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Jet-Lagged but not dispirited, Mike Leigh has recently returned
from Los Angeles, where he's just seen his potential Best Director
Oscar handed over to Clint
Eastwood for Million
Dollar Baby
. "Oh
it's fine, it was good to be nominated," he reasons. "Obviously it
went exactly as we expected but it's still disappointing when it
happens."
Leigh is here to talk to Film Review about the
DVD of Vera
Drake, his latest masterpiece in which Imelda
Staunton
plays an ordinary urban
housewife in 1950s London who secretly provides backstreet abortions
for young girls who have "gotten themselves into trouble". As the
poster so teasingly summarizes, she's a wife, a mother and a
criminal. Surely it's a controversial subject matter for these
increasingly right wing times, particularly when one considers the
power that the anti-abortion lobby wields in America?
"On Sunday night, at
the 'do' after the Oscars, the distributor was saying that he
expected the film to receive more controversy than it did," offers
Leigh. "I think the truth is that the factions you might expect to
come out against the film haven't because it leads you gently into a
look at a moral dilemma that is unavoidable.
"That's why, when we
were in Venice with it in September, Vatican Radio came out in
support of the film. Now that's as unpredictable and surprising to
you as it is to me, but similarly there hasn't been a massive
negative reaction to it in the States. There has been some, but
nothing substantial." Leigh is quite unique among directors, an
artist able to finance his projects without providing even so much
as a script. His films are all improvised; not even Leigh himself
has a clear idea of what the final picture will be when rehearsals
begin.
"Actors agree to take part in my films on the
basis that we don't know what the character or the story is and
we'll make it all up," he says. "The film comes out of massive
amounts of investigation and creative work. We spend six months in
rehearsal before we shoot anything, although it's not rehearsal in
the conventional sense - it's creating the world of the characters,
researching everything and bringing the premise of the film into
existence.
"However what we do shoot is thoroughly
rehearsed and we don't shoot anything until it's very precise. There
is a risk of over-rehearsing I suppose, but it's my professional
function to make sure that doesn't happen."
It's a distinctive method of making film in a
marketplace that is becoming increasingly homogenised. Into the new
millennium, and many movies have become more focused on CG and
digital technology than story and performance. Clearly such issues
are worlds away from Leigh's methodology, but it's tempting to ask
whether he's ever bought into the new revolution. Has he even used a
single CG shot in one of his productions?
"Yes!"
he announces. "What you can do digitally is fantastic, and it's
there as part of the tool kit. There is a shot in Vera
Drake
where,
for a moment, you saw the camera in a mirror. In the old days that
would have f**ked us completely but we just removed it digitally, we
painted it out. "Vera Drake is the first film I have made which was
graded digitally, and we shot it on 16mm and blew it up to 35 mm.
It's also amazing what you can do digitally with soundtracks now.
The scene where Vera gets interrogated in the police station, which
was obviously shot in location in the East End in a disused police
station, it rained all through the weekend it was shot.
"In the old days that
would have meant having to post-synch the entire scene, but with the
brilliant sound editor on this film was able to digitally clean it
all up and maintain the original tracks. Now that is fantastic." It
might not have bagged the Oscar, but Vera Drake remains one of the
most critically hailed films of the past year. It also earned Leigh
the Best Director gong at the BAFTAs, while Staunton took away the
much-deserved Best Actress award. In truth, the whole ensemble
deserves recognition. "The whole cast is extraordinary, even down to
people who play the smallest of characters. There are exceptional
performances and that's what it's all about - getting people to do
wonderful acting."
David
Richardson
This interview appears
in the May edition of Film Review.
www.visimag.com/filmreview
www.visimag.com/ultimatedvd
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