Mike Leigh is moving slowly around the Toronto International Film Festival with a cane. His latest film, “Hard Truths” (December 6, Bleecker Street) has earned raves and plays the New York Film Festival October 5. The 81-year-old British filmmaker, Oscar-nominated five times for writing and twice for directing (“Secrets & Lies,” “Vera Drake”) has struggled to raise money for his projects since his $18-million period battle epic “Peterloo” (Amazon) flopped at the box office in 2018 ($2 million worldwide).
“Hard Truths” was delayed by the pandemic, but Bleecker Street and a group of European backers cobbled together a modest budget, Leigh’s lowest in some time, for the small-scale film focused on the astonishing character of Pansy (“Secrets & Lies” Oscar nominee Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a woman of Jamaican heritage who is so miserable that her massive pain and anger leak out on anyone unlucky enough to be near her, from her hapless husband (David Webber) and son (Tuwaine Barrett) to people in a store line or on the street. Only her empathetic sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) is spared her wrath. As the movie proceeds, new layers explain how Pansy got this way. The towering, moving, unpredictable, and often hilarious performance by Jean-Baptiste could earn her a second Oscar nod. You’ve never seen anything like it.
Like every other filmmaker, when Leigh can focus on a recognizable figure like painter J.M.W. Turner (“Mr. Turner”) or theatrical luminaries Gilbert & Sullivan (“Topsy-Turvy”), the financing comes easier, partly because his investors know what his movie is about. Otherwise they remain in the dark and have to operate on faith. That’s because Leigh makes certain non-negotiable demands. “It’s increasingly difficult for me to get the dosh,” he told me, “because of that old thing of no script. I can’t tell you what it’s about, and I’m not discussing casting, and please don’t interfere with it while we’re doing it. Over the years it worked very well, but it’s got harder and harder. ‘Secrets & Lies’ or ‘Vera Drake’ are a much bigger budget; they’re a much broader canvas. This is a narrow canvas.”
Leigh went back to Jean-Baptiste, persuading her to leave her family in L.A. and move to London for a time. “She’s brilliant,” he said. “We were mates, and it’s about time we got together again. She was up for it, and we talked about it for quite a while. And this is the opportunity to focus on a Black family.”
The core cast all have Jamaican as opposed to African or other heritage. “So I knew that we will be tapping into the same cultural roots,” he said. “Though I love to work with new people, especially young ones. It’s great to go back to the character actors that I’ve worked with successfully in the past. She’s no exception.”
Over the years Leigh’s process remains unchanged. He picks Jean-Baptiste, say, and then pursues rigorous pre-rehearsals, in this case 14 weeks. “We did what we always do, which is to start by talking about real people,” said Leigh. “In this case Marianne has known a lot of them, and I gradually whittle it down and say, ‘Well, let’s go for her and her. That’s a starting point.’ Then we creatively build a character.”
Leigh feeds things in, “and then things come back,” he said. “Because Marianne is a highly intelligent, funny, sharp, witty, anarchic spirit, she’s able to be imaginative. That’s the same as what you get with Johnny [David Thewlis] and ‘Naked,’ or it’s the creative contribution of any actor in this particular esoteric process.”
Jean-Baptiste invented the line, ‘you’re so backed up your sperm is coming out of your brain,” for example. “She comes up with this stuff,” said Leigh. “The thing about Pansy is, on one level, she’s got no sense of humor, but on the other hand, she comes out with this wit.”
Only when pre-production gets under way does Leigh provide his key departments with some idea of what they need to create, “scene by scene, sequence by sequence, location by location,” said Leigh. “We’ll have days without crew, and we’ll stop, start, and improvise through rehearsal. Then I script it very precisely, and then shoot it.”
Leigh has never previewed his films ahead of closing the final edit, ever since his experience with French investor CiBy 2000 on “Secrets & Lies.” “We showed it to them in a small theater on the Champs- Élysées,” he said. “They liked the film, but ‘there are two scenes you have to cut because they they don’t fit into the plot.’ We said, ‘No, actually, it’s out of the question.’ And they said, ‘Well, if you don’t cut we won’t go to Cannes.’ ‘Fine, that’s whatever.’”
The standoff lasted for months while Leigh was making “Career Girls.” They did an official preview screening in a 300-seat multiplex cinema in Slough outside London. “There was no discernible conclusion,” said Leigh. “And the thing dragged on and on and on. And finally in October, they got all the distributors from around the world, including Disney and Warner Bros. And they all said, ‘It’s fantastic. Don’t touch it,’ including Warner Bros.” So the movie entered the Cannes competition and finally, took home the Palme d’Or and Best Actress for Brenda Blethyn.
“We compose the story the way we think it should be,” Leigh said. “I don’t need to see whether an audience laughs to know whether it’s funny or not. It was great last night. Almost from the get-go, there were laughs, and a lot of them, and yet, by the time you got to the back end of the pool, there was funereal silence as was entirely appropriate.”
Next up: Leigh is not hanging up his spurs. “I’m only 81,” he said. “It’s a challenge physically. My cinematographer, Dick Pope, who I’ve worked with ever since ‘Life is Sweet,’ had major heart surgery just before we started shooting. Our sound recordist, who we’ve worked with for years, was a little bit younger than us, and went off to hospital twice during the shoot. I can’t get upstairs easily. But hey, we did it. Anything’s possible. Retirement doesn’t seem particularly attractive. I’ve got notions kicking around. I’m not going to tell you. It depends on how much money we get.”