AWARDS/
MIKE LEIGH
FOUNDER'S DIRECTING AWARD
The Founder’s Directing Award is given each year to one of the masters of world cinema.
An Evening with
Mike Leigh
Wednesday, April 30
7:30 pm
Castro Theatre
429 Castro Street (near Market)
Join us for a special evening honoring the brilliance of England’s fiercely independent filmmaker, Mike Leigh. Retrospective film clips from Leigh’s illustrious and prolific career—highlights of which include High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked and Secrets & Lies—will be followed by an onstage interview conducted by Screen International film critic David D’Arcy and a screening of Leigh’s panoramic, multiple-award–winning Gilbert and Sullivan biopic, Topsy-Turvy.
Mike Leigh: The Magic of Realism
By Jason Sanders
Growing up in Salford, England, a gray industrial area near Manchester, gave the young Mike Leigh plenty of opportunities to see that supposedly dreary daily life could hold both tragedy and humor. “I was always thinking, ‘You could make a movie out of this,’” he recalls, thinking of a local man who once displayed the newspaper headline “Unknown Hoodlum Raids Bank” and bragged, “That’s me!” Or the scene at his grandfather’s funeral, where several ancient old men tried (and nearly failed) to navigate a coffin down a flight of stairs.
Having gone on to receive Oscar nominations, awards at Cannes and Venice, retrospectives around the world and even the Order of the British Empire, our Salford schoolboy has succeeded, remarkably and with fierce independence, in making movies out of things just like “this,” so-called ordinary life. From his beginnings in experimental theater in the 1960s to his first film, Bleak Moments (1971), through teleplay masterpieces like Abigail’s Party (1977) and onto such international hits as Secrets & Lies (1996), Topsy-Turvy (1999) and Vera Drake (2004), Leigh has created some of the most truthful, funny and piercing human dramas of our time.
Leigh turns his camera onto a very British yet also universal world of rigid social orders—the neat divisions of class, race and gender that make for such a mess of contradictions, spilling out into tea time, dole lines and council flats. Invariably, his gaze is drawn to the minute details of personality and human communication that together define a spectrum of daily capitulation and rebellion. Sometimes the only way to stay sane is to go a little mad, and Leigh’s characters often do just that. It’s these little bursts of delirious individuality, of gleeful impropriety and reckless revolt that Leigh celebrates, and that help to separate his films from a brand of gloomy kitchen-sink realism with which he is sometimes still mistakenly associated. “We are in the business of not only making people believe and care and all those things,” he points out, “but laugh.” That said, Leigh is equally adamant: “I’m absolutely committed as a filmmaker to entertain and amuse, but I am also concerned to confront.”
Alive with humanist spirit, political conviction and devotion to personality, there are no stereotypes in Leigh’s films, just highly original characters fleshing out taxi-drivers, undertakers, skinheads, supermarket clerks, urban Marxists, suburban Napoleons, militant vegans, drifters, artists, career girls, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. “Real people are by definition interesting,” says Leigh. “My job is to put characters on the screen like real people; idiosyncratic, unique and individual and properly placed in their social context.”
It’s a job he has pursued with the utmost fidelity for the better part of four decades. But Leigh has also had help, as his legendary working process makes clear. Starting with a theme but without a script, the director and his cast collectively brainstorm and improvise the characters’ pasts, motivations and desires, often for months, working on dialogue and relationships for each actor. Finally, after their characters’ lives are so “lived in” that they may as well exist on their own, Leigh channels these characters into a tentative script and turns on the camera. The results are stories brimming with vitality and characters that seem at once down to earth and too authentic to be contained within the boundaries of a two-dimensional screen.
“It’s not an acting job,” recalled the late and brilliant Katrin Cartlidge of working with Leigh in Naked and Career Girls. “It’s a life experience, a profoundly fascinating and philosophical journey that’s like climbing Mt. Everest.” Lesley Manville, who has worked with Leigh on six films, concurs. “I’m afraid once you work with Mike you become a constant observer of all things peculiar in life.”
He has a great eye for talent too. In addition to his informal repertory company of Manville, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Alison Steadman and Brenda Blethyn, he’s also responsible for giving Ben Kingsley, Tim Roth, Gary Oldman and David Thewlis their first major roles.
“My films aspire to the condition of documentary,” he told Peter Brunette in 1991. “If you’re a newsreel cameraman and you go and shoot a real event, you know that a world exists whether you film it or not. What I want to do is create a world with that kind of solidity to it, something so three-dimensional and solid you can cut it with a knife.”
The ingredients were all there from the beginning for a wide-eyed youth from Salford. “Life is simultaneously comic and tragic,” declares Leigh. “That is how life is.” Or as Brenda Blethyn’s character says in Secrets & Lies, as if in her unadorned way she were summing up the filmmaker’s entire oeuvre, “You’ve got to laugh, ain’t you, sweetheart? Else you’d cry.”
Jason Sanders is a writer and researcher for the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. A graduate of New York University, he also writes for Filmmaker Magazine, Cinema Scope, International Documentary and film festivals around the United States, including San Francisco, New York, Miami and Seattle.
FESTIVAL SCREENING
Topsy-Turvy
Mike Leigh selected Filmography:
2008 Happy-Go-Lucky
2004 Vera Drake
2002 All or Nothing
1999 Topsy-Turvy
1997 Career Girls
1996 Secrets & Lies
1993 Naked
1990 Life Is Sweet
1988 High Hopes
1985 Four Days in July (TV)
1984 Meantime (TV)
1982 Home Sweet Home (TV)
1979 Who's Who (TV)
Abigail's Party (TV)
1977 The Kiss of Death (TV)
1976 Nuts in May (TV)
1973 Hard Labour (TV)
1980 Grown-Ups (TV)
1971 Bleak Moments
Formerly Known as the Film Society Director Award previous recipients
2007 Spike Lee
2006 Werner Herzog
2005 Taylor Hackford
2004 Milos Forman
2003 Robert Altman
Formerly Known as the Akira Kurosawa Award
2002 Warren Beatty
2001 Clint Eastwood
2000 Abbas Kiarostami
1999 Arturo Ripstein
1998 Im Kwon-Taek
1997 Francesco Rosi
1996 Arthur Penn
1995 Stanley Donen
1994 Manoel De Oliveira
1993 Ousmane Sembène
1992 Satyajit Ray
1991 Marcel Carnè
1990 Jirí Menzel
1989 Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1988 Robert Bresson
1987 Michael Powell
1986 Akira Kurosawa
