Mike Leigh

So, Mr. Leigh, here in Cannes, you get not only the main award, but also a few other prizes. Does it make anything easier?

It's very good for the film, and it's very good generally for people... The film opened in the UK, for example, the week after Cannes, and people really went to see it, because suddenly it had been on the news, you know, and people knew about it and had a different attitude towards it. And I suspect that may help audiences in different countries when the film opens in them.

I think it's generally a good thing for for all independent filmmakers when independent films like mine win prizes, really. But as to opening specific doors, I mean, it's perhaps making it a little bit easier for some people to consider the possibility that they may back another film. But it's not, it hasn't changed things overnight exactly.

Pretty sure you are not a representative of the fancy mainstream, so, but commit yourself to a kind of aesthetical realism. Is this your personal program?

Well, I just make films about what I think is interesting and important, which is to say ordinary people's lives, you know. So I'm not really, I don't have a program as such. I just feel drawn to telling stories about the lives of people out there in the street, really.

Is it also some kind of social criticism?

Yes, I mean, implicit in what I do is constantly to look at people in their... Because I am looking at the real world in hopefully in a real and truthful way, inevitably that involves seeing people in their socio-economic context. And therefore, since you can't talk about that in any way seriously, without raising questions about how we live, it's implicitly political. Of course it is.

So that's also the main attitude. I mean, the next question would have been what's so fascinating for you about the lower class sphere?

Well, I find that, or I always find that a strange and slightly funny question, because it presupposes that it's rather extraordinary thing to make films, to tell stories, about the majority of the world's population, you know. I mean, the fact of the matter is that the real world is out there. And, you know, we are sitting here having this television interview in a hotel room in Hamburg.

We ate lunch, we went to the toilet since we got up this morning. We are lit by electricity. We're sitting in chairs, on carpet, we're wearing clothes. People, all kinds of people have done their job to make these things happen. And some of the people, a lot of the people doing their job are ordinary working-class people whose lives are, you know, if you look at it in one way, very ordinary, but if you look at it in another way, very rich and full of possibilities, and interesting. So I simply am drawn to getting out there and telling those stories, really, about people about whom it's as natural to tell stories as anybody else, really.

People also like you for the so-called British humour. Do you think, or does it match your idea about yourself on that point? Maybe it's more some kind of photo-realism?

Well, it is realism, and my films are both tragic and comic. I mean, they are certainly supposed to be funny, and on the evidence people do seem to find them so, and they laugh at the jokes. It is British in the sense that, yes, we make... I make the films in England, and, you know, the milieu, the territory, the landscape is English. But they are not films about Britain as such. They're not films about England, and they're not and they're certainly not in any way films about... I think the subject matter of my films is pretty universal, really. I mean, you know, my films are about being born, dying, having children, having parents, and all of those things, really.

How comes you are so familiar with the lower-class atmosphere?

Well, I mean, I grew up in Manchester, and and also I've just been around for a long time, you know. [laughs]

And your aesthetic is consciously meant as an explicit no to all the decorative Hollywood design, to the All-American Dream? You want to be different explicitly?

Well, yes, I mean, people of my age—I was born in 1943—who grew up looking at Hollywood, and mostly Hollywood movies, so we were reared on Hollywood. If you... if we also... Those of us that have a natural tendency to want to get out there and make films, as I say, about the real world, about real life, there's an inevitable urge to react against Hollywood.

Even, much as... So that it's ambivalent. I love Hollywood, so long as I only have to watch the movies and I don't have to go there, by the way. But at the same time, I want to make films about... where you really feel that the characters are real, and and believable. So, implicitly, there's a kind of tension in there, and a reaction against Hollywood, certainly.

The audience and even the critics in Cannes were not just amused, but very touched by your film. So what do you think? Is film, in the end, more than entertainment?

Oh, absolutely. Film should be a total experience. Of course it should. And, I mean, in Cannes, as you say, people would... I mean, grown men wept, and journalists, they were, too, at my film in Cannes. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, people talk about escapism, you know, and some people say, well, escapism means getting away from the things that matter, getting away, entering into a fantasy world, and forgetting the boring, humdrum things of the everyday life.

I don't think that's good enough. I think, in a way, escape, to escape when you watch a film is important. You watch my film, which runs for 140 minutes, I want you to be completely drawn into the film, and I think that's what happens. You know, you completely forget about your problems in your world, but that doesn't mean that the things in there are things that you shouldn't relate to. If they're real, and the things that you care... I mean, I think the things that you care about most are the most enriching.

Things that you don't really care about at all, trivial things, you can't be so engaged by them, you can't be enriched by them. So I think film should be a total experience. And if people laugh and cry at my story about a young black woman looking for her natural mother, then that's good. Where do you find your stories? – For me, the problem is never what to make a film about, it's what not to make the film about, because there are so many stories kicking around.

I mean, I actually make the stories up. I mean, I'm a fiction filmmaker, we invent these stories, you know. But the source material is out there, you know, it's everywhere. Everywhere you go there's stories. Everyone's got a story.

So, back to 'Secrets & Lies'. After they met first time, the life of mother and daughter totally changed. What happened to them? What meant it to come to know with each other, maybe at that point in their lives?

Well, I mean, I, of course, wouldn't want to describe the film, because I hope that people will go and see it, and they'll find out what happens. But certainly, it is a film about the way in which this unlikely coming together of these two by now very different people, even though one is the mother and one is the daughter, definitely has a great change on on their lives. And on one level, the film is about how different children are from their parents, and can be from their parents, which, of course, we all can relate to, I think.

The white mother first denies the possibility of having, especially, a black daughter. Is it a kind of metaphor for ongoing racism in the world?

It is a metaphor for for racism. The film... I've tried in the film to look at racism in a subtle and implicit kind of way, because although, I mean, you know, there's plenty of racism around, and not least in that very racist country, England. Nevertheless, it would be quite easy to make a film about young black guys having trouble with the police or something, but I have nothing interesting or original to say about that. I've tried to make a film where the racism is that much more— it's not so much racism, but racial attitudes that are quietly there, and people are kind of learning how to deal with them, and learning how to adapt and accommodate, and in the end it is a film, I suppose, which does finally say that we are all people, and

that we should kind of connect, really.

So, the last question, maybe last question: Do you suppose the secrets and lies you show or even make visible are constitutive part of our culture?

Yes, I think ours is a is a culture which promotes having to have secrets, having to to hide things, having to tell lies. The film is actually about what we are, and, you know, and facing up to what we are, and trying to discover what we are, and our attitudes to what we are, and how we appear to other people, and the way we anticipate other people will see us, and our image, and all of those things. I mean, part of the film is about... One of the central characters is a photographer, a high street photographer.

So a lot of the film is about just images, of people's images of each other and things. And I think increasingly in this society, because we live in a world in the Western society, where corporations, international corporations decide on our lifestyle, decide on our images of each other, and images of our- selves, because we live in a McDonald's culture, and a computer-generated culture, and an internationally American exported culture generally, you know.

We are to some degree losing our identity in a life that is a great web and network of lies and kind of bullshit, really. And it's quite difficult in such a culture for people to be open and truthful and honest, and not have secrets.

What do you think about political correctness in that relation?

I'm very suspicious of political correctness. For anybody that saw my last film, 'Naked', it you know, political correctness... I was accused by some people of not being politically correct, which I was very pleased about, actually. Of course, all the things that political correctness is about, of course, I believe in, like everybody else. I mean, it's very important that we know how to respect each other and so on. But, you know, we should question everything and not receive things. They shouldn't become just cant and lazy propaganda, really.

And not institutionalized?

Yes.

So, what is your next project?

Well, I've just finished my next project, actually, which is a film for which I don't yet have a title, but which is about students in the mid-eighties whom you also see now in the mid-nineties, when they're about thirty. And it intercuts between those two worlds, and you just see the way that they've developed and grown up.

The lost generation.

Thank you. Thank you.