Mike Leigh: ​‘I’m inter­est­ed in the space between words’

Mike Leigh has a rep­u­ta­tion for being spiky in inter­views, so it was with mod­er­ate ter­ror that LWLies sat down with the 71-year-old British mae­stro to dis­cuss the ins-and-outs of his aston­ish­ing new work, Mr Turner.

LWLies: Mr Turn­er is a film where death looms large but by the very act of mak­ing the film you’re res­ur­rect­ing a life that clear­ly has mean­ing to you. To what extent do you think that we can, through art, make peo­ple live forever?

Leigh: I don’t think we can make peo­ple live for­ev­er. Turn­er is dead. He died in 1851. His work lives. We’ve cre­at­ed a world, a char­ac­ter. We evoked some­thing. On the one hand, I’m quite sure that if you get into a time machine and go back to the actu­al events they, in many respects, would bear absolute­ly no resem­blance to what’s on the flick­er­ing sil­ver screen. On the oth­er hand, we, and you – the audi­ence – enter into a con­spir­a­cy to say that we are bring­ing some­thing to life. That’s what we do in films any­way. Even if I make the whole thing up, as I usu­al­ly do. You’re still bring­ing some­thing to life that actu­al­ly doesn’t exist. What’s impor­tant is what we expe­ri­ence from it and what we gain from it, what we share about it.

Where does the exten­sive con­cen­tra­tion required to cre­ate come from?

It’s hard to answer a ques­tion like that with­out – and I’m cau­tious here – with­out run­ning the risk of sound­ing deeply pre­ten­tious because the fact is that an artist of any kind has to be dri­ven, and has to be dri­ven by some sense of some­thing that goes beyond sim­ply, a thing that is very impor­tant but nonethe­less which is just the prac­ti­cal fact of doing it. So there’s going to be some­thing spir­i­tu­al and tele­path­ic, what­ev­er you call it, I hes­i­tate to call it divine because I think that would be over-stat­ing the case but all that has to be going on at some lev­el but what is that? That is only about hav­ing your anten­nae attuned to stuff that’s going on on dif­fer­ent levels.

So you’ve got your anten­nae up to pure­ly an idea and then you’ve got to trans­form into some­thing that trans­lates to the screen.

Well that’s the name of the game! And that’s what Mr Turn­er is about! There you see a guy who can see and expe­ri­ence pro­found and epic things but actu­al­ly what you see all the time is a guy mix­ing paints and lug­ging things about and doing prac­ti­cal things which is what we call mak­ing paint­ings. Noth­ing is more prac­ti­cal and pro­sa­ic than the mechan­ics of film­mak­ing but the job is to take all of that and all of those peo­ple involved in it and some­how go beyond the mere tech­ni­cal­i­ty of it and cre­ate some­thing that looks at the world and dis­tils some­thing from it but in a way we’re not say­ing any­thing that’s not obvi­ous really.

The mechan­ics of film­mak­ing in this case involved the goal of recre­at­ing some of the scenes with­in Turner’s paint­ings and drawings…

We’ve been inspired by his paint­ings in how we’ve ren­dered and made things look. To begin with it’s about look­ing at and under­stand­ing and get­ting to know his work and com­ing to under­stand where he was com­ing from…

Do you remem­ber the first Turn­er paint­ing you ever looked at?

When I was a teenag­er a mil­lion years ago in the 1950s, I, now, think­ing back on it, was pret­ty vague about Turn­er and indeed Con­sta­ble and all that. By the time I was 14 or some­thing I real­ly knew about Picas­so and the impres­sion­ists and 20^th cen­tu­ry art and even sur­re­al­ism and Sal­vador Dali. All of those things were pinned on my bed­room wall as post­cards but Turn­er was vague. Was it some­thing on choco­late box­es? I don’t know. But it wasn’t until I was at art school a few years lat­er that I start­ed to look at him and under­stand. And I don’t know what the first paint­ing was but I know that I start­ed to go to the Tate and the Nation­al Gallery and see the paint­ings and become aware of what he was about.

Pre­sum­ably there was then a gap of some years before you decid­ed to return to Turner…

It was only in about ¹⁹⁹⁸⁄₉ that it sud­den­ly hit me. Have you seen my film Topsy-Turvy?

Yes.

After we’d done that some­where along the line it start­ed to occur to me… because until then I hadn’t real­ly done a peri­od and once I’d done Top­sy-Turvy I realised you could do that. So then I start­ed think­ing and read­ing about Turn­er and I realised that the, again, what I’ve already referred to about the ten­sion between the char­ac­ter and the work, it all came togeth­er. And apart from any­thing else there isn’t or hasn’t been a motion fea­ture film about Turn­er so I though maybe we should do one. The next thing was a decade or so of try­ing to get the mon­ey to do it because it need­ed to cost a lot more than we nor­mal­ly get to make my films when you just see peo­ple argu­ing on stair­cas­es and in back gardens…

And cafes…

And cafes. Absolute­ly. But in the end we didn’t get real­ly as much as we want­ed and in the end it was made for less than Top­sy-Turvy so that was the big strug­gle. While that was going on we were con­stant­ly research­ing and read­ing and build­ing up ideas. When it came to actu­al­ly doing it then it was about cast­ing it and look­ing for loca­tions and all those things.

Was Tim­o­thy Spall always going to be your Turner?

He was the only actor I asked. And once I’d thought of him that seemed very log­i­cal. Part­ly because, apart from any­thing else, Turn­er was very much a Lon­don­er and there’s some­thing in what Tim knows as a Lon­don­er that he would have to tap into. I also knew he had a cer­tain ama­teur predilec­tion for draw­ing and painting.

In your film he com­mu­ni­cates through an extra­or­di­nary array of non-ver­bal sounds…

That came in the first place from what we read about Turn­er. He did grunt. Some­body had sat down and tran­scribed him actu­al­ly talk­ing so that was quite use­ful. It’s an attempt to try and get at how he talked.

What do you think words can do that sounds can’t?

An equal­ly inter­est­ing ques­tion is, ​‘What do I think sounds can do that words can’t?’ Peo­ple talk about lan­guage and words. What I’m con­cerned with in a film, and this film is no excep­tion, is the total com­bi­na­tion of ele­ments that make real­i­ty. It’s what we say and it’s the space between words. If you lis­ten to where we are now its incred­i­ble, there’s an incred­i­ble amount of sound­scape going on in this room. And also there’s what we’re say­ing, how we’re say­ing it, what our sub­texts are, what hap­pens in the paus­es but also part and par­cel of all that is me as a char­ac­ter, you as a char­ac­ter, where we are, what the dynam­ics of our rela­tion­ship is, what I’m wear­ing, what you’re wear­ing, what I think about you, what I won­der about you, what you won­der about me. All those things, the whole his­to­ry of what leads to this moment and what I do in all films – includ­ing this one ­– is an incred­i­ble amount of work that leads up to a moment so that moment res­onates with real­i­ty so that it’s the tip of an ice­berg, as in real life. So the ques­tion about sounds, words, silences, artic­u­la­cy, all those things, I see them all as part of an organ­ic whole and you can’t sep­a­rate them out. They’re all dif­fer­ent ele­ments that have to be dealt with.

Do you think – and this is just an off-the-top of my head the­o­ry – do you think that words are a way of inter­rupt­ing and ratio­nal­is­ing emotions?

That is, if you’re seri­ous… well, you say it’s an off-the-top-of-your-head the­o­ry; it sounds like an off-the-top-of-your-head theory.

Sor­ry!

You can’t seri­ous­ly be sug­gest­ing that by def­i­n­i­tion words dilute feel­ings or dis­guise or cam­ou­flage feel­ings or truth or mean­ing because that is alto­geth­er a high­ly reduc­tion­ist over-sim­pli­fied thing to say. Of course, they can do that but to say that they do do that would be very dangerous.

So how do you find this part of your job – talk­ing to peo­ple that ask you lots of ques­tions; some bright and some not so bright?

Unless it’s irri­tat­ing­ly stu­pid, which this isn’t… or irrel­e­vant… I mean, look, here’s a thing. You make a film. We fin­ished this film at the begin­ning of the year. Until I went to Cannes I didn’t real­ly have to talk at all about it to any­one. Then all of a sud­den you get dropped in this may­hem they call Cannes and you’ve got to do a mas­sive amount of press. Now, what is hap­pen­ing there to me is I’m at the begin­ning of a jour­ney of find­ing out two things. One is how to talk about this film and two is learn­ing what it actu­al­ly is that I’ve made. That involves a whole bunch of con­ver­sa­tions with all kinds of peo­ple. And I love con­ver­sa­tions so we’re hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion. You’re hard­ly the most pre­dictable jour­nal­ist I’ve met so it’s great.

Who mat­ters most: the response of the pub­lic, the response of fel­low film­mak­ers or the response of the press?

It all. Any­one that says, ​‘I don’t care what any­body else thinks’ is lying. Pos­i­tive respons­es can only be good news. It makes you feel like you haven’t been wast­ing your time. It’s stim­u­lat­ing. Also, apart from any­thing else, I have this tick­et to con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple and I go to film fes­ti­vals where you get fed and watered and you meet audi­ences. I make films for audi­ences. There are peo­ple that make films and they don’t want to talk to any­body. I mean there’s a lev­el of some­times you think actu­al­ly it would be great just to make a film, walk away and make anoth­er film and not have to do all of this. But that’s only because it gets rep­e­ti­tious or it gets too much or it encroach­es on your time but in real terms, part of the joy and the point of doing some­thing – which by def­i­n­i­tion is about com­mu­ni­cat­ing with peo­ple and shar­ing with peo­ple – is the feed­back, which is as impor­tant as any­thing else. Indeed the feed­back feeds back. I hope it makes me a bet­ter film­mak­er in some way.

Is it too ear­ly for you to be think­ing about your next project?

I have oth­er things I have to do. I’m going to direct a pro­duc­tion of The Pirates of Pen­zance next year in May for the Eng­lish Nation­al Opera so we’ve been work­ing on that, design­ing it and so on.

I know it’s not auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion but I’m curi­ous to hear what it is about him that is your conduit?

He took no shit from nobody so I iden­ti­fy with that.

Have you always been a no shit-taker?

What do you think…