MARIAYAH: Good evening, everyone, I’m Mariayah Kaderbhai, head of BAFTA. Welcome to this 12th edition of the Screenwriters Lecture Series. We are honoured to have a hugely successful and talented line-up of speakers over the weekend.
I want to do a special thanks to Jeremy Brock who created the series in 2009 and Lucy Gar from the JJ Charitable Trust for their continued love and support of the series. The Screenwriters Lecture Series is a flagship event and provides a platform to the most interesting screenwriters working to today to share their craft with audiences and peers and members of BAFTA. We invest in talent and support screenwriters year round through some of the talent development initiatives through our bursaries, scholarship programme, BAFTA Breakthrough and BAFTA Elevate. BAFTA’s flagship writing programme – Rocliffe, aims to discover the most promising and original writers from across the UK and give them a platform to showcase their work. We receive almost 1100 script submissions every single year for this.
The opening lecture will be delivered by one of the UK’s most esteemed film makers, Mike Leigh, a visionary director and writer who transformed ordinary lives into straightforward cinema, revealing the beauty and complexity in the everyday. His commitment to authentic storytelling built through deep character studies and unscripted improvisation reminds us that true artistry lies in the embracing of life’s unfiltered moments.
I would like to welcome the founder of the series, Jeremy Brock, to the stage.
JEREMY: We are back! Welcome to the 2024 Screenwriters Lecture Series. We are incredibly excited and honoured to have Mike Leigh as the opening night speaker. As was said, and it’s worth repeating, he’s one of the world’s most renowned film makers, and he is famous for his uniquely collaborative way of approaching story-telling. One of my favourite Mike Leigh quotes is, “given the choice of working in Hollywood, or poking steel pins in my eyes, I’d prefer steel pins.”
After the events of the last week, that feels poignantly apposite, as does his seminal Vera Drake. From a huge body of work, which includes 16 feature films such as High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked, Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, and Peterloo, just hold that thought for a moment – this year’s stunning Hard Truths has just come out. Mike continues to drill down into the forgotten lives, elevating their humanity through his extraordinary storytelling techniques. He has a signature integrity, exhaustive research and rehearsal, which is like no other film maker working, and we are incredibly grateful to him for giving us this lecture tonight and talking about his process. He will lecture and there will then be a Q&A.
Ladies and gentlemen. Mike Leigh.
MIKE: Let me begin by saying that what I do, and how I do it, is fairly idiosyncratic and isn’t what most people do by way of how to make films. So, I want to preface everything I say by saying that what I do, and what I do with everybody I work with, is pretty idiosyncratic and comes out of a personal feeling about stuff, life and art and practice. And, therefore, in all sincerity, I humbly do not propose to suggest that anybody else tries to do what I do because it’s not as straightforward as that. But I just thought I would say that. I don’t want to be thought in any way to be proselytizing because I’m not. I just want to talk about what we get up to.
A screenplay – it’s been referred to in the clips we saw – a screenplay is conventionally and traditionally a detailed, comprehensive document that tells you everything that’s going to be in the film, embodies its structure, it contains everything there is about locations, it contains everything that everybody says. It’s a very detailed and important and necessary tool. Hands up – I’ve never written one. Never! Not even once. And I’ve made a lot of films. I’m not showing off, I’m just telling you the way it is. I have made a lot of films. I do take the credit of writing and directing because I’ve written and directed a lot of films. I’ll talk about how we have gone about that and, as well as films, as you will know, perhaps, that I have created over 20-odd stage plays which, like the films, were and are precise, finished, detailed, I hope well constructed and well written pieces, but arrived at by the elaborate means and process and journey that I’ll talk about.
I think the first principle to share is this; the way that painters make paintings, novelists write novels, sculptors make sculpture, poets write poems, musicians create music, et cetera, et cetera, is really how I collaborated with other people on both sides of the camera to make films. Which is to say that we embark on a journey of discovery as to what the film is by the process of making it.
You will all be, certainly writers, familiar with the stage of the proceedings where there are ideas floating around and you’ve somehow got to start making them manifested in some way. That is what happens to me. I have made some films where there was a particular issue or agenda, not very many. One of them was Secrets & Lies which arose from the fact that people close to me, in my family, two lots of people, adopted kids, and I decided to investigate that whole experience, that whole area. The other was Vera Drake, which is about a back street abortionist in 1950, which was before the 1967 Abortion Act and I’m old enough to remember what it was like when people had unwanted pregnancies and people like Vera Drake and various kinds of abortionists were around. And I, for many years, had a notion to deal with that in a film. But I’ve made a whole lot of films. I should also say that the historical films that I’ve made, which is to say Topsy-Turvy, about Gilbert and Sullivan, Mr Turner about the Painter, and Peterloo, about the Peterloo Massacre, again, those started with the premise of, let’s investigate those areas. But even in the case of those films, the principle was, the idea was, to say, let’s look at these historical figures, historical people and their world and their experiences and their crises and their passions and all the rest of it in the same way that we look at contemporary characters whom we invent and approach them with the same techniques and in the same philosophy.
Those films and the other two that I mentioned are films where there was a more concrete notion. But, I’ve made a lot of films where there was either just a feeling or a kind of possible notion of some sort related to some other notion, but vague. All of this is familiar to many of you because this is what we artists do at the beginning of the process. So that is always on the go in some shape or form. But another thing that’s for me part of the process was starting to think how and what shall we make happen, is to think, well, I really think it would be great to work with this actor or that actor. Which may or may not be somebody I’ve worked with previously. So you think, well, just get that actor or actress on board, and let’s see where we go. because, as I say, the journey of making the film is going to be and always is, even with historical ones, a journey of discovering what it is as we go along. This is what other artists do in other media. It’s to get something going, react to it, that gives you an idea that moves you in that direction, that stimulates what you do in this corner, that stimulates something else, and gradually, what you are doing, of course, is starting to think of the possible film. I’ve never made a film yet, and I think I never will, where what we wound up with was in any sense what I thought we might wind up with because that’s not what it’s about. It’s about discovering it.
Of course, as has been said, because I am exclusively concerned with putting on the screen or the stage real people like we all are, real issues, real relationships, I’m not really concerned with fantasy and extraordinary and extra-terrestrial and all those other sorts of things. I’m a great fan of those things but I don’t particularly want to do them myself. That, to some extent, defines, makes feasible, the kind of thing that I’m going to talk about.
It’s about collaborating. Collaborating with actors to create characters, to find characters, to build those characters, and I’ll talk more about that in a little while in more detail. To explore the characters’ worlds, activities, their work, build their relationships and back story, et cetera, et cetera, and then to distil that into a structured and finally, a precise piece of work. I’ll come back to that. This whole way of going about things, to boil it down to the simplest terms, falls into two stages. The preparatory stage and the stage of actually making the piece of work which is to say shooting and editing the film.
I’m going to talk about the second stage first. Because if I talk about the first stage, my experience is that you could be distracted and bogged down in all sorts of aspects of that, which I will talk about. But actually the more important, the most important thing is what we actually shoot, what we actually take to the cutting room, what the actual artefact is so that the preparations, important though they are and I will talk about them as I say, are by way of laying the foundations. So I will talk about the actual making of the film, shooting and the distillation of the film – the editing.
What we shoot in my films, with very, very, very rare exceptions, is very precise action. Filmed for the most part in a formal, classical way, with very precise dialogue that’s been worked at and written in a complex but detailed way. And, it is virtually never a tiny exception here and there for particular reasons, what you never see in my films is action or dialogue which is improvised on camera on screen.
In brackets, this is an aside – very occasionally, you might get a snatch moment that just presented itself. I will show you one later on. Or it may be that you have got two people walking down the street amongst real people and the function of the scene is only to create the atmosphere of that and it’s not important what they are discussing or anything, you may not even hear what they are actually saying, that kind of thing. That allows for, you have got the facilities and by the time you get to the stage – and I’ll talk about it – you have got actors who’re absolutely able to do the characters in any situation. So that is feasible and the improvisation skills are all there. I thought I would just deal with that, what for some people is a myth, because there’s the talk of improvisation that what you see on the screen is improvised – it isn’t.
If you were to visit a shoot, on a particular day, you would see precise action. You would see actors, and again I shall illustrate this later with clips, you will see complex dialogue, in-depth dialogue, always, always thorough character dialogue. Complex action of all kinds. But performed by actors with confidence in a relaxed way, very much actors in character, actors not playing themselves, actors going into character and really doing the character in question.
What you won’t see, which you would see, and forgive me for saying this, but it’s necessary just to make a point. What you won’t see that you will see on many a film is actors who can’t remember the lines or who stumble over the lines. Who say “sorry I’m not quite sure what I’m doing” and all of those things – where in those situations you will be seeing actors who’ve not had time to digest the lines and haven’t done any work to really assimilate the dialogue that’s been written with the nature of the character or the characterisation and how they are playing the character. Actors who’re supposed to be playing spouses who’ve been together for 40 years, who only met that morning on the set. It’s not funny, it’s true. Actors wearing costumes that they don’t feel comfortable in because they have never worn them before et cetera. You won’t see any of that. Because that is not what happens. Because, and this is where it’s important to stress what happens on my films; it’s not only about the actors and what they are doing, it’s the collaboration between everybody. The actor, the production designer, costume designer, make-up designer, and indeed everybody, everybody’s on the same page, and the work that goes into preparing the world of the characters, and everything to do with them, is a shared and sophisticated and grown-up business.
During the shoot, and again, this is just talking about this major second part of the whole process. During the shoot, there will be shooting days and there will be rehearsal days. Sometimes in the case of major sequences that have to be created, I mean like the climax of Secrets & Lies, a ten-day gap was created. That is to say, rehearsal time in the location on the set without the crew. The shoot, scene by scene, sequence by sequence, location by location, we go to the location, we improvise, the actors improvise in costume with real stuff, props, et cetera and in character, of course. And, my job then is to take those improvisations, to stop and we start to break down improvisations and to start to draw from them to distil from them. We write the scenes, all the scenes, however complex and however much in-depth they are, we write them through rehearsal. I never go away and write dialogue and come back and give it out. It’s arrived at through rehearsal to a precise degree. We’ll do that.
Now, it’s important for me, as an artist, as a director, and as a writer, that I can only create a scene by being in the location and seeing it and experiencing the physical relationship between characters and the place, as well as what happens and what they say, et cetera. That is part of the creative process and a part of that journey of investigation.
There are scenes in my films where I pretty much knew what we needed to achieve, but you have still got to explore it in detail. There are scenes, sequences in my films where, we didn’t know what was going to happen. Indeed, for quite a number of my films, the shooting script, which I’ll talk about later, I’m not there yet! Which has a series of potential scenes which are numbered. Well, at a certain stage, it’s often been the case that it will say, scene 39, scene 40, from scene 41 to et cetera, et cetera, question marks, we do not know how the film is going to end. You know…
But the process of arriving at that happens in the location, as I say with the actors. And then the crew joins us, the cinematographer will look at it with me, and we’ll run it and we’ll decide slowly and carefully how to shoot it. The actors stay with us to run bits for us, and everybody involved has got their contribution. We decide how to structure it and then we shoot it.
So, what we take to the cutting room, to the editing afterwards, is, on the whole, ordered, precise and detailed. And, not a great deal in general happens in the editing of my films, but it’s about trying to make sense of all this material. It’s more about, you know, taking advantage of different nuances of behaviour, or different emotional timbres and qualities. Sometimes when we are shooting, I’ll say, “okay, let’s cut, let’s do that again” and everybody says, “why, what is wrong with that?” And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s because my instinct is that we will go to the cutting room with just more nuances.
Now, what I didn’t say at the beginning, quite as thoroughly as I should, is that, and I know this is obvious, but forgive me. For me, personally, and this is only personal, there is absolutely no dividing line between my function as a writer and my function as a director. They are inextricably intertwined and they are one function. So that the decisions about the structure of the film, about the meaning of the film, about the emotional timbre of the film, about the quality of what happens in the film and of the dialogue and all the rest of it, and the responsibility I have for the performances and the communication with other artists behind the camera, they are all part of a whole. There’s no dividing line, it’s all part of a whole. What I am saying is not news in the history of the cinema, but I have to say it in the context of this lecture in this series.
So, let’s go back to what we do to make it possible to do what I’ve been describing. I’ll say to an actor, “please be in this film. I can’t tell you what the film is because we don’t know, we are going to find out. I can’t tell you about the character because there is no character because you and I are going to collaborate to create a character.” And I say, and this is very, very important, “you will never know anything about the whole project except what your character knows. You will never know anything about any of the other characters except from the perspective of your character.” And that is very, very important indeed, because it means that it makes it possible for us to explore relationships in-depth and detail. In a real, actual way, through improvisation and discussion and so on.
It demands a massive amount of discipline on the part of the actors involved and everybody else involved to shut up and not spill the beans. And the weird thing is, I can honestly report that it’s never been the case that that’s happened. People absolutely buy into it, and deal with it and do it, and it works.
Of course, you will say, hang on a minute, if you decide to make a film about Gilbert and Sullivan or a film about Turner or the Peterloo massacre, everybody knows that is what they are in so they do know what the thing is. Yes, absolutely. And those are the exceptions. But even in the context of those films, we still deployed the kind of approach that I’m talking about, in order to bring to life in three dimensions the characters on the screen before your very eyes as performed for the camera.
Everybody knows because every book you read will tell you, that just before the first night of The Mikado, the writer Gilbert cut the famous song about the punishment fitting the crime, the list of people who would be culpable. And, the chorus went to the posse to persuade him to restore the song, which he did, and it’s in the film. You will read that that happened in every book on the subject and there are lots of books on the subject. But nobody will tell you who said what or where they were or what the argument or atmosphere was or how easily he was persuaded. We had to create and invent those things and there are hundreds of examples of that sort of thing in the historical films, including in Peterloo, as well as deploying some research into making things happen that are in one sense or another recorded. But that’s an aside. Because the main principle of creating the films, contemporary films, which explore situations and relationships through character and so on and so forth are, work on the principle, are achieved on the principle that we are able to explore. Explore situations, explore relationships, explore the whole thing on the basis that people only know what their character would know and they react through the character in a completely real way. So I will say to the actor, “ok, take part, please”. The first job when we sit down to do this, everyone gets together for an hour or so, and just to say hi, everybody knows who is involved, and then everyone goes away and I start to work individually, separately and really in a sense privately with each actor.
On the whole, with tiny exceptions that aren’t worth discussing, this is what happens. I’ll say to an actor, “look, make a list of real people you know”, sometimes I might give a specification, but quite often I don’t. The only specification I always give is, of the same sex as you. And the actor will make notes, I say don’t make notes, just put the names down and we’ll talk about them. And for session after session and sometimes quite a long number of sessions, I will work with this actor in the morning and that actor in the afternoon and then another one the next day and so on. And each actor will talk about this person and that person and I’ll ask questions and I’ll make notes. And that takes a while. And I will say, actually, let’s get rid of her and her, and keep her on the list, and gradually we whittle it down. What I don’t do, and this is obviously logical in terms of what I’ve shared with you about the actors not knowing about the whole thing, what I don’t do is say why I’m making those decisions. Because what I’m doing, as the writer director, is thinking about the possible film. So I’m thinking about possibilities with this actor, thinking about possibilities with that actor, and start thinking how that resonates with what I had in my head before and or if I didn’t, what it starts to suggest, so in other words, I’m starting to, even at this prenatal stage, to interreact and respond to the material and it’s letting my imagination be free.
Gradually, we’ll whittle it down, and usually what happens these days is, it comes down to three people and we then combine these people and that becomes the basis of the character.
Now, at this point of talking about it, I have to make it very clear that what we are actually talking about now is very much a sophisticated aspect of the acting involved. And it’s about the act, it’s not just about talking. You can talk about somebody for a hundred years, but of course, what we are actually talking about is not only the idea of the character, not only the facts of the character, and not only what we are mostly going to invent, partly using the jumping off point, the embryo character we started with, but it’s also about the, not just the character, but the characterisation which is to say how the actor plays the character, how the character walks, talks, breathes, thinks, et cetera. And that can only be achieved by actually acting.
Now, of course, the conventions of acting are mostly that you get a script and start acting what it says. But, we are not anywhere near that stage.
We always do this preparatory stuff which, by the way, a lot of the films, it’s gone on for six months before the shoot and people are paid to be there and come and go and so on. We always find some old building of some kind to use for a rehearsal base with multiple rooms of various kinds. And certainly with one big space, if not more than one. Old schools are very good for this. We have done it in various kinds of buildings. And a building where nothing else is happening, where you are not sharing with a Scout group or Women’s Institute or any of that. It’s a serious laboratory for exploration, uninterrupted.
So, we will arrive and say, so-and-so and so-and-so, and even with the more minor characters where I don’t necessarily combine more than one person, we just get one person and get that person, the first thing to do, sorry, get that person on the go as a character, the first thing to do or that happens is. I’ll say to the actor, we’ll go into a big space, just move around and find the person you are talking about and do the person you are talking about. Don’t try to make a scene and be dramatic or theatrical or interesting, just find him or her, physically, and get into the rhythm of the character.
The actor will do that for a bit. And I’ll say okay, let’s put him on one side and look at him now. And then do the second one and the third one, for quite a while. By the way, one of the techniques that’s very important for me, and helping actors to settle into this way of working, is that I will invariably say to an actor, I’m going to leave you alone for a bit, I’m going to go out of the room, I will come back, sit quietly in the corner, stay in character until I tell you to come out of character. And I’ll leave the actor alone, because it just helps the actor to rid himself or herself of any need to show or perform, just to get into the rhythm of discipline of just being in character.
Look, it doesn’t work for all actors. Just in passing, I should say I do elaborate auditions which I get people to do the sort of thing that I’ve just been talking about. And there are very good actors and very well-known actors and other actors who are not well-known but very good for whom it is not very good and doesn’t suit everybody. Not all actors are character actors, and for the kind of work that I do and which you have seen in my films, it’s absolutely about character acting, it’s not about, as I’ve already said, about actors playing themselves. It’s about going into character, being the character and then being able to come out of character. That is important. I’ll come back to that in a few minutes.
I’ll say to the actor, okay, now, you’ve done all three of these, in this corner is A, in that corner is B, and in that corner is C. Just go back from one to the other, I’ll leave you to it for a bit, and see what happens if you try and merge them together into one character. And the remarkable thing is, that I can report to you, that it’s never been the case, ever, and I’ve done this many number of times, that an actor has said, I can’t really find it, it doesn’t work, there isn’t a way of combining these. It always works. Obviously, there’s something built into the, instinctively built into, the choice but you can’t guarantee it, it’s not rocket science.
But what emerges, and this is the important thing, aside from the mechanics, is an embryo character. And so I’ve got the embryo character, that embryo character and we start to talk the character into existence.
Now, it may be that it turns out to be a character who will only meet other characters way down the line, perhaps even not until the action of the film and certainly not until somewhere into their adulthood, some way well into their adulthood possibly. So, in that context, in particular, we create the whole character, talk the character into existence and invent his or her name and background and all the rest of it, the actor can go and do research that will help to put flesh on the bones of the character in all sorts of ways, work research, background research, place research and stuff like what movies would the actor have seen and books read and holiday, et cetera, you name it.
It may be that, and it often is, as you will know from having seen some of these films, that we are talking about the relationships between people who are spending a lot of time together. Siblings, parents, children, married couples, et cetera. Long relationships. Where the characters will have met, and in the case of people whose lives actually need to be explored from when they were babies because we got their parents involved and everything, that has to be invented in detail and not in isolation. That has to be the ways of collaborating on that.
So we actually go through a long process of exploring relationships through improvisation, through various kinds of improvised exercises of various kinds which I’m not going to illustrate, merely to say that it’s very much a combination of a very long time of acting, talking about it, research, experiment of various kinds, and things like naming sessions and sessions when you sit down and make a list of the possibly things the character could be called, et cetera, et cetera.
I remind you that my job throughout all of this is to function as the creator, the writer director, if you want to call it that, of the ultimate film. It’s moving it in a direction of possibilities. Sometimes it’s clear and sometimes it isn’t. If you make a film like Naked for example which I’ll illustrate later and which you will probably be familiar with, I mean what happens in Naked is extremely complex. Of course, it’s a combination of extremely unpredictable things, but at the same time, the other characters had to be there for the protagonist, Johnny, to interact with in the first place. It’s a combination of me thinking of possibilities and setting those up and then being prepared to let certain things go or be replaced by other things or to realise that something else was actually more important and better than what I thought we were going to do, or it’s an amplification of that and all of these things.
Gradually, there comes into existence, there creeps into existence, this world or these worlds.
Some people say, when do you decide when it’s time to start shooting? That is a ridiculous question. You don’t decide when it’s time to start shooting. When we sit down to have a rehearsal period, we know that shooting is going to start on September 1 or whatever it is, and that’s a non-negotiable fact. And that, of course, doesn’t or can’t mean that on the Friday before the Monday in question I suddenly say, well I think there’ll be a house and, you know, that’s obvious rubbish, it needs to be prepared, we need to have locations. More importantly, we have to have thought about the feel of the film, the look of the film, the quality of the film, the atmosphere.
So there’s always an agreed time. To start with, as I’ve described, to start with, it’s about what I do with the actors, it’s about the acting. Operating with the cast coming and going. And, incidentally, contracted to join in and gradually it grows. And supported by a small team of assistant directors. But there comes an agreed point, an agreed time, a disciplined date, when I’m going to sit down with the cinematographer and the designers and production designer, costume designer, and the make-up designer, but principally with the cinematographer, to say, I think what’s emerging is this, I’ll illustrate what I’m talking about. With Naked, all my films were shot by Dick Pope who, you may know, sadly died ten days ago, and is a great loss to all of us. He shot everything that I have made since Life Is Sweet in 1990 and was a brilliant genius, cinematographer, photographically and wonderful operator, great friend, artist and collaborator. I thought I would just share that.
In the case of Naked, I said to Dick, I think it’s something dark, nocturnal, perhaps monochromatic about this one, knowing that we were going to shoot in colour, of course. And he said, okay, and he thought about it. He went away and shot tests. That’s what he’d always do, shoot tests. And that feeds back, what we negotiate and share, we share that. And that what I see and what we share starts to feed back into the decisions I’m making with the ever-evolving potential story.
With Happy Go Lucky, for example, it was emerging the character of Poppy and the spirit of the film, I was able to say to Dick, I think it’s summer primary colours, you know, bold and clear. And he said, all right, I’ll look at that. By strange coincidence, that weekend was the Annual Film Market, Film Industry Market in London, and he went along to that, as he routinely would, and there was a company with Fuji. They had a stall and new stock for primary colours, and he said, this is amazing, this is what we want for the film-making with Mike Leigh, and they were so amazed to find anybody that wanted this stock, but we got it for free!
When we were preparing Another Year, I said – I was rather vaguer than I sometimes would be – and I said, it’s sort of this and that, and I said okay, I think I know what you mean, I’m not sure but I’ll shoot some tests. So he shot some tests. Eight o’clock one morning, we rolled into a previous theatre in Soho. He said there’s not much here. Four different looks, see what you think. I sat there, and I had this, at this stage, the characters and relationships and all that stuff on the go. We hadn’t by any means got to the point we were going to, but it was pretty much on the go. I went in there, only lasted a few minutes, only brief clips. I sat there and suddenly had this incredible revelation. I came out. He said, which way do you want to go. And I said all four ways. And he said, you are mad, what do you mean? And I said, the film will be in spring, summer, autumn and winter. And he said, oh, I see, yes, okay. Having made that decision, when I went back into the construction of the film and the investigation of the character, suddenly it informed that. So in other words I tell you this, because obviously it’s all about the synthesis of the relationships between form and content, between the cinematic visual, the dramatic construction, the characters, the relationships, all of these things are part of the whole.
So we progressed on this journey of bringing into existence the characters. This is important. We are not only talking – and I’m talking about what happens with each actor – and the actors in combination with each other where it’s appropriate. We are not just talking about the back ground or the behavioural part of the characterisation or the physical aspect, all of those things are part and parcel. But we are also, as much as anything, talking about what comes out of their mouths, which is part of how important it was that we are rooted in some kind of world that’s real, background.
So we start to talk about in the preparatory period, about the kind of language they use, about the kind of input and where they get the ideas from. If you go back to Naked and I’ll illustrate this later on, this is if you remember the central character in Naked, he’s full of it, he reads books and his head is bursting with all kinds of stuff, some is ridiculous and some is profound, but it’s all there and it all starts to inform how he talks. Even when talking about characters who never read a book or who are inarticulate or whatever, still how does the character express his or her ideas. What’s governing or motivating the language? That’s important, along with every aspect of the character and his or her life.
And again, to repeat, it’s about character acting. So one of the things that we do, which is very, very important and highly disciplined, is the actors develop a process. Each one, each actor develops a particular way of warming up into character so that they are in character, really in character – a sort of instant thing. And when whatever we are doing comes to an end, they come out of character. Because, it’s important – and this is where it’s the other end of the spectrum from some notions of method acting and all of that – the actor when in character needs to be totally organically in character and is able to stay in character and it’s a very strict discipline. Unless there’s a crisis, something catches fire or something, somebody has a heart attack, you don’t come out of character until the instruction is issued, come out of character, which means everybody stays in it and they trust each other that they are all there. There’s a discipline about going in and coming out of character. That’s really important, it means that, apart from anything else, the actors are able to be objective about the emotional experience that the character just had. And I’m strict that actors always refer to their characters in the third person, she did that, he felt that, you know, not “I”. I is the actor, she, and he is the character. You may say it’s technical. It’s not. It’s a very important discipline, part of being able to create a world that is organic, and we are able to make choices and distil.
Somebody once decided to do a so-called improvised play along the same lines. Somebody who had worked with me, that is. And an actress that was in the show, after a very heated improvisation with this guy, when the improvisation was over, they actually said to the director, you can tell him if he behaves like that again, I will walk out of this production. Now, of course, what that illustrates is simply that the whole principle of coming out of character and being objective about what happens simply wasn’t going on at all. The actress didn’t know where the line was drawn between herself and the character. I just share that minor anecdote to illustrate the point.
So gradually, this world comes into existence and I’m starting to move towards the potential of a film. At no stage during this long preparatory period do rehearse of fix anything, it’s all laying the foundations and it’s all potential. We don’t script or fix anything.
Another important aspect, very important, and those of you that are actors, particularly will appreciate this. From the earliest stage of the proceedings, I get the actors to work in costume. We start with temporary costumes and gradually the designer will tune into what we are doing and helpfully bring in other stuff.
But part of this – you know it’s extraordinary that there’s widely practised conventions of actors rehearsing wearing their own clothes – you may say so what, but it’s fantastically important because it helps the actor to do the character, to sustain, to discover, to be accurate about the character. So we do that, that is important.
Research is fantastically important. Everything you can think of is researched. As I’ve already said. Jobs, background, all those things that I’ve listed already. A lot of the time, you know, you have got actor A, B, C, D and E and maybe we are concentrating on what happened between A and B. That’s my walking stick falling over.
Which means other people are not involved. That’s the time for them to go off and do the research. If you look at Secrets & Lies, you will see Marianne Jean-Baptiste being an optometrist. She went off and learnt how to be an optometrist and there’s a scene where she’s doing it. Even if this wasn’t a scene in the film and we didn’t know there was going to be necessarily, it’s all part of making the character and the characterisation three dimensional. When it gets to the later stages, we have sessions where I throw out all sorts of random things and questions to start to fill out the things we hadn’t necessarily talked about so that the actor has a real three dimensional sense of the character and knowledge of what is in the character’s head, all of which is going to be important and is important.
Throughout all of this, we are constantly doing improvisations.
Now, I’ve said we’d get places with spaces to work in. We always have a huge amount of furniture, beds, sofas, televisions that work, tables, everything, you name it. Newspapers, magazines, kettles that boil, you name it, all sorts of stuff. Because we are not talking about the kind of “improvisation”, like that, it’s about settling into real people in real-time and not trying to make interesting things happen. So that it settles down into a reality.
And, in the discipline throughout all of these sessions, all these improvisations, is that 60 minutes is 60 minutes, three hours is three hours. I personally should be in the Guinness Book Of Records, because I’ve sat through more long, boring, tedious improvisations than anybody else in the history of the world. But it’s an occupational hazard and it’s necessary.
Famous improvisations were, X and Y are sitting in a room that we have created and they have a row, and X gets up and walks out. This has actually happened a few times. X walks out in character, leaves the rehearsal place, goes out into the real world and we do quite a lot of stuff involving that, difficult with the period films, so we don’t do it so much there, but he stays in character, the person they have left behind stays in character and I shut up and I don’t stop the improvisation. Eventually, the other person comes back in and it carries on. But what we have been doing, of course, is building the back ground experience and the potential for the drama.
Of course, my job is to move it in this direction, coax it in that direction, and say, actually instead of that, why don’t we decide this, and sometimes I will introduce new ideas. Obviously if I decide, as I did and I have shared with you that I am going to make a film about a woman who has been adopted, tracing her birth mother. Obviously I’ve got to set it up. Famously, we have got a long way down the line and finally reached the point where Marianne’s character who was, it’s time for her to find her mother, Cynthia, played by Brenda Blethyn, she was in this set this home that we created, we were doing the work in an old school in Stoke Newington. She had a mobile phone, an early version of a mobile phone. The phone rings. A woman speaks to her with a London accent. And eventually, and obviously this is what is distilled in proper dramatic terms in the actual film later, she, they agree to meet.
I had, knowing as I did, that she was going to be the mother of this black baby, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Much earlier when we were exploring and building the back story, the life of Cynthia, she was a promiscuous, vulnerable 16-year-old, susceptible to guys. At one point I said to her, I mean she was at a party and anything could happen. I said okay, there’s a black guy and they go into the bathroom and she said okay. And I don’t remember whether it was I or she suggested that they would have a fuck and Cynthia forgot about that, and so did Brenda Blethyn. She actually forgot. So we set up an improvisation actually in the street outside the cemetery in Stoke Newington. It was dusk, with lots of people moving around. I was watching it discreetly from the other side of the road. Brenda Blethyn in character is hanging around waiting for this person to show up. As I said earlier on day one, everyone meets and you know who is involved but then you never see them again. Brenda thought, because she only heard this person on the phone, she thought the character was played by a white actress who is in the film. And a young black woman approaches her and says, excuse me, are you Cynthia, and Brenda’s reaction was, shit, I’m in the middle of an improvisation and a member of the general public is talking to me. But she dealt with it. And the rest developed from there. But that’s just an illustration of the principle of people not knowing, you know. And of me, the way I have obviously got, of course, as a dramatist, to be in what you might cynically call manipulative, but only because that’s what we are there to do, is to tell a story. But there’s lots of stuff, massive amounts of stuff, in my films where it’s not there as a function of my manipulation, it grows out of what’s happened, and I get new messages and it tells me. If you go back to Naked, if you remember the end of Naked, he finally grabs the money and hobbles down the street. We hold it with a steady camera and follow him down the street with a flat he just left in the background. It goes to black and that’s the end of the film. He’s hobbling because he’s been beaten up and it’s not in a good state physically. We couldn’t decide, does he go back, and we couldn’t decide what to do. Every possible ending was in some way or other, potentially interesting and rich. And I used to drive to that location every day from my home in North London and see this house down this street. I didn’t really pay any attention until one day I spotted it and I thought, I know what happens. And I got the idea. I saw the image of the end of the film. Like so many images, and things that happen in my films, and I illustrate these very shortly, I could not sit in a study in a room, in an office, and think of these things and put them down in a script. But really what I’ve just said applies to pretty well everything in all of my films. It’s a combination of everything that stimulates the realisation of the piece of work of the film.
Finally, we get to the end of that and we are choosing locations, actors who live in a particular house or home or flat or whatever it is, have got some input with the designers and in choosing not only the location, but not executively, but being helpful. The designer interpreting what the actors and I are inputting, and also about props. That’s very much happening with the costume designer and the choice of costumes, et cetera. And we are starting to evolve decisions about, we need a main location that we have the choice to go back to, other locations that will crop up here and there and so on and so forth. And very late in the day, as late as possible, I then go away and I sit down and I write what I call a shooting script. It’s not a script in any conventional sense.
Scene 1 – Wednesday – day interior flat, X in bed. Scene 2, Wednesday, day exterior, X walks down the street. Scene 3, Wednesday day interior, office, X at work, et cetera, et cetera. That’s all it says. I’ve worked it out. I’ve worked out a potential structure of the film, a dramatic, cinematic structure, potential. I stress the word potential. But also, it’s necessary to have such a document, such a collection of possibilities in order that we can sit down and plan the schedule and we’ll sit in a schedule, a planning schedule, no actors are involved because they are not involved in this, everybody else has an overview of course, of the film, of the potential film.
We will sit in that long session going right throughout and building the schedule, the potential schedule, knowing that certain things might change and some things can’t change. If you are going to have a scene of something that happens in scene 3, 7, 19 and 27, in one location that you can only get to at certain times or only once or something, those have to be built into the decision and so on. The AD will say to me, okay, can we shoot scene 32 before scene 29? And I may say yes, actually we can, because there’s nothing that would happen in 29 that would inform what happens in 32. Conversely, the question might be asked, and the answer may be no, there’s no way, we cannot, unless we created and shot and investigated what happens in 29, there’s no way we can investigate scene 32. So those things happen.
And now, we are back to where we started, which is the shoot. Start by going to the locations, building the scenes, in the way that I already described. Again, the actors by now have proper costumes to work in, we have proper stuff. Two famous improvisations in the location. Sorry, two famous improvisations, one in the location and one before we’ve got to the location. One before we ever got to the location, sorry.
When we were preparing Vera Drake, if you remember, at a certain point in the action, a crucial point in the climax of the action, the police come round and arrest her because she’s been identified as an illegal abortionist. We rehearsed the preparatory rehearsals, we call it rehearsing but we know that it means the actual preparation, for months in this disused NHS hospital which is up near Alexandra Palace, next to the swimming baths at Crouch End, if you know that part of the world. It’s now been restored, it’s now a new NHS facility.
So we had this whole hospital and we did different rooms and everything. There was a flat upstairs where the doctors and nurses had stayed when they were on nights. And that had become, over the course of the long time we’d already been there at this stage, the Drake family flat. Lots of improvisations went on. As in the film, the family, the husband, kids, brother, sister, did not know that the mother, Vera Drake, was performing back street abortions illegally. They simply didn’t know because she didn’t tell them and this is something that came out of my early research, it was not a not uncommon situation.
They did not know that – of course there is a discipline – you only go to the rehearsal place when you are called because other things are going on when you are not there which you don’t know the about. They did not know that Imelda Staunton and a bunch of other actresses had explored through improvisation her helping various women with unwanted pregnancies.
She didn’t know that the last one had gone wrong and she didn’t know that there were actually actors playing doctors and nurses. The others didn’t know there were a whole bunch of other actors playing the police. The guys playing the police started to build a picture of this woman who they thought was going to be difficult and aggressive, i.e. nobody knew what we wouldn’t know.
So on a Sunday, this is when we have been at it for quite a while, but this is two months before we get to the shoot, by the way. On this particular Sunday, there was 11-hour improvisation. I’ve already told you that, improvisation is 60 minutes is 60 minutes, so 11 hours was 11 hours, and the actors stayed in character throughout the whole of that time and the police were there. We created a police station in this big old ward at one end of the hospital. Eventually, the family are having this party, which you see in the film, they are having a celebration because the daughter’s got engaged to the guy next door and the son, the brother and sister-in-law, are announcing this they are going to have a baby.
All this is going on, all of a sudden the cops show up. With all the trauma that followed.
By the way, my job is to shut up, shut up, monitor what is happening, watch what’s happening, be as much as possible where I need to be, discreetly and quietly, not have a lot of the assistants around, they are adjacent, the assistant directors. I never interrupt unless I actually stop the thing and get people to come out of character and I didn’t because it would not have been productive.
That traumatic experience, and it was traumatic, I mean they really went through it all in character, but they went through it, that gave us two months later the experience or if you like the raw material to go back to, in the location this time, in Bethnal Green, sorry, Stepney Green, not Bethnal Green, where we reexplored the situation, plugged back into everybody’s memory of that improvisation and broke it down. The whole film lasted 2.5 hours and this was 11 hours, so this was merely we distilled it. We drew absolutely on the experience but that doesn’t mean that when we actually refined it and distilled it down and structured it, and scripted it through rehearsal, that there was input from me about choice of language and stuff, but we were always drawing from and taking as much as possible from what they had experienced.
Lots of scenes in the films are created without ever having been a parallel or equivalent situation in the pre-rehearsals. The whole stuff in Naked which I am going to show you a bit of, the sequence with the security guard in the empty building, was all created at the time of the shoot in the actual building.
But the principle of the thing, whatever the action, is that you have got actors who can actually do the characters and have everything to sustain the characterisations and to make what they do and not least what they say consistent and organic and proper for the characters.
By the way, it’s important to say that you will see all of my films, minor characters and things that have come in late in the day, sometimes at short notice and I give them some work that is a version of what we are talking about so that they too can create a solid contribution.
And so, we are able to shoot the film. I’ve got my shooting script, it’s there, it’s there, it’s helpful, it’s there to dictate. I share it with the actors to begin with, but only the bits they’re in. They can’t read the whole thing, obviously. It’s there. And also, I sit down with everybody, except the actors, and talk through it so everybody else has got some idea, and that is literally everybody, apart from actors, so everyone’s got an idea of the potential of the film that we are going to in some way realise.
So we shoot the film and what I take to the cutting room, to the editing, is structured and disciplined. You know, play around with it, move things around, you decide to lose a sequence or a scene or chop things out and all those things. But we do all of that. But we are not looking to try to make sense of a pile of indiscernible spaghetti.
I think I’ve described what we do. I missed a lot out, obviously. But, I think I have sufficiently. So I’m going to show you four clips. Each to illustrate a different point, though all of them are in many some way or another an illustration of what I’ve been talking about.
First of all, this is from Naked. This is – forgive me for preceding each one with why you are looking at it – this is in the security office block with the security guard Brian played by Peter White, David Thewlis playing Johnny. I’ve talked about the way that Johnny, we built the character with all kinds of research and reading. One day, during the preparatory period, I’d been working with one of the other actors in the afternoon and I called David in for a session at 4 o’clock. We were working in an old building in Marylebone. He came and said, I have run into this extraordinary young American man, he was ranting and raving in Soho about the fact that before too long and in a few years’ time, we’ll all have credit cards laser tattooed into our hands or arms and all of that. This was in the street. That is what you are going to hear in a minute. This guy was, we created this character, he was full of all kind of stuff, some shit, some profound stuff and some stuff in-between.
So, when we got to the improvisation stage, he and I, David Thewlis and Peter White who also has ideas and contributes to the film when he can get a word in. As I’ve said several times, we scripted through rehearsal which is to say we went over and over it again, refining, changing, distilling, you know, and all of that and working on the poetry, as well as the meaning and the content and the psychological aspect of what he’s saying.
So that is important. But what is also I think important to stress is this; we had done the improvisations in the actual office building that we were rehearsing in ages before. A couple of months, whenever it was. The assumption was, and this is another important aspect I’m about to illustrate, the assumption was that Brian, the security guard, would be guarding a conventional office block with offices full of typewriters and computers and all that stuff. The distinguished opera designer who designed this film and worked with me on several films and a lot of stage work, Alison, rushed in one day and said, I’ve had this amazing idea, what if he’s not guarding an office block, but an empty office block with nothing in any of the rooms and I said, that is amazing, it was really right for the spirit of the film. So that was a really important input into the conception of the film. We got this amazing office block in Charlotte Street and we were going to rehearse it. The action was going to take place at night so I said, you know what, we have got to rehearse this at night, if we do it in the day in the middle of, you know, Tottenham Court Road, the atmosphere will be different, we have to do it at night. So, we went into night-time mode for ten days. The scene you are about to watch – because what I do, you know – I go off and find somewhere to squat, sit on the familiar on a chair or whatever, and the improvisation is set up and it happens and then eventually I stop it and deal with it.
I went and sat in the corner in a dark room with windows on the other side of which there was another room obviously, and waited as Brian, the security guard goes around the building. They used to take little devices all over, kind of a clock, and they would go all around. It was the fact he was going around guarding and checking out all the different parts of the building. So I sat there in the dark. Eventually, the lights came on behind these windows in the next room and they did some stuff in there. Then they came into the room where I was but the light switch for the room that I was in was way down the other end. So suddenly they stopped. Johnny stopped Brian, the security guard and he delivered this rant. Magic. I’m sitting there and this is unbelievably fantastic cinematic stuff. I couldn’t have thought of that, writing a script privately. But there it was. And that is what you will now see. So, can you play the first clip, please?
(Clip)
However, the next scene is from Secrets & Lies. I will show you this scene because it illustrates the complexity of the relationship between the action and the words because this is the barbecue scene, held up in one shot. It’s partly held up in one shot because I knew that in the following long sequence of the film, when the shit is going to hit the fan and they find out the truth, that there’ll be lots of cuts and things, but also because it seemed proper and a practical way to deal with the practicalities of what you are about to see in the scene which is that you have quite a number of characters, you have got a barbecue going on, with elements of a barbecue being served up at the table. The plot is on the go, which is to say people don’t know why she’s there and what the relationship is, and then things are all going on at once and all of that. Certain elements are not controllable. I mean, the actors are quite controllable, it’s being rehearsed thoroughly and I’ll talk about that in a moment, but you can’t control steaks which jump around and will have a life of their own.
So what you are looking at is a scene which took a long time to make precise and it is precise. It doesn’t look as if it’s precise, it’s intended to look like real-life, which of course all of this stuff is, which is to say, it’s intended to look like it’s just for real. But, it is very, very, very thoroughly rehearsed because if it weren’t, it would be a mess, it would be ‘unlookable-at’. It would be horrible and it would not be dramatic, it would not have the tension that it needs to have at this point in the story. And so, you will rehearse the dialogue, which is to say what is going on in relation to the issues that are preoccupying everybody. You separately work out all the action and then you carefully mould them together. It’s long and painstaking. It’s about rehearsal. And at all times, it cannot compromise the performances, the characters, the situation. So that is what you are looking at. Roll the next clip, please.
(Clip)
It goes without saying, it’s too obvious to say really, if you just allowed that to be more ad-libbed or something, you would get people talking over each other. Nobody talks over anybody else, it’s all very strictly scripted and I think that’s important to understand.
Now, I’m going to show you a slightly longer sequence, if you can bear it, from Topsy-Turvy. And I’m going to show you three bits, which follow on to each other. The first bit, like what you have just seen, involved very thorough rehearsal. However, I’ve just shared with you that the scene you have just seen took days to get right. When we made Topsy-Turvy, we shot all the stuff in the theatre, in the Richmond Theatre in West London. And by a strange fluke, we had five weeks available in that theatre, five dark weeks, which happened to be the five weeks we needed it for. So we shot all the scenes in the shows and the audience stuff. But we ran out of time and the scene you are about to see needed to be shot on the stage with the auditorium in the background. And we only had one day. The final Saturday. We had to get out, because a real show was coming in the next day.
So this scene that you are about to see was put together in a day, and shot, improvised, scripted and shot all in one day. And the point about this is that, that would be more than impossible if the actors, and all of them that you are about to see, this applies to all of them, were not totally able to sustain that, to do that and sustain their characters. And don’t forget, this is set in 1885, so this is not just people behaving like people in 1998 when we made the film, it’s embodied in what they are all doing is much more profound and extensive research into all kinds of things, including, and this was very important, the language, the way that they talked and everything.
And even the characters, the Japanese actors that you are about to see, playing Japanese people, they were very grounded in the background of their particular characters in Japan.
Now, let me just stop because I’ve just remembered something that I meant to say and that I hadn’t said previously though I’m sure it’s obvious and it’s this – I was reminded to say this by what I’ve just said about other people’s experience. Apart from anything else, going back to the business of I couldn’t sit in a room and write the screen plays for any of these films – apart from anything else, what goes into the films extends my experience way beyond my own limited experience of people and life, because I learn, things that I am learning, along with the actors and everybody else and that feeds into and expands the possibility of what we are able to put into the film.
So all of that is important, including the musical elements that you will see which involved extensive musical research and preparation and rehearsal and so forth. I’m going to show you that main sequence where Gilbert brings the Japanese people from the Japanese exhibition that was on in London at the time. The Japanese village. To show the actors how to be Japanese. There then follows a short screen, an extract from the actual stage opera, the The Mikado. I include the scene from the extract from the The Mikado because it’s improvised because we were under real pressure to get out and I just wanted something to do with that would follow that and so we set the camera up and let it happen. I’m showing it to you because it’s a rare exception in my films. But it gives us something which was helpful because it goes from the structured scene, which was the main scene that you are about to see, into the very structured extract from The Mikado for which we used the stages and prompt copy from the original production in 1885 at the Savoy Theatre. Therefore what you are looking at, apart from anything else, is my sense of structure and the tension between one kind of scene and another, which is part of what we, with our screen plays, ought to be thinking about. Please run the clip.
(Clip)
I am going to show you a bit from Hard Truths. It’s a short bit. I apologise because I shouldn’t really show you a bit if you haven’t seen the film, but anyway, again I return to what I keep saying, which is that there are things that, you know, I just couldn’t sit in a room and script and think about and invent. I won’t tell you what it is. But actually, for the first part of this short extract from the later part of the film, what is being said, what is going on is fairly straightforward action. It’s very much served by the actors in-depth in character, but still you could say that it’s something that anyone could write in terms of the dialogue. But then, something happens which is not dialogue, which is completely organic, and which is action. And it’s completely unpredictable. It came out of improvisation, and it was startling when it did, and it’s in the scene. Here it is.
(Clip)
On the whole, that’s all I have to say to you. Thank you very much.
Q&A
ELLEN: Thank you so much Mike, totally in-depth and fascinating. I’ve read a lot, as I’m sure people have here, listening to you describing your process, I never understood it quite right until now. Hello, everybody, I’m Ellen E Jones, the journalist and co-host of Screenshot on BBC Radio 4. I’m going to host the Q&A portion of the evening. I’ll ask Mike one, maybe two questions if I’m indulging myself and then I’ll let you guys ask some questions yourselves.
I thought I might start at the end, by asking a question of your most recent film Hard Truths, a lot of people won’t have seen it so I won’t give any of it away. I will say that it’s already much discussed ending and I found to it be both very hard and very true, and I wondered, working in the way that you work, almost making it up as you go along, I suppose.
MIKE: Actually it is, yes.
ELLEN: How do you know that you have arrived at the ending, what does that feel like?
MIKE: With respect to your question, and it’s a fair question, but still, you might ask any artist the same question about any aspect of what he or she arrives at in a piece of work and I think that point is easily made without even trying to illustrate it, you know. You feel it. I mean, having said that, since endings is what you are talking about, although the question you are asking applies to all sorts of aspects of what is in all of the films, but what I do I would say like to do, but I’m compelled to do and feel it important to do and prefer to do, is to hand it over to the audience, and certainly not to supply comforting, easy sugared conclusions.
I mean it varies. If you look at All or Nothing, for example, you could say that actually it ends optimistically. They go to the hospital and the lad that’s had the heart attack is in bed and suddenly he’s behaving himself and something’s happened between the husband and wife and it’s positive. Actually, if you look at the daughter, you can see that she’s not entirely convinced. Because something else is going on. But, for a lot of the films, you know, and I’ve already described the end of Naked, or discussed it, to sustain it beyond the natural point at which I’m able to say okay, over to you, go away, discuss it, care about it, argue about it, feel emotional about it, forget about it, whatever, I feel that’s an important part of the journey for the audience.
ELLEN: Yes. Speaking of indulging the audience, I’ve heard you say before that you like to give treats to the audience. The example you used was in Secrets & Lies where there’s the lovely photo studio scene and you get to see everybody posing for their photographs.
MIKE: Well I do, but look, we just looked at this scene in Topsy-Turvy. I mean, they are all, all the characters in that scene are dead serious about what is going on. It’s really important. They are taking it very seriously. As we in show business do. But if it’s not full of treats, what is?! You know.
ELLEN: Rightly so. Let’s give you guys a chance to ask some questions.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, hello there, thank you very much firstly for sharing everything tonight. I guess my question is, you have reminded me of the importance of rehearsal, but, as a newish film maker, my struggle with that is that when I know I’m paying basic equity of £150 a day, how the hell do you budget putting in a rehearsal space to get to your end result, to get to that film when you know your actors are living in London, they have got no money and you are kind of saying to them, can I have some extra time? I’m just a bit lost actually as to how to square making a film, paying your actors because they should be paid, and your DoP and everybody else, where budgets are as they are, and how do you keep going, you know, as a film maker?
MIKE: First of all, I absolutely sympathise with you and agree with the spirit of what you are saying, the sentiments you are expressing. I will say this – I have been very, very lucky over a long period – it has got harder, and tougher for various reasons. But in the end, my answer to that, my own personal answer to that is, if it’s not feasible, don’t do it. I mean, it’s a question of, of course try and get as much money as you can. So what we do, we say what’s the budget, and then, how can we allocate this and how can we spend it? Obviously this applies to what I’ve been talking about. If it is a non-negotiable priority or a non-negotiable necessity, rather, and if it’s in a space that has to be paid for, and people like production designer and others are on perhaps longer than they might otherwise be, because they have to prepare, if that is a necessity, that’s a given, then it’s a given. That is it.
When we were going to make Mr Turner, I – and anyone that knows about Turner will immediately understand and agree with this – I said, whatever happens, we have to see Turner in Venice. Absolutely non-negotiable. He went to Venice a lot. He painted Venice, and it was an important part of it. We were lucky, we found a substantial backer in Amazon who, in those days were very enlightened, liberal, less the case now. And we got backers. But, my producers said we could do everything you want to do but there’s no way we can go to Venice. Now anyone here, lots of you will know, that if you go to Venice, you have only got to buy a coffee in a market and it’s cost you half a mortgage. If you go there with a film crew, turn up, in the early 19th century, you would be spending more than five bob. So we didn’t do it. That was a compromise. But we made the film we made. That is an extreme illustration. So my point obviously, is simply, you have to do what you can do and don’t do what you can’t do and you have to make those decisions and priorities.
Now, I am with you, it’s easier said than done, but that is the answer and the only answer.
Actually, I thought you were going to say something slightly different when you started. I thought you were going to say that rehearsal time even in the conventional shoot is very limited. I can see heads nodding already. You don’t get time to prepare, that is unforgiveable. Because in fact, and again I refer to this in what I said earlier on, many is the shoot where days, time is wasted, days are wasted, because people couldn’t get it together, because there wasn’t preparation time. Again, it’s about making choices and being disciplined, et cetera.
ELLEN: Another question, please? If you don’t mind having a little jog to the back there, thank you.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you very much. It’s been very informative. You didn’t talk a lot about editing and I just want to know, obviously as writers, a lot of writers in the room, the dreaded notes we tend to get in pre-production when going through the script-writing process, your way of working seems to circumnavigate that kind of input from people. Do you ever come across the notes in post that you have to address from financers or whoever it might be and have you had to reshape or do any additional shooting or anything like that during the processes?
MIKE: I’ll deal with the last bit first. We once had to reshoot a scene because, unusually, the actor wasn’t very good and we got somebody else in and it was a self-contained scene and we did a different version of it. But otherwise, no. But, your main question is a really important one. No, I don’t get those notes. No, because again, it’s a question of choices. I haven’t talked about this, but for all except my period films, where I’ve been able to say it’s about this, that’s all I would say, about Turner the Painter, et cetera. For all the other films, we go to the potential backers and say, there isn’t a script, I can’t discuss, can’t tell you what it’s about, I can’t tell you anything about casting, please give us the money to make the film…
(Laughter)
This is absolutely what happens. And don’t interfere with it at any stage.
Only two things what happen when you do that. Either, they say great, fantastic, here is the money. Or, as is more often the case, they tell us to fuck off. And we do. And, this is the important part of the answer to your question – there’s no two ways about it – it’s a compromise. My late producer, Simon Williams, sadly no longer with us, used to go off and talk to potential backers. He’d come back and say, they don’t care that there’s no script, they don’t care they don’t know what it’s about, they’ll give you loads of dosh, but they will insist on a name. Meaning, a Hollywood star. I would say, walk away. And he’d start to argue and I would say walk away. The minute there’s the suggestion that there’s going to be interference and I have to guarantee there won’t be, we walk away and don’t make the film.
So we get to the editing, take the stuff to the cutting room of. Important that everybody I work with is a creative artist in their own right, including the editor, the input from the editor is important, in the end of course I collaborate with the editor. Nobody interferes. There’s no committee of executives and all that, we just cut the film as we think we should. I work with a composer who can’t do what is often the case, which is to start writing when he or she reads the script. It only works by the composer reacting to a rough cut of a film or an assembly, and then I will go and work, he or she will come up with ideas and we’ll talk about it. Nobody else involved. And we don’t incidentally for anyone that’s interested, we don’t use temporary music tracks, which is distracting and pointless.
And, we certainly don’t have committees of people sending notes. I have never had a note actually when I think about it. As far as I’m aware. I mean, the producer will eventually come and have a look and she might say, well, what about that, but very, very marginal and it’s always in the right spirit, and there to be listened to and shared. But in terms of what you are talking about, it doesn’t happen. Because again, it’s the same answer as I gave the first questioner here is, you know, you establish the principle beforehand. And if you have to walk away before it happens, walk.
ELLEN: I know you said you didn’t want people to emulate you, but if everybody was just as uncompromising, everybody, at least 75% of the British Film industry’s problems would be solved, right?
MIKE: Well, yes, and for me the tragedy is that, what you have just said is absolutely correct and serious, the tragedy is that, I have been at this for a very long time, I’m now 81, and made my first film in 1971.
I wish that you weren’t able to say what you have just said, and it’s very disappointing to me that it’s the case.
ELLEN: Time for one more question if we speak really fast and you make it one that has a yes/no answer. Come down here, please?
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: When you run an improvisation, do you give beats? What is your relationship to story beats? When you run an improvisation, how do you work with beats? I am just really interested. So you have a location, characters, you have done the character work, you presume you have the story structure in your head, do you give beats?
MIKE: You mean do I specify before an improvisation what the beat should be?
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Yes.
MIKE: Absolutely not. I never ever, ever, give any instructions as to what should happen in improvisation. It’s like that (rubs tummy and taps head) it’s a contradiction in terms. An improvisation is completely free. It’s not actors doing whatever comes into their heads in an ad hoc, ad-lib way, it’s actors in character, behaving, doing exactly what the character would do, but the minute you say, and anyone here who has experience of improvisation will know what I’m talking about, including the questioner. The minute you say, you have to hit certain points, which is a convention of improvising, works. Or this has to happen, or you talk the language in beats, it’s impossible. You can’t then say, just behave in character and stay in character and do what the character would do. The two things are incompatible, hugely. So no, so the job is, and I’ve been talking about it for a while, the job is to set up explorations of situations and allow them to go wherever they want to go. And then, to deal with it. Have I got time to illustrate this point?
ELLEN: I can’t say no!
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: I am interested in, for example in Secrets & Lies where that is the revelation, presumably you must direct that in some way, or am I incredibly naive?
MIKE: No. I will illustrate the point funnily enough by exactly that scene. In that sequence, we did a very long improvisation, and a long, long thing that went on for hours, and then we spent a good eight days or something breaking it down and building it into a scene.
When the shit hits the fan and it turns out that this woman that’s come is the other daughter, the white daughter, in the improvisation, as happens in the film, she was furious. And in the improvisation, she got her boyfriend and said, “we are off” and we were actually in the house that we were going to shoot it in, in North London. They left and they literally went off and they disappeared. And eventually when I stopped the improvisation, it took quite a long time to find them. Because they’d gone off, they’d simply gone.
And so she came back. Now, this is to answer your question, my job, I mean, there’s no way, I mean that was it, I had to resolve the film. So I said to Clare rush brook who was playing the character, is there any way she wouldn’t do that? Absolutely not. She would do that, non-negotiable, obviously. Any way she’d come back? No way, never see her again, she’s furious. Fine. So I said well how is she going to get back home because they were just hanging around in the area. And she said, well, the bus. Across the road from the house at the end of the road, a short distance away was a bus stop. So we set another improvisation, go to the bus stop with her boyfriend, and Maurice, the character comes out, comes over and tries to persuade her, and she says no way and again, we stop the improvisation and go to another one. She says, there’s no way she’s going back and she says, no way. Then in one of the improvisations, they said to the boyfriend, what do you think, and the boyfriend says, well maybe you should go back. And because of the nature of the relationship, and up to that point the boyfriend’s being fairly wimpish really, as you see in the film, at that point she said, well, if he said that, maybe she would. So we explored that and fixed it. Thus she was motivated organically without any cheating to go back into the house, then we could explore the rest of what happened and resolve the drama.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you.
ELLEN: Thank you. That is all we have got time for I’m afraid. Thank you very much Mike Leigh, thank you.
MIKE: Thank you.
