Over the course of his nearly 40-year career in movies, Mike Leigh has developed one of the most distinctive ways of working with actors. When they begin the process of making the film, which might be a year before the camera rolls, they start with a vague idea of a character and a lot of improv. Of the course of many rehearsals, Leigh and his actors develop their characters and story; sometimes when filming begins they don't even know how the movie will end.
That's how it went with Happy-Go-Lucky, Leigh's new film that is simultaneously buoyant and melancholy in its depiction of a young woman (played by Sally Hawkins) with an unerringly bright outlook on life. Far from being cutesy or sentimental, Happy-Go-Lucky is the result of all that character work, crashing a bunch of different people together and seeing what happens. In an interview last week, following the film's press screening at the New York Film Festival, Leigh talked about the process of making his movie and telling a story about someone so fundamentally happy.
How do you start with your movies? Do you find an actor you want to work with? Do you find an idea and then an actor?
The truth is, whatever I do is only what artists do in general. You have a conception, or a feeling, or a particular precise idea. Even with the films [I've made] that have a more specific agenda, I've still made the films by exploring and creating and investigating and experimenting and making it up all the way through to the end of the shoot. And indeed, you make a film in the cutting room. For me, that is pure filmmaking. This is not something invented by me. That's how movies were made until the talkies came in. When the talkies came in, people became scriptbound.
You movies are in a way an investigation, somewhat similar to what happens in a documentary.
Yes, except that I am in the business of highly structured, distilled, organized, classically shot films. I'm not in the business of documentaries. Your point applies to documentary, but it also applies to every other art form. That's what artists do. You embark on a journey that works out your ideas, and you discover what it actually is in precise terms.
Do you see Poppy as a character who needs something, or has a problem to solve?
The very fact that we're discussing it at all is because the assumption is always that a character in a movie must have a problem in some way. I think what's interesting about this woman is she doesn't, as such, have a problem. The problem is the world.
The female characters in your movies are the most realized and fulfilled female characters anyway. Why do you focus on them?
I don't know. I'm a male heterosexual person who looks at the world, and I deal with men and woman. I've got to deal with women. I deal with them as fully as I know how to. My agenda is I think that the paucity [of parts for women] is huge. On the whole, female characters-- even so-called starring roles for women, certainly in the English language-- the women are always a function of the men. Quite frankly, I don't really think of these things. I do characters, and when they're women. I do them thoroughly.
Can you talk about working with Sally in the role?
She has a huge sense of humor, she's incredibly hard-working, she's very focused, very bright, very generous. If there's any evidence that an actor is selfish, egocentric, narcissistic, anything-- they're out. I don't work with them. I work with people who really have got great spirit and warmth and are creative, and are more concerned with creating stories about the world out there than they are about their own narcissistic navels. And Sally Hawkins is a great person, and a great artist.
Where does Poppy get the strength that keeps her so happy and buoyant?
Well, where do any of us get our strength?
Well, when you build the character, do you think about their past and their parents and all that?
Yes, we do all that, that's what we do for six months. So when she goes down to the seaside to visit her sister, and you get an immediate sense of their relationship, that's because that relationship actually exists. We've done it. They could tell you everything that's ever happened to them. Same with everything, it's all there. These things are layered in, and occasionally details resonate to the surface. But like the foundations of this building. I'm sure there is a foundation for this building, and I'm sure once upon a time someone drew the plans for this building. But nobody says 'That's a great building, now tell us about the plans.'
