Mike Leigh’s ‘Hard Truths’ Required Marianne Jean-Baptiste To Create A Character With No Pre-Set Script, Story Or Dialogue – Contenders Los Angeles

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Reuniting with filmmaker Mike Leigh for Hard Truths three decades after her breakthrough in their collaboration Secrets and Lies, Marianne Jean-Baptiste embarked on an unconventional route with the director to create not just her character, but the film’s story and fully-formed world. “The initial conversation is usually ‘Should we work together again?

I don’t know what it’s going to be about. I don’t know what you’ll be playing in it, but we’ll have a great time,’” Jean-Baptiste explained during a panel for their new movie at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles event. “He always asks that you come in with a list of people that you know, real people, and you go through that list and it gets smaller and smaller and smaller until you land on a few people,” she elaborated. “And then you start creating a whole new character inspired by little bits and pieces and characteristics of that person from their first memory to the age they’re going to be playing in the film.

And all of the characters in the film are created in that way, by really just doing very, very in depth work on creating them.” What the exploratory process underlines, she added, is literally every person in the world has fascinating facets. “There’s something interesting about everyone,” she explained. “You don’t even have to know them that well.

It could be somebody in your local bakery: you go in to get your bagel or whatever every morning, and there’s this woman and there’s just something about her, the way that she does everything so meticulously and you all go, ‘Okay, we’ll talk about that one.’ And then you go on to the next one.” RELATED: Contenders Film: Los Angeles — Deadline’s Complete Coverage After characters and a storyline coalesce, the