. He says his much-talked-about filmmaking method was derived from a process that flashed before him during a “clairvoyant” moment while attending art school. This process involves taking a seed idea, then creating characters and a story during an intensive rehearsal and development period, often lasting for several months. During this time, the director and his actors reflect intensely on the characters they are creating, with improvisation and research playing significant roles in the process. Eventually Leigh’s story evolves and a scenario is developed. According to Leigh, the film he shoots is unknown when he and the actors begin their work.

The subject of Topsy Turvy is the real life musical partnership of librettist William Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and composer Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner). As the film progresses, we understand they are experiencing something of a seven-year itch. The famed team is at a crossroads concerning the future of their collaboration. Later, at a stony-faced summit, they ruminate on how and if they will proceed with their very successful artistic and business arrangement. The deadlock is broken when, by chance, Will Gilbert becomes fascinated by Japanese culture. He is inspired to write the lyrics for an opera called The Mikado, which he hopes will have authentic Japanese character. His libretto intrigues Sullivan and rekindles the duo’s operatic inspirations. Soon Gilbert and Sullivan are hard at work on this ambitious show at London’s Savoy Theater, as the proprietors utter a deep sigh of relief. It is here that many colorful, comical and tragic characters, both on stage and behind the scenes, come to life.

In Topsy Turvy, Leigh has reincarnated the London of the 1880s, with the impressive sets, costumes and beautiful lighting seducing us into this Victorian world. Woven into the film are the complexities and excitements of the day—the opening of the East, Britain’s

From Topsy Turvy: Mike Leigh directs Louise Gold and Timothy Spall

Curious about how the director applied the famous “Leigh process” to a movie as extravagantly produced as Topsy Turvy, I called Leigh at his office in London.

Adam Goldstein (MM): Topsy Turvy is the first period piece you’ve done and you’ve accomplished it with extraordinary grace. There is obviously an incredible amount of research involved in recreating the look of a time before you were born, before even your grandparents were born. How did you go about this process? What sources and techniques did you find most valuable and important when it came to this film?

Mike Leigh (ML): I think it’s not just a question of recreating or creating the look of the time. I think the important thing about getting it to be real is to somehow try and locate and tap into the spirit of the time. You have to reach a point where you are living and breathing the time, so that you have a good sense of the flavor, the religious and social etiquette, the gastronomic and political tastes—everything that you can think of. It’s interesting that you say a time “before you were born and a time before your grandparents were born.” It’s about the time the grandparents were being born, actually. But the interesting thing is that the late 19th century—and I was born in 1943, so I grew up in the ’40s and ’50s—the late 19th century really hung in the air. It was sort of an early post-Victorian world, in a way. Particularly living in a great Victorian city like Manchester, living in a Victorian house, going to a Victorian school, being taught by people that were (laughs) late Victorians. I would have found it much more difficult, if not impossible, to make a film set in 1485, because so much of it [Topsy Turvy] is in what you might call our recent culture.

MM: It must have been fascinating to go back to the roots of your roots.

ML: Yes, absolutely. In terms of accessing the

Katrin Cartlidge and Allen Corduner

MM: During the writing process did you feel it was important to be true to historical facts or did you and your actors take liberties for the sake of drama, story and cinematic form?

ML: I took some liberties. But there are liberties and there are liberties. There are one or two actual, factual deviations from the truth, the most basic of which is that Gilbert thought of The Mikado before the Japanese exhibition opened in London in 1884. It was actually more dramatically interesting for him to get the idea by going there. And things go on which are not so much deviations from the truth, but merely legitimate fictionalizations based on a premise. I mean there are things that we know happened but we don’t know how they happened or what the flavor was. For example, Gilbert did cut The Mikado song at the dress rehearsal and the chorus did go to him in a posse and persuaded him to reinstate it. But all we know is that it happened. There’s no evidence as to how it happened or who was involved or what his reaction was. So that’s just a dramatization based on something that we know took place.

MM: How did you go about casting Topsy Turvy? How do you decide upon potential cast, especially in this film where acting in front of the camera had to be complemented by stage acting, singing, dancing, musicianship and familiarity with the era? How do you usually work with your casting director?

ML: I have a very brilliant casting director, Nina Gold, who did this film. I mean, I obviously do the casting, but she’s very good at pointing me in the right direction. I realized that for Sullivan a problem was going to be to get someone who could not only act and who looked like him, but he also had to be a consummate musician. It so happened that Allan Corduner was appearing on

Chorus of The Mikado

MM: Topsy Turvy seems like a much more controlled work than your past films. Were facets of the approach to your development and improvisation process different in any significant way from your previous films?

ML: I would have to disagree with you. I don’t think it’s any more controlled than Naked, Secrets and Lies or Life is Sweet or Career Girls, and really not any more controlled than High Hopes or indeed other stuff. I think it gives the impression of having what looks like a discipline that you may think the others don’t have because of the formality of the language. But that’s an illusion. It was achieved in exactly the same way as the others. That is to say out of improvisation into very tight structure through

Topsy Turvy

MM: In Topsy Turvy, as in many of your films, the camera often has an intimate, almost sensual relationship with the characters, which seems to invite the audience even closer to them. What are your ideas concerning the interaction between the camera and the actors, and what do you think about and talk about with your actors and cinematographer when you block shots?

ML: Well, that’s not a very easy question to answer, except to say that I create action with the actors in the first place by starting off with improvised situations and then build them into something very highly and tautly structured. And when I do that, I can only do it by working in the location or by having done at least some work in the location before I refine it. Because I can only do it by seeing it visually. In other words, the writing process, which happens through the rehearsal process, isn’t something that I can just stew in a theoretical way, in a void. I’ve got to be there in the location or on the set so I can see it. And thus, the decisions about what happens, about who says what and what’s going on dramatically, are intertwined with how it works visually.

MM: With the camera?

ML: No, that’s just putting it together, anticipating the camera. Then, when it comes to sharing it with the cinematographer, sometimes I have action where, for instance, I’ll say to Dick Pope, ‘This is how we’ve got to shoot; it’s like this.’ And he may say, ‘Fantastic, good.’ Or he may say ‘Yes, but how about this,’ in which case we then develop it and work together on the thing. Sometimes I might say I’m not sure about something. I mean, there are various ways we could do it and we’ll just work it through. There is a very good relationship between all of us, so that the actors are patient and happy to run bits while we sort out how to shoot it. That takes time, which we need to allocate for that purpose. But what is very important to say is that so far as I am concerned, not only is the camera there to serve the action and what the actors are doing, but the action is there to serve the camera. Very often I’ve got a piece of action that’s kind of worked out, and by figuring out how to shoot it I will then make structural, dramatic and, if necessary, textual modifications in order to accommodate the best way of shooting it. And I can do that because A) it’s grown out of organic improvisation work and can therefore take changes and modifications and development and B) I haven’t got some wanker of a scribe or studio executive breathing down my neck, leaning over my shoulder, telling me I can’t change this and I can’t change that. I mean, I can do just what the hell I like. And the job

Topsy Turvy

MM: You’re a lucky man.

ML: Well, it’s partly that I have not gotten into the wrong situations.

MM: What are your thoughts about how you would represent lighting technology and the quality of light in the 1880s, including how the stages might be lit then? Was this a very important consideration for you? And how did you go about discussing this with your cinemaphotographer?

ML: Well, we looked at a huge amount of reference. Part of your question was about the theaters. The Savoy Theater was, as you may know, the first public building in the world to be lit by electricity. And at the time of the film it was to be in existence four or five years. There is no reference to that because there is no logical reason for anyone to mention it. But we looked at that, and we got some demonstrations of old equipment. In fact, a company made us a thousand period bulbs for nothing, as a gift. So there are a lot of shots where you actually see those lighting buttons with those authentic 1880s lighting bulbs. But it is that whole quality of light which is what you’re really talking about. The good news about filming anything after the 1840s is that you’ve got photography to look at. But also it was very much London light. Although there are hardly any exteriors, it was still very much the feel of London that we went for, which is something that you kind of have a sense of if you move around this city, which remains a Victorian place. Of course, you’ve talked about actors and about the cinematographer, but the other thing that’s very important is that there is a tradition on my films that a real communication goes on with the production designer, in this case Eve Stewart, who’s done a number of things with me, and also the costume

Naked (1993)

MM: You’ve worked with your producer, Simon Channing-Williams, for many years, and I’m curious to know how the two of you work through the inception of the ideas of your films, through the development stage while you’re working with the actors, production, post-production and beyond. How would you describe the relationship?

ML: The first and most fundamental key to our relationship is that he leaves the film to me, and I leave making it happen and the nuts and bolts of financing, the budget, the organization and everything else to him. In that sense it’s the perfect symbiotic relationship. He has no pretensions about the content of the film, or the style of the film, or artistic choices related to the film. And I have no pretensions about how it should be financed or all of those things. I mean, obviously we share decisions about key heads of departments and all that stuff. And when it comes to the cut, his opinion is as valuable as everybody else’s. And he’s very happy to contribute that. He sees himself as being there to enable me to do what I do without interference. And it’s to his credit that he’s able to find the kind of backers who are happy to leave me alone and not interfere. Because you know perfectly well there’s any number of people who will happily back a film even if it’s got no script. But boy, do they want to interfere and tell you how to make your movie. And his job is to protect me from that and to create a situation in which I can really do what I can do. That’s the bottom line.

MM: How do you go about the work with your editor? Do you ordinarily do a lot of takes that you chose from? Is there a lot to do in the editing room? Do you find that doing so much work before even shooting, that your films fit together as you imagine them?

ML: In the general sense, yes, they do fit together. And sometimes there are a lot of takes, for practical reasons. But sometimes I will go for takes when it’s sort of intimate behavioral stuff, purely for different nuances of performance. On the whole, there’s not a huge number of takes. And usually they do fit together efficiently and consistently because I worked out the structure very carefully. The job then is to do what you do with any film, and that’s to

Secrets and Lies (1995)

MM: What films have interested you recently and what do you think of the recent trend of shooting on digital video for blowup to film?

ML: I saw The Blair Witch Project the other night, and I quite liked it, actually. I think I could have done with something a bit more extraordinary at the climax, though I really don’t know quite what. I like the idea of it. To be honest, I don’t have much of a formulated view about digital, really. I’ve been around long enough to know what a piece of film feels like, you know. The jury is still out with me about what digital will do for us, for me.

MM: What’s next for Mike Leigh?

ML: Don’t know.

MM: Don’t know?

ML: No, I’m thinking about it. I mean, given the nature of the way I work, I don’t really talk about it until I’ve done it, really. And that’s not being enigmatic. That’s just the way it is. I would imagine it will be set in the early 21st Century. MM