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Turnersays when a journalist meeting him for an interview addresses him as Mr. Leigh.
I have to lean on this stick and ask people to help me stand up, he says.
But I can get around all right.
A publicist helps Leigh settle into a plush chair and brings in a tray with a tea set.
The tea sits untouched through the first part of the interview.
Leigh bats the first two questions down like shuttlecocks.
[Pauses, thinks some more] No, its not.
In all honesty, first of all, I dont think in conscious terms.
There is no guiding principle for me.
But theres nothing conscious on my part about ongoing preoccupations or consistencies or running themes or any of that.
I certainly never think about my other films at all.
If you made me and youre not going to!
But equally, there would be other kinds of relationships where you really couldnt do that.
But its rubbish, really.
A writer of the character expresses something about her energy by naming her Poppy.
Those are really two different kinds of decisions.
Thats not in question.
Theyre both idealists, but hes a frustrated idealist, a disappointed idealist.
Poppy is an idealist who meets a situation and deals with it and acts on it and who isableto.
But each film is its own thing, and each character their own thing.
Its an ongoing investigation.
She said, Mike grows a film.
What do you think of that?First of all, you should go ahead and have some tea.
[Indicates the teakettle]
Yes, sir.Painters paint pictures.
I embark on this journey of discovering what a film is through the course of making it.
So yes to that description.
It does all start with, in principle, nothing: some loose ideas, possibilities.
Sometimes I know more about what we have in mind than other times.
Then we react to it and then it grows.
Thats really how it works.
So that was the starting point for that film.
I sat on the idea for 40 years or so.
But to start toreallyanswer your earlier question: I start with the casting.
Working together again sounded appealing, and we really felt we had to do it.
We were actually going to do the film in 2020, but COVID scuttled that.
But Marianne was the first.
We then talk about those and then pick some, and we distill those into a character.
Potential names always have to be specific for the cultural background of a character.
Parallel to that, as you know, I am consciously and subconsciously tapping into ongoing preoccupations.
I know a Pansy.
I bet everyone does.Absolutely, there you go.
And I know a Pansy.
So you start to resonate with that, you know?
All of them.Thats what happens when youre interacting with material.
I say, Well, actually, I dont thinkanythingabout it.
Thats a three-act structure!
Theres a point in our process where the story assumes that structure.
Sort of a blueprint.
Through this process, we arrive at usually, and in this case a list of three people.
And then, by means of some esoteric process, we meld them together.
And that gives us a jumping-off point, a source character, an embryo character.
And its then you give birth to Chantelle and you start to put her and Pansy together.
If you want clues to what Im talking about, theyre revealed in the cemetery scene.
The part about their childhood, and their dad leaving the family?Yes.
And of course, this is a woman who says very funny things but has no sense of humor.
Marianne and I have an enormous shared sense of humor.
I have a question about the improvisational development process in your historical films.
When your actors are in a period film, do they improvise in rehearsals based on historical research?
People read Victorian newspapers of the period.
I had a chopping trolley with me all the time, loaded with various texts and pictures.
Gilbert, because the approach to the phraseology and the irony was very much laced into that.
At one point we had etiquette workshops.
The processes were the same onMr.
you could do anything as long as you approach it and research it.
I wanted to go back to the comment you made about the three-act structure.
Yes, I can see a three-act structure in all of your films, to some extent.
But they dont adhere to the idea that every moment must further the plot.
We fought a massive battle with them.
We won the battle.
They didnt want us to go to Cannes, but we went to Cannes.
And we won the Palme DOr with those scenes in the movie.
The scene is important because you see Maurice dealing with this guy.
So the scene has a function on that level as much as any other.
And the customer who cant get through a hairdressing appointment without taking a cigarette break.Absolutely.
The scenes are multilevel in their function.
I briefly thought about Maurice while watching the cemetery scene inHard Truths.
After the sisters father ran out, Pansy was forced to take on responsibilities she wasnt ready for.
Thats over to you.
Can you explain why Curtley throws the flowers out?
Thats over to you.
Im not in the business of doing that.
Its over to you, the audience.
I cant recall any movie of yours where youre flat-out telling people what to think.
But I can think of some of your films that are more straightforwardly political than others.Peterloo, for sure.
AndNaked.OnNaked: Thats your prerogative to see it that way.
Theyre in the Criterion Collection now.
One isMeantime, which came from the conditions of unemployment under Thatcher.
The second isFour Days in July, which is about Northern Ireland and therefore implicitly political.
Thats what the sexual character Cyrils dilemma is.
Yes, sir!I wrote an obituary for him.Oh, you did?
Yeah I think I read that, actually.
But wherever he is, hes sending a message saying, You got to find somebody else.
But its a tough proposition.
What did you learn from working with Dick Pope?We learnt from each other.
The way we shotLife Is Sweetwas pretty straightforward.
Its perhaps nocturnal, maybe its monochromatic.
Knowing that we were going to shoot on Eastman film stock, Dick shot tests.
It was a great idea that was perfect for the movie because it gave it a grayness.
When we got to that stage withHappy-Go-Lucky, I said, You know, its somehow primary colors.
He said, Okay, Ill think about that.
And a few days later, by coincidence, there was an annual film-industry market in London.
Fuji had a stand, and they had a new stock called Vivid for primary colors.
And Dick said, This is amazing.
He took hidden cameras into dangerous places.
He shot in the Far East.
He shot in the desert.
And he also famously shot music videos for big stars.
But he was absolutely on the case.
We cut two scenes fromTopsy-Turvybecause it was running very long, and there was a big battle about it.
Those scenes are tacked on as extras on the Criterion version ofTopsy-Turvy.
And there are scenes which you finally get to the editing and go, Actually, you know what?
The movie is better without this scene.
In the cutting, when it came down to it, we realized, This is a red herring.
For example,in the cookout scene fromSecrets and Lies.Thats the famous, big one, it is.
So we spent days rehearsing that scene to make it look natural.
Hardly anybody in the scene overlaps the dialogue, but when it happens, its a deliberate thing.
Maurice is doing the barbecue and his wife, Monica, is serving up.
Once she gets up, she sits down, they pass the salt.
And at the same time, you wonder whats going to happen.
Is something going to spill the beans about why Hortense is there?
All that is going on.
But its absolutely all controlled, rehearsed very thoroughly except that you cant direct a steak.
Steaks have a will of their own and may jump off the plate.
But were talking about something thats very straightforward.
But the blocking is never unmotivated.
The actors are close together and carefully blocked.
I couldnt sit in a room and write that in a zillion years.
Nor could Marianne and I sit in a room and talk it into existence.
But when it happened, it was dynamite!
The motivation was so dense and complex.
We move back toward the house.
Thats the motivation for that first shot.
At the end, Virgil comes out and gets into the van and drives off.
We are referencing that earlier shot.
Thats because we know Pansy and Curtley are inside and that shes upstairs and hes downstairs.
Were doing the same thing with the camera: By moving back toward the house, were saying again!
I wonder whats going to happen when we go inside.
And then we go inside and find out.
So that tree isnt in the second shot!
When we did the second shot, somebody asked me, Should we add the tree back digitally?
I said, No ones ever gonna notice.
