by MATTHEW HAYS

The name Mike Leigh evokes immediate and strong images in any filmgoer versed in British national cinema. There are the stark, unblinking glimpses into relationships (often damaged ones). There is the bleak aesthetic quality, one which the U.K.’s travel bureau clearly had nothing to do with. There are the striking performances, always taking place in the context of an ensemble collaboration with the filmmaker. His films represent an astonishing oeuvre, including Naked, Secrets and Lies, Career Girls, Topsy-Turvy, Abigail’s Party and Hard Labour, among many others.

The set of expectations surrounding his work hasn’t been broken with Leigh’s latest, All or Nothing, again set in Britain’s underbelly. The film introduces us to another set of classic Leigh characters, grappling with poverty, alcoholism, obesity and the basic struggle for survival in a world that is so often ugly. As the Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen recently phrased it, All or Nothing is another chapter in Leigh’s trademark cinema of “kitchen sink surrealism.”

The Mirror caught up with Leigh at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where the man who is arguably Britain’s greatest living filmmaker discussed All or Nothing, misguided critical responses to his work and why he feels the audience is crucial.

Mirror: When you sit down and decide what your next film is going to be about, how do you make that decision? I mean at the earliest point of creation.

Mike Leigh: It’s hard to answer that question. It’s particularly hard in the context of this film. My films, especially this one, come out of prevailing feelings and preoccupations. This film does that. I can’t answer it in a very concrete or specific way. Besides, for me, the journey of making the film is a journey of investigation through which I discover what the film is, because I really don’t work conventionally. It’s hard, this is a film that comes out of feelings about relationships, love—ongoing preoccupations which date back to my earlier work. The whole business of surviving and coping.

Depicting despair

M: Something that stands out about your work is that I’ll watch a film of yours and feel utter despair at what I’m witnessing, at the same time that I’m laughing at the situation.

ML: I’m not the first person to say this, but I don’t think you can be funny unless you’re being serious—not proper humour, anyway. Someone can sit on a pork pie, so to speak, but that’s not profoundly funny. To me, life is comic and tragic. That’s what we’re mining for the scene. The humour’s there in the inevitable, organic kind of way. I think what’s important is that the film may be bleak, but finally, it has to be redemptive.

M: The Globe and Mail’s Liam Lacey wrote that All or Nothing had an overly sentimental closure. Do you ever see your work as sentimental?

ML: No. People who decode art are quite capable of putting labels on things, because they resonate with other things. I don’t think I’m sentimental, I know I’m not sentimental. Sentimental, if we mean sentimental, is to kind of wallow in emotions at a surface level. Maybe they’ll see it as sentimental because they’re looking at it in the context of whole load of other movies, but I don’t think it’s sentimental at all. Do you think it’s sentimental?

M: No, I think there’s warmth between the characters in the final scene, but it’s hardly maudlin or sentimental when one takes into consideration the previous 100-odd minutes of the film.

ML: What we’re actually saying is we know it’s not sentimental. It’s scientific fact. It’s not.

A man with class

M: Do you ever worry that people will feel you’re deriding the British working class in your films?

ML: I know I’m not doing that. There are people who say that. It’s as absurd as accusing me of being sentimental. These films are about love and are motivated by love of the people. I tell it like it is. If people are behaving in an ugly way, that’s because that’s the way it is. On the whole, people who say it’s patronizing and it’s an ivory-tower view of working class people—that tells us more about their position than mine. That’s usually coming from ivory-tower folk and media types who indeed decode working class people behaving badly as stereotype. It’s not: people are people.

M: What were some of the main shifts for you when you did Topsy-Turvy? That was quite a change for you, as a period film.

ML: It’s interesting, if you scrape away at the top layer, you’ll find a regular Mike Leigh film going on, with all the usual preoccupations going on: living, surviving, working, relationships, men and women communicating and not communicating. The whole point of it, on one level, was that I wanted to do a period film. I’m sick of looking at period films I don’t believe in, so I wanted to contribute a film to that territory for the sheer hell of it. If I take what presents itself as being the ultimate chocolate-box subject, and I subvert it by taking it seriously, then in fact, because I looked at it with the same feelings, I responded to the characters in the same way that I did with my other films. Oddly, it was less of a deviation than it immediately looks like.

M: I had such a discovery this past year when a number of your early films were re-released on video. I was able to go back and discover some of your lesser-seen works, in particular Abigail’s Party.

ML: That was a stage play first, of course. There’s a revival of it in London, where it’s a massive sellout. Amazingly, it holds up and people go and see it in droves. In the U.K. it’s always been immensely popular. I suppose I’m not surprised but I’m delighted.

M: Are there any models you think about when you make your films? They are so uncompromising and unique.

ML: I’m influenced, for sure. And I’m inspired by films of various kinds. Some of the influences go in subliminally. It wouldn’t be immediately obvious, but I was raised on the Ealing comedies. If you think about a look at English life, it’s somehow in there some way. I never really discovered world cinema until I was 17. All I saw was Hollywood movies as a kid. Renoir, Ozu, early Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, the Nouvelle Vague, these are all major influences. But you know, I’ve found my own style. I guess I also credit Beckett or Pinter, and even Chekhov. But I never set something up and say, “Oh, here’s a Hitchcock shot.”

M: Certainly, I can feel the existential influence, philosophically, in your work. That’s what Ray Carney has written about you fairly extensively.

ML: That’s a legitimate position for him to take. But I don’t often think of my films that intellectually. There’s an instinctually existential take on life, which is mine. But for the film to be thought of as a sort of thinking out of existential ideas would be seriously false.

M: Are there times when you read interpretations of your work that you find offensive?

ML: Yeah, sure. Particularly when people talk about a cynical view of life, that bothers me, because it isn’t. It’s curious because on the whole, people who absolutely get what I do, they relate to it. It’s not really decodable in labyrinth intellectual ways. Sometimes people speak a lot of rubbish about me. In particular, when people talk about my patronizing attitudes. My films are viewed as a critique of British society, which is fine up until an extent, but to say that my films are primarily about that, in terms of their intention, is simply not accurate. All or Nothing is about a series of themes. But it’s universal.

M: Certainly, I’ve read the initial critical responses to Abigail’s Party in ’77, and many argued it reflected a Britain which was then in decline…

ML: And it again would be disingenuous for me to join in there. That has never really been the intention with my work.

M: Are you happy with your work when it’s done?

ML: Generally, I am. I wasn’t so happy with Hard Labour. It’s got things about it which are good, but there are things that are left unended and a bit grey. They had a retrospective of my work in Sarajevo, and I went and sat in on the films, because of course if there was going to be a Q&A I wanted to be prepared for it. I was happy to sit through them. I like watching them, and I like watching them with an audience. I only pull them out occasionally to watch at home, like when I was at the stage where my kids hadn’t seen them. I get very pissed off with directors who say they can’t watch their own films, and they hate them, they can’t bear it. My own feeling is, if you don’t like your own film, why the hell should you expect anyone else to? Film is about audience. It doesn’t exist without one. It has no meaning in a can. :

All or Nothing opens Friday, Nov. 15

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