“I’m there to make you care, to move you, to make you laugh, to make you cry…to hopefully improve your lives.” Mike Leigh has directed 15 feature films over 5 decades with a unique style of immersing his actors in the creative process of developing scripts over months of research and improvisation. From ‘Secrets & Lies’ to ‘Hard Truths,’ Mike takes a look at all of his films and discusses in detail how they came to life.
Directors
Mike Leigh, Bill Forsyth, Terrance Davis
Michael Winterbottom: ‘Studying English at Oxford University was a mistake’
The director, 62, tells Michael Segalov about vertigo, risk aversion, shouting to get attention and how Steve Coogan makes things easy
By Michael Segalov
I grew up in a small bungalow on a big housing estate on the edge of Blackburn. My mum was a teacher; my dad was a draftsman in a factory that made television sets. Everything about my childhood was ordinary.
Blackburn’s Unit Four cinema was a scruffy place. In my teens, I went to its fortnightly foreign-language film screenings religiously. I was always desperate to escape, and these films briefly transported me all over the world.
During a childhood swimming lesson, Mum noticed I was lying on the bottom of the pool. A teacher pulled me out of the water. I don’t remember anything, but after that, Mum obsessed about me never venturing deep. I still don’t find swimming in the sea relaxing.
Constant pacing is an awful habit of mine, so my family says. I regularly march around the house while dragging my fingers through my hair and talking to myself.
I left school at 17 and travelled abroad for the first time – I went to pick grapes in the south of France. One night I went to a concert with a German colleague who rode a massive motorbike. Driving us back, I realised he was off his face at 100mph. I clung on for dear life, and haven’t been on a motorbike since.
Steve Coogan makes directing far too easy. We’ve worked together a lot. Naturally, he’s constantly doing things that are both funny and interesting. You can just point a camera at him and leave him to it. I’ve never had more fun than working together on 24 Hour Party People.
Studying English at Oxford University was a mistake. I loved reading, but I wasn’t committed to the rigour of it. Halfway through my studies, I came across a cinema workshop in the city. There and then, I knew what I wanted to do.
I suffer from a particular type of vertigo. I’m fine on planes, or whenever someone else is in charge. But if I’m in control? Even short ladders make me feel vulnerable.
Don’t make a short film, make a long one. That’s the advice I give to young filmmakers. Go out there and shoot something yourself. Not lots of 10 minute things, but a proper one. The only way to learn is to do it.
Generally speaking, I’m risk averse, my mum was over-protective of me as a child. I was the same with my kids in the playground. Caution was bred into me, and it’s far too late to change.
If you get a chance to eat, then you should eat: you never know when the next meal is coming in my business.
People say I have a temper. I certainly do shout a lot. It’s not out of anger, just a way of trying to get attention.
Political extremism pushes people to the edge, and violence sees opposing sides become further polarised. My new film, Shoshana, explores this in Palestine under British colonial rule, but it’s still true in the region today, and around the world. In the past 10 years, those divides have deepened.
The film industry wasn’t accessible when I started out, and it’s still not today. Back then it was a union closed shop. Your career hinged on knowing people. Of course, that remains helpful. Now the best way to start is to go out and start shooting yourself, or to work a lot for free. Either way, that requires big money.
I’m entirely unsurprising as a man. Everything about me is, I think, rather obvious and straightforward.
Shoshana + Michael Winterbottom Q&A plays as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival 2023 which takes place in London cinemas from 9-19 November, with a national tour taking place from 9-30 November and a selection of films available online from 20-27 November
Source: Michael Winterbottom: ‘Studying English at Oxford University was a mistake’
Death is that man taking names
Screenwriter and director Terence Davies, best known for his films Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, died today at the age of 77.
A poet of pain, ecstasy and epiphany, Terence Davies is a colossal loss to British cinema
Thank goodness Davies experienced his late-career appreciation – he was a director of high seriousness and singularity and a man of vulnerability and true good humour
By Peter Bradshaw
Terence Davies was the great British movie artist of working class Catholic experience and gay identity, a passionate believer and practitioner of cinema. And was also a wonderfully stylish and self-assured presence in person, with a gorgeously resonant voice that might have belonged to a stage matinee idol.
I raised a glass of rose with a beaming Davies and Mark Cousins at the 2008 Cannes film festival after the triumphant premiere of Of Time and the City, Davies’s wonderful, personal docu-collage about his home city of Liverpool, a place he resurrected on screen with love and without cliche.
And from that moment, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the years of relative neglect that he had been suffering as a film-maker were over, and that he was a presence again in world cinema.
He was one of the great personal and autobiographical film-makers – with Of Time and the City, of course, but also his fervent evocation of childhood in The Long Day Closes (1992), his unflinchingly passionate and painful masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives (1983) and his early, mysterious trilogy Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983) – superb films which, in literary terms, might be compared with Beckett or BS Johnson.
The key word is transfiguration. For Davies, the act of memory and cinema transfigured the pain and shame of what he endured of abuse and bigotry in his own life. Without irony or affectation, he brought his early religious belief into parallel with these childhood experiences: these were his stations of the cross. Like Proust, he saw the awful link between art and pain as the agents of truth and the fixity of meaning.
His films – especially his earliest and most personal works – were not easy experiences, nor were they meant to be. His Distant Voices, Still Lives is unforgettable, perhaps because the adjectives in the title are so misleading. The voices are immediately present, the lives vividly in motion. The film’s austerity, beauty and artistry are a revelation. It is as gripping as any thriller and Davies finds a towering performance in the great actor Pete Postlethwaite as the terrifying dad who rules over his working class family with fear – but is secretly convulsed with fear himself and is capable of humour and gentleness. Davies’s attitude is complex, and in this film you can see another of his great themes: the urge to forgive and the terrible burden it places on you.
The Long Day Closes, from 1992, was another epiphanic study of childhood, a cine-poem of early experience and here Davies – like Fellini, Scorsese, Truffaut and Spielberg – evokes the moviegoing as a religious observance, but with pleasure where the shame and misery might otherwise go. His shot of sunlight drifting across a carpet is a thing of wonder: these are things that children look at and adults forget to see.
As the 90s wore on, Davies found it more difficult to get movies made, but his adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s The Neon Bible in 1995 transferred his distinctive worldview to an American setting.
So too did his superb treatment of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth in 2000, starring Gillian Anderson, a Wharton adaptation that easily stands comparison with Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence.
In his later career, Davies took on literary adaptations – conceding, perhaps, that these were more commercially acceptable and produced them at the highest pitch of intelligence and feeling. His version of Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea in 2011 was a very Daviesian account of loneliness and romantic love with Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz; he brought the same intensity and severity to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song in 2015. His last film, Benediction, was a fine study of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, returning, to some degree, to his earlier themes of gay sexuality and the way secular passions are displaced into forms of worship.
He had lately been working on a tremendous sounding adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl – and we have to hope that this might yet be posthumously completed.
I should also record the rather extraordinary experience of recording an audio commentary with him and Matthew Guinness (son of Alec) of the Ealing movie Kind Hearts and Coronets. For him, communing with this classic was an almost ecstatic experience, a virtual seance of every creative contributor to the film, he seemed to know every line, every scene, every musical cue; his connoisseurship was compelling. He was a remarkable director.
Source: A poet of pain, ecstasy and epiphany, Terence Davies is a colossal loss to British cinema