I discover what my film is by embarking on the journey of making it. Mike Leigh More Quotes by Mike Leigh More Quotes From Mike Leigh When I was young I used to sit in the cinema thinking wouldn't it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real people instead of being like actors. Mike Leigh real character thinking I make films because I am endlessly fascinated by people. I'm fascinated immediately to know about the lives that are going on around me. That is what drives me. And that is because everybody matters, everybody is there to be cared about, everybody is interesting and everybody is the potential central character in a story. Judging people is not acceptable. Mike Leigh judging-people character interesting The main problem is that the Hollywood system has already made the film before the director shoots a single frame. Mike Leigh hollywood problem directors It's an unhealthy habit to say that life is what you make of it, and if you want to be happy, then you can be happy. That's just rubbish, basically. Life is about luck and it's about circumstances and socioeconomic conditions and all the rest of it, but you know, you can also make choices. It's about spirit and generosity and all the other things, too. Mike Leigh generosity luck choices It's important to be true to the events, but the most important thing is to get to the essence of the experience. Not to be bogged down in an academic way by a notion of the truth. First of all, the truth is an illusive and spurious concept. Mike Leigh events important essence I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience. Mike Leigh life-experience real trying I can't negotiate and collaborate with a character to create a distilled dramatic investigation of the raw material. I need to work with an actor. That stuff about actors who stay in character all the time is nonsense. Mike Leigh raw-materials character needs I hope I make films where you walk away . . . with work to do, arguments to have, things to worry about, things to care about. In that sense, I would regard what I do as political. Mike Leigh political care worry My work is about life as you and I experience it. You're either lucky or you're not lucky; either your relationship works or it doesn't. Mike Leigh wonderful-experience our-relationship lucky Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins. Mike Leigh hollywood eye choices I wonder if I would have been capable of producing anything if I worked in a more conventional way with a prewritten script, because I'm of the procrastinator class. Mike Leigh scripts class way I mean, artistic processes are all about making choices all the time, and the very act of making a choice is the distilling down and the getting to the core of what it is that you care about and what you want to say, really. Mike Leigh care choices mean For me the journey of making a film is a journey of discovery as to what that film is. I mean what I do is what other artists do, painters, novelists, people that make music, poets, sculptors, you name it. It's about starting out and working with the material and discovering through making, working with the material the artifact. Mike Leigh artist journey mean If a film or any piece of work doesn't entertain, it fails - and that is using the word entertain literally, meaning it holds you there and you become absorbed by it so that you don't walk away and get bored and so on. Mike Leigh pieces bored film I think the camera has got to be motivated. You can't have things arrived at gratuitously. Everything has to have an organic function, but the more comfortable I've become and the more imaginative and sophisticated and the more exploratory I've become at the medium, the more I've subtly deviated away from that in various ways. Mike Leigh motivated sophisticated thinking The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across. Mike Leigh location spirit character There have always been and there always will be the peripheral sideline activities which are a form of entertainment, which is to say you pay a couple of cents and you see something freakish. That is what reality TV is. Mike Leigh couple pay reality The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist. Mike Leigh actors artist way Because of the way that I work with the actors and because a scene is not in this rigid and literal interpretation of something written, I can constantly change stuff, which means I can get a scene absolutely perfect, and then when we go to shoot it, the requirements of the shot mean it would be useful to extend the dialogue or take a line out or swap things around. So the camera doesn't serve the action. The action serves the camera. That's important. So it becomes more and more organic and integrated. Mike Leigh important perfect mean But films should be voyeuristic. What else is a film if you’re not snooping into somebody else’s lives? Mike Leigh snooping film should
