British Realist Filmmakers

Mike Leigh

Table of Contents

1) Who is Mike Leigh?

2) Documentary Realism and Psychological Realism

3) Filmmaking Methods of Mike Leigh

On the whole, life for most people is – get born and survive as best you can, for as long as you can, till it’s all up. The norm for most people in the world is that life is hard work; it’s tough. It’s not about being winners or losers. It’s about coping. The minute anything extraordinary or exotic happens [in a film], I get bored. Most movies are about extraordinary or charmed lifestyles. For me what’s exciting is finding heightened drama, the extraordinary in the ordinary – what happens to ordinary people … the entirely disorganized and irrational business of living. Mike Leigh

Who is Mike Leigh? Mike Leigh (1943 - )Bleak Moments (1971) -His first feature

▼His Second Feature, High Hopes (1988) Theatre and TV drama

director in the intervening 17 years.

Mike Leigh’s Early Works

Bleak Moments (1971)

•A shy, intelligent woman, Sylvia, looks after her mentally retarded sister in their suburban south London home, while having a friendship with a woman from work and embarking a relationship with a emotionally stunted man.

Mike Leigh’s Early Works

Abigail’s Party (1977)

•While teenage Abigail throws a party two doors away, grown-ups have their own soirée. The cynical exposé of adult, middle-class pretensions and snobbery.

Mike Leigh’s Early Works

High Hopes (1988)

•Slice-of-life look at a working-class couple in London, Shirley and Cyril, his aging mother, his mum’s ghastly upper-middle-class neighbors, and Cyril’s pretentious sister and philandering husband.

Who is Mike Leigh? Life Is Sweet (1990)•About a family life with Andy, a professional chef who buys a decrepit hamburger van, his wife Wendy, a part-time waitress, and their daughters, sex and Marx-obsessed Nicola and and a secret bulimic, Natalie, an apprentice plumber who rejects gender stereotyping and dreams of escaping to America.

Mike Leigh’s Works

Naked (1993)

•Johnny, a highly intelligent but bitterly cynical Mancunian wanderer, arrives in London, where his presence has a powerful impact on those he meets, his former girlfriend, her flat mate, and the guard of an office building.

•The winner of the best director and actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993. Wider acceptance.

Mike Leigh’s Works

Secrets and Lies (1996)

•The story of a successful ‘black’ woman named Hortense Cumberbatch who, while tracing her family history (she was adopted as a baby), discovers that her birth mother, Cynthia Rose Purley, is an unhappy working-class ‘white’ woman.

Mike Leigh’s Works

• All or Nothing (2002)

• The marriage between Penny and Phil is on the rocks. In a poor London housing estate over a long weekend they recover their love when their son is hospitalized after he collapses with an attack of stroke.

Mike Leigh’s Works

• Vera Drake (2004)• Vera Drake is a selfless and respectable wom

an who is completely devoted to, and loved by, her working class family. However, she also secretly visits women and helps them induce miscarriages for unwanted pregnancies.

Documentary and Psychological Realism

• Mike Leigh’s Realism

• Psychological rather than documentary realism

• Realistic representation of inner psyche of characters rather than realistic copying of appearances

Documentary and Psychological Realism

• The exploration of the desires, hopes and disillusionment of working-class protagonists and the presentation of the heart of the structure and texture of working class families.

• Similarities to and influence from Ozu Yasujiro

Documentary and Psychological Realism

Documentary and Psychological Realism

• Mike Leigh’s films – it is people but not locations that are their centre.

• The interiors and behaviours of his characters and the small-scale incidents

• Realistically capturing the variety of human (mainly working-class) behaviours with personal quirk, emotion, or idiosyncrasy

• Earlier films – strong caricaturing tendencies turning characters into types.

• Later films – more naturalistic characterizations

• Both sharper observation of human beings.

Filmmaking Methods of Mike Leigh

(1)   A group of actors arrive with lists of people they know, and Leigh then lets them discuss these people with him.

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(2) Leigh picks up the characters he is interested in, bearing in mind the other characters he is assembling and the general area the film is going to explore.

Filmmaking Methods of Mike Leigh

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(3) He then sends the actors off to do research.

They create the personalities by inventing

their entire histories and giving them emotional

depth and a psychological and social structure.

Leigh works closely with each actor during this

process.

Filmmaking Methods of Mike Leigh

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(4) Once the creation of the characters is

complete, Leigh introduces his actors to each

other and has their characters interact and

improvise together in situations that he has

devised. Meanwhile, Leigh is building dramatic

conflict between the characters, refining the

dialogue, constructing a plot.

Filmmaking Methods of Mike Leigh

▼(5) Leigh finalizes the plot and the dialogue, construct scenes and determines the mise-en-scène.▼(6) When the film goes before the camera, the improvisations are over. There is a final script, and Leigh adheres to it. There is nothing

anarchic or free-form about his directorial methods.

Happy Go Lucky (2008) Another Year (2010)

Leigh’s output is small but he doggedly sticks to his filmmaking method.