Mike Leigh on His Uncompromising Approach to Filmmaking and Aversion to ‘Message’ Movies
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film CriticThese days, it’s refreshing to speak with someone like Mike Leigh whose vocabulary hasn’t been corrupted by the latest Hollywood trends.
For example, when Leigh uses the word “content,” it’s doesn’t mean the same thing as 98% of his peers, for whom the term has come to describe the swill that fills the various streamers’ pipelines.For Leigh, “content” refers to the substance of a film or play, as I found when asking Leigh, who is the subject of a 14-film, career-spanning retrospective by New York’s Film at Lincoln Center — from “Bleak Moments” to “Peterloo,” with two shorts thrown in for good measure — where he thinks audiences unfamiliar with his work ought to begin. “I certainly don’t think anybody should be preoccupied with seeing my films for the first time in chronological order,” he says. “I think you could drop anchor anywhere and start.”A similar London-based series organized by the BFI last fall brought audiences out in a big way, which Leigh found encouraging.“Young people respond well to ‘Meantime,’” he observes, referring to the 1983 feature, Leigh’s second, about two brothers coping with unemployment in Thatcher-era England.
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