The Book of Leigh
Berlinale Jury president Mike Leigh speaks to the Talents about his working process.
Berlinale Jury president Mike Leigh
The Mike Leigh method of filmmaking is a bit like the bible: collaboratively constructed, religiously studied and often woefully, disastrously misconstrued. Thankfully, however, Leigh still walks among us, and at this year’s Talent Campus, the British director and president of this year's International Jury imparted his candid wisdom to a packed audience of filmmaking apostles eager to learn about his distinctive approach to creating cinematic worlds.
“The distinction between writing and directing doesn’t exist,” began Leigh in response to a roundabout question by Ben Gibson, the evening’s moderator, regarding the idiosyncrasies of his process. Despite having earned five screenwriting Oscar nominations for the likes of VERA DRAKE and ANOTHER YEAR, Leigh says he wouldn’t know where to begin writing a verbatim script, only ever beginning a film with a loose outline in mind. He allows his ideas to germinate during months of preparatory research and rehearsals with his cast, where he individually works with each actor through the process of creating their character, developing elaborate backstories to help shape their personas. Then, with each actor only knowing as much as their characters and nothing of what lies ahead, Leigh lets the drama create itself. What results are scenes that unfold with an element of honesty and immediacy that is often missing from traditionally shot sequences, where the actor would know their complete trajectory in advance. Leigh likens this naturalistic process to that of a documentary, where “the journey of making the film is the journey of discovering what the film is.”
But there exists a verse of the Mike Leigh process that sounds like a confused contradiction: “It’s all about creating precise work.” So how can impulse be precise? Leigh explains that while the on-the-spot spontaneity of a rehearsal is ultimately what he wants to capture on film, he would still like to retain an element of control over how a scene unfolds, right down to the exactitude of the mise-en-scène. Thus, as soon as Leigh feels a rehearsal is ready for filming, he fractures the action into meticulously staged and photographed shots where the actors must revisit the emotion of the rehearsals. Therein lies the unique and oft-misunderstood dichotomy of the Mike Leigh process; capturing spontaneity with precision.
On top of his background in theatre, the genesis of Leigh’s distinctive style lies in his strict diet of Hollywood and British films during his youth, where he often pondered how great it would be “if the characters were real people.” So where, as one audience member enquired during the tail end of the event, do his seemingly endless stories of real people come from?
“Well, they come from living,” Leigh replied.
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