The Telegraph’s got a package of pieces about Mike Leigh‘s latest, Happy-Go-Lucky, including the peppy, poppy coming attraction. It debuted at Berlin and won best actress for star Sally Hawkins. I’m stumped most times when I’m asked me about a most-favorite film, or to trippingly, lightsomely describe some Platonic ideal of what would define the perfect movie for me. (Anything that demonstrates itself as great; and when I really figure it out, I’ll figure out a way to make it myself.) Still, I’d grasp at Rules of the Game and Leigh’s Naked, and based on this trailer and what I’ve read between the lines in reviews and interviews, as well as the highs, lows, and general characteristics of Leigh’s good and great movies, I take a deep breath and hope this is one of those movies: offhandedly serious with a light surface described through behavior, told through a bright, brash woman with the most generous of heart? I’d like to see a lot of movies like that. It’s the one movie I’m really anticipating in the next few months. (My fingers are crossed under the desk.) In a profile of the 65-year-old conceiver-writer-director, Sheila Johnston goes through the ritual of visiting Leigh’s threadbare Soho aerie and gets good quote on grumpiness from one of the more contentious interviewees I’ve ever had the pleasure to get stick from. “He ushers me into his production offices. He has been based here forever, a Soho institution nestled among Soho institutions: a pub, an art gallery and a prostitutes’ flat. A compact, round, grey-bearded figure with large, watchful eyes and the soft trace of a North-West accent, he’s a sharp interlocutor, who doesn’t hesitate to describe a question as “ridiculous” or (less often) “good”—but also an empathetic one. I remark that the early reviews in Berlin… ran something along these lines: “What a surprise, a fabulous feel-good comedy from Mike Leigh, the… the…” I hesitate, looking for the tactful word, and the director helpfully supplies it: “Miserable!” So, yes indeed: a light-hearted comedy from that miserable grump who makes dour movies about the turmoil and pain seething through lower-class lives. “In a perfectly good-natured way, I reject all that as nonsense,” the director declares. “People say it as though my other films have been relentlessly grim, but I haven’t made anything that doesn’t have humour in it…” He eyes me quizzically. “And, well, is Happy-Go-Lucky light-hearted? I certainly started from the premise that it would be an erupting, energetic film. But I think it has plenty of weight underneath it.” Johnston gives the bare-bones of Leigh’s extensive preparation process here. Johnston also interviewed Hawkins, on-set and off: “It is very much her film: she plays 30-year-old primary school teacher Poppy, who slowly but surely be comes a multi-faceted character, starting off as bright, easy and zippy and ending up as compassionate, thoughtful and complex. It is a brilliantly subtle performance, one that not only demands humour (there is a hil a rious scene where Poppy goes flamenco dancing) but also pathos (the apparently carefree Poppy also has to confront the harsh realities of life).” Since first seeing his work at the time of Life is Sweet, I’ve grown increasingly fond of Leigh’s way with stereotypes that he proceeds to explore and burst. From a 1983 Guardian Interview with an audience at the NFT: “One of the things that I like to do is to take ideas which people think of as being clichés, social clichés—you know, like a postman and milkman go round and going into houses and having it off with people’s wives—it’s a cliché. The fact is, however, that the minute we started researching [we discover] that it’s not really a cliché.” “Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh” (edited by Amy Raphael) is published in the UK on 17 April. (No US release date slated.) Below: Film4’s 10-minute Happy-Go-Lucky preview with Leigh and Hawkins, plus my interview with Leigh for Topsy-Turvy and some reflections on Naked, which originally appeared in a slightly different form in Cinema Scope; my conversation with Leigh about Secrets and Lies is collected in “Mike Leigh: Interviews.” Plus: Leigh’s mash note to Bruxelles. [Leigh’s credits.]

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TOPSY-TURVY
MIKE LEIGH AS ARTIST MAY NOT BE ENTIRELY RAW NERVE, BUT HE OFTEN IS AS INTERVIEWEE. I’ve talked to the veteran filmmaker a few times, and know that the subject of his working methods is one that he doesn’t care to go beyond practiced boilerplate. And while the secrets of “What we do as actors and directors” is the meat of Topsy-Turvy, one query of mine, based on a wonderfully dense anecdote told to me by Jim Broadbent, led to a brusque and smiling reply of “I don’t know about that. Sorry. Can’t help.”
PRIDE: Let’s talk about master shots. You have a marvelous one when the battling composer Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) and librettist W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) finally face each other. They can’t look each other in the eye, but they review their differences while sucking on candies.
LEIGH: [Owing to the period setting], we struggled because we did more than we normally do. It wasn’t just a kind of distillation of improvisation. We [worked with what we learned from the extant] correspondence as well. The thing with the sugar kind of crept in just a joke, really. I said, well, actually it’s great, why don’t you just do it? They were sort of slightly sending it up. I said, play the scene with that and it liberated it completely. Because what’s fascinating about the whole thing, which I’m just doing sort of a quasi-bio-pic, it’s not really a bio-pic at all, where you make famous people behave like for real. So we retrospectively invented the Swiss sugar, which is completely not a piece of research.

PRIDE: It’s interesting because it’s one of the scenes that seems ripely actory at first, filled with actor’s business, yet it neatly fits the tale. Like some of Timothy Spall’s scenes, such as his Richard Temple and the other actors speaking in that cracked continental polyglot and that unlikely reflection of his, “Laughter. Tears. Curtain.” You could see an actor doing a botch of that, but you see ego love and hurt there. It’s almost Beckett.
LEIGH: And of course [Spall] and I share this particular predilection for Dickens. In fact, he’d been very ill, he’d had cancer between Secrets and Lies and this. Then he was better. I said, whatever happens, you have to be in this next film. I’m not making a Victorian film unless you’re there. He has this great [presence] and he knows quite a lot about [the era]. The great and fortunate thing about Richard Temple is there’s not very much known about him. Where there was a lot known, such as about Gilbert and Sullivan, we tried to use that and activate these guys as we researched them. But that left Spall and me free to create this Victorian “Ac-Tor,” y’know, which seemed very appropriate. When Gilbert cut [Temple’s big] song , which he did [in real life], and when the chorus went to [Gilbert] in a posse, in reality, we had no idea whether Temple cared or was relieved in reality. but certainly it was very useful to make him this guy [care].
PRIDE: I was at the New York Film Festival press conference–
LEIGH: Oh, so you’ve heard me say that before! [laughs]
PRIDE: No, I’ve heard most of the basics you rehearse with familiar questions, such as the idea that you’re subverting a “chocolate-box” story. It certainly went over well in the screenings there and in the press afterward.
LEIGH: I don’t really know anybody’s reaction to it at all. I know that Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard actually hates the film.

PRIDE: Was the idea of demonstrating what actors and directors do an overriding concern as you assembled the story?
LEIGH: Yes. It was a given, yeah. I sort of felt , in the way that I suppose everybody does, a lot of artists do, at a certain stage, you do a kind of self-portraiture. But it isn’t in any literal sense, that. But I just felt it would be good to look at what we do, really. And y’know, as you know, I always shy away from or I’m more naturally gravitate towards ordinary lives, lives like lots of other people, really, the unextraordinary. I just thought, y’know, these guys are, let’s, as I say, subvert that. Let’s look at, these are real people, then. But yeah, the assumption was let’s do a theater… film.
PRIDE: I used the phrase in my review, “Life as it is lived and lunch as it is eaten.”
LEIGH: Did I say that?
PRIDE: I said that.
LEIGH: Oh. That’s good if I say so!
PRIDE: But going to the scene at the start, where Broadbent brays out the information with the review of “Queen Ida,” it’s a model of narrative economy. All that information is gotten out of the way, and you establish Gilbert’s blustery wit. It’s acting and text. And the film is similarly precise and economically throughout. But nowadays, writers with nothing else to say complain when a film is almost three hours. But Topsy-Turvy, despite its length, is such a taut film.
LEIGH: I think that’s right. In fact, of course, it won’t surprise you I’ve had to put up with a lot of nonsense about length in this last year. The fact is, it is one minute short of two hours forty and I don’t think there’s a spare moment in it, really. I think it’s absolutely all there. Nobody is more critical of long, boring films that don’t say anything than I am. But I don’t think it’s that. It needs all that time. I mean, obviously, you do a scene where they’re rehearsing, y’know, yes, he makes them go over and over it, and yes, they go through a whole scene, and yes, y’know, the point is made if it’s just about making the point, kind of sooner. But actually, to make the audience enjoy and indeed be confronted by the gruel of doing this is important, really, y’know. It’s the repetitious nature of it all.
PRIDE: We’ve talked before, yet this is one of those rare films I find difficult to talk about. It speaks for itself, fluently, confidently, quietly. Questions and interviews seem superfluous. Are you getting interesting questions?
LEIGH: That’s an occupational hazard, this whole process! I dunno. It’s quite interesting. Obviously, it has its detractors, but on the whole, its detractors tend to be… All the negatives are about something else, why is he– why are you doing this, what is the point? I haven’t really gotten the hang of it yet, because it hasn’t been screened publicly in moe than a few places. There’s not been very much press yet, but on the whole, the response is positive. The things that are interesting, I dunno, every time I get asked about the improvisational stuff, I dutifully reply, but I don’t do much more. Aside from the fact, that yes, I usually do that, and yet we’ve still done it with this even though it’s in [period]. But if I were to put myself in the critical world, to me I would have thought that what is interesting is the whole, what the film is interesting about on the level of reality and theatricality and life and art and y’know, um, deception and self-deception. Which works on all kinds of levels in the film. That’s what’s interesting.
PRIDE: I’m fascinated by the scene where you propose how Gilbert discovered the Japanese influences for “The Mikado.” It’s the most overtly cinematic, bowing toward some of the Asian masters you’ve esteemed, yet it’s the most modern of the scenes: not the straightforward camera style so much as the fact that the Asians seem utterly of today and tomorrow and the bowler-hatted Victorians seem otherworldly antiquated, the art exhibit.
LEIGH: I know! Um. It’s very interesting, that. There is something so resonant about the way Japanese design is [both] classical and contemporary. Even the Kabuki play, which is pretty accurate, although a distillation, it seems very, as you say, contemporary. I think it’s just that, really, isn’t it? Those images, the Japanese graphic images remain contemporary. The people in the black hats do not.
PRIDE: You use very simple cinematic strokes. Many people dwell on performance when writing about your work. But one of my favorite shots this year is in the shot where Broadbent watches the sword fight, whooshing between his face and the camera, blades across his face as he’s filled up with inspiration.
LEIGH: I mean, the fact is I get pretty depressed when people go on and on about it as if it were just a film about acting. I mean, these films are very cinematic. I have worked for a very long time with Dick Pope, who is a great cinematographer, and we push ourselves we push each other to the limits. We do very sophisticated cinematic things. We don’t just point the camera at the actors in a kind of naive way. I think it’s both cinematographically and photographically, it’s a major achievement, this Topsy-Turvy, it really is, y’know. And the design is also an achievement, given the budget.

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NAKED

THE NEED TO TOUCH WITHOUT BEING TOUCHED. TO ACT WITH THE IMPERVIOUSNESS OF A VIOLENT, INFLEXIBLE LAW OF PHYSICS. TO SPEAK VOLUMINOUSLY, INCESSANTLY, YET BE HEARD ONLY BY ONESELF. That’s Johnny’s loneliness. Mike Leigh’s brave, brilliant Naked is a corrosive masterpiece, as likely to alienate as impress. Leigh describes his film as a “lamentation” about male aggression. His male characters, simply put, hate women as an integral part of their own self-loathing. This isn’t sexual warfare: it’s apocalypse. His protagonist, Johnny, obsessed with how the hardly evolved “cheeky monkeys” got to this end of the evolutionary scale, is presented as more Man than man: this is the pre-millennial condition the English condition is in.
Naked‘s core is David Thewlis’s commanding, ceaselessly articulate vagabond: 27, from Manchester, a barmaid’s son with a silver tongue, constant headaches, and some dangerous knowledge of psychology. Lean and shaggy, with large, sad eyes, Johnny is a hyper pup with a gift for talk. And what talk – the acrid fumes of a soul spending itself. Johnny has the fearful potential of insight. He murders with his mouth; he seeks compassion in order to tease it out and slay it. How dare you love me? If only for a few hours, his magnetism transfixes everyone in his path: ex-girlfriend Louise, whom he travels to London to see; her mumbling roommate who falls madly for his wit and rough sex; a philosophical night watchman; and a hilarious, if sad young Scots couple, whose near-incomprehensible grunts and yelps seem torn from the lower rung of Johnny’s beloved evolutionary scale.
Leigh’s extensive television work and movies like High Hopes (1988) and Life is Sweet (1990) trade in social embarrassments, epic awkwardness, and sometimes hilarious caricature. (And of course, after Naked, we have Secrets And Lies and Topsy-Turvy, refined and filigreed editions from the same cool eye.) But Naked bursts through the finely observed domesticity of the earlier work, making a leap into darkness. Leigh makes his movies with improvisation taken to seemingly mad extremes. Starting with little more than a notion, the director and his actors discuss possible threads of story and character for weeks, then partially base their roles on an acquaintance. In Naked, another familiar Leigh device rears its woolly head. If a central character has a bad habit, Leigh often sets up another character who’s much worse. Johnny’s doppelgänger in male aggression is a vile, arrogant landlord. With his Porsche and hundred-pound-notes and Dirk Bogarde looks with dead black devil’s eyes, he’d fit comfortably alongside Ted Bundy.

But placed next to Johnny, that character is pure laziness. Johnny is a magnificent black cloud, an angry young Antichrist who puts the pissy antiheroes of late 50s and early 60s English theatre to shame. Johnny plunders the depths of hellishness for good material, a Stygian stand-up who’s his own worst audience. Like Johnny, everyone in Leigh’s London is adrift. The nuclear family has detonated, leaving a dank wasteland whose citizens live with the most tenuous connections to ideas of comfort and home. The dead capital of the ancient empire is all mildew, damp, and verdigris, with a perpetual overcast to chill the bones. In Leigh’s construct, Johnny is at the highest stage of evolution and the highest circle of hell. With dozens of references to “the missing link,” The Odyssey, and prophetic writings in the Bible and from Nostradamus, Leigh and Johnny are never not conscious of the multiple meanings of his traipse through London along what Johnny laughingly calls “the via Doloroso.” Still, this prophet without portfolio, drawing from his cracked gospels, is not just another suffering Christ waiting to be nailed to the cross of that popular symbolism. He’s more like Dostoevsky on the dole: a fevered creature with too much in his brain, powerless to change the world or shed his skin.
At first glance, the many metaphors and allusions chafe some, but Thewlis and Leigh are more than up to the task, carrying off their conceits with impressive bravura. For instance, Johnny’s ideas about the emptiness of the modern soul are made literal when a lonely night-watchman lets him into the “postmodern gas chamber’ that he’s paid to watch, with floor after unoccupied floor of empty space. The ten-minute sequence of almost-unbroken talk is exhilarating and exhausting. Like the watchman, we’re unwitting pupils to Johnny’s too-clever-by-half Socratic dialogues. Leigh’s television-bred style at last seems eminently cinematic, his seeming visual restraint demonstrating itself again and again as sly, patient pattern-making. Leigh is aided immeasurably by Dick Pope’s lighting schemes, working from patterns of darkness into pools of light to darkness again. There are three pivotal points where the camera eddies around a becalmed Johnny who seems ready to disintegrate. At these rare moments when both his mouth and feet are still, Leigh’s camera swirls around him with a vertigo so profound, you can sense the neuralgia bursting from Thewlis’s brow. And at moments like these, Andrew Dickson’s forceful score for harp, viola, and double bass, is as lyrical and wounded as Johnny’s language.

To the bewildered young Scot bellowing for his girl, Thewlis’ Johnny has an instant that startles even on the third viewing. Watch Thewlis’s face: after taunting the other man for a few moments, there’s a quicksilver change from antagonism to laser-like insight, as he suddenly, flatly, asks: “What’s it like being you?” It’s the question Johnny keeps asking himself, staring into an abyss that responds with deathly silence, but a silence more comforting than mere concern.
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