I wouldn’t say Mike Leigh has the look of a vindicated man. That is not how he rolls. For the past 60 years or so he has cut a lugubrious figure as he steadily established himself as the most celebrated British film-maker of his and several other generations.
Brilliant TV work in the 1970s, such as Abigail’s Party and The Kiss of Death. Big-screen return in the 1980s with High Hopes. A triumphant 1990s with Life Is Sweet, Naked and the Oscar-nominated, Palme d’Or-winning Secrets & Lies. And onwards. Through it all the woolly beard, the sad stare and the ironic sigh have remained in place.
Yet he has, in 2025, every right to declare vindication. In 2022, despite recent critical smashes such as Mr Turner, he told the BBC that he was “struggling like mad to get anybody to back a film”. To fans’ delight, he eventually got the searing, economic Hard Truths into production. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, star of Secrets & Lies, is transfixing as a middle-aged black woman paralysed by anger and depression. It is classic Leigh.
The film was then turned down by the Cannes, Venice and Telluride film festivals. Can that really be true? As we have established, he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1996. He took the Golden Lion at Venice in 2004, for Vera Drake. So it’s not as if those venerable events are anti-Leigh.
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“Cannes first. Then Venice. Then Telluride,” he says, definitively.
Did they offer any explanation?
“No, no. And your guess is as good as mine.”
The film then premiered to unqualified raves at Toronto. Jean-Baptiste’s performance has been, by some margin, the most celebrated by critics’ bodies this season. She won best actress from the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Board of Review and British Independent Film awards. IndieWire’s poll of world critics also had her at number one. The film itself is similarly adored.
So, yes. To circle back, does he feel vindicated?
“Well, because we spent six months with it being turned down by those places we started to think maybe we’d made a bad film. So it is a kind of vindication. But we’ve moved on from the fact that they didn’t take it. And there you go.”
There is a sense here that, more than half a century after Leigh first emerged, the powers that be still don’t entirely understand what he is up to. Hard Truths, featuring a largely black cast, is old-school Leigh in every aspect. After Mr Turner and Peterloo, two sprawling historical pictures, he returns to the livingrooms and gardens of everyday London. Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy lives with a permanent aggression that looks to have alienated her long-suffering husband and is now trying the patience of her largely supportive sister. The family’s staying power is itself moving. The texture of modern life is perfectly captured.
Let us try this again. What could the selection committees of both festivals have objected to?
“There are only two theories. And both are theories,” he says. “One is it’s racist in some way. The other is that, particularly in Venice, they wanted glitz and glamour. Whatever else you can say about Hard Truths, it’s not exactly dripping in glitz and glamour. But we’ve got over it. Because we have had such a good, positive response from where we have taken it.”
It is interesting to see Leigh embrace a black cast. He has always employed a diverse array of actors. With her Oscar nomination for Secrets & Lies, Jean-Baptiste became the first black British woman to be so honoured. (She has every chance of a second nod this year.) The cast grasp their roles with stirring passion.
Some people, however, now get testy when white creators tackle stories about people of colour. The word “appropriation” gets thrown around. I am looking forward to putting this point Leigh’s way. I suspect we may get to enjoy some fools not suffered gladly.
“It’s both irrelevant and, to be honest, slightly offensive,” he says, obligingly. “Apart from anything else, I have looked, across my films and my stage plays, at all kinds of different sections of classes and society.”
He laughs as he notes that he has raised his children in diverse, bustling north London.
“It’s not an issue at all. I don’t really have much to say about it – except that it’s my prerogative to point my camera in all kinds of different directions in society. Including, in my 19th-century films, at those ‘alien’ people who are actually not alien at all. I did a play in Australia about Greek Australians. I did a film in Northern Ireland about Catholics and Protestants. I did a play in the National Theatre about Jews.”
That all makes sense.
“To me it’s about people. And there you go.”
Let us discuss the apparent difficulty he had getting the film into production. The facts are here indisputable. There was a full six years between Peterloo and Hard Truths. He has not endured so large a gap between theatrical features since 1983, when Meantime arrived 12 years after Bleak Moments. But, back then, the British film industry had gone into temporary hibernation. During the 1970s he and contemporaries such as Stephen Frears and Ken Loach retreated to television while the UK economy had its nervous breakdown.
So why the issue now? Is the whole industry in crisis?
“As you know, the proposition to backers is: ‘There’s no script. I can’t tell you anything about it. I won’t discuss casting. We don’t know anything about that. Don’t interfere with it.’ And I’ve got away with that over the years by some fluke.”
That is, of course, the one thing anyone who knows anything about Mike Leigh knows about Mike Leigh. He starts with no script. Often with not even a scenario. The actors improvise the screenplay over weeks and weeks. Imelda Staunton, star of Vera Drake, told me that when actors playing police officers arrived in the rehearsal space, the cast members playing her family were stunned to discover that her character was secretly providing abortion services. Their surprise was genuine and was incorporated into the shooting script.
One point of this anecdote is to confirm that his techniques have always been the same. Why are funders now more reluctant?
“It has got that bit harder because people now want to tick boxes and they want to check out algorithms,” he says. “I hear the mantra: ‘We really like what you do. We respect what you do. But it’s not for us.’ Right? ‘Not for us,’ means, ‘We can’t interfere with the script. We can’t interfere with the casting. We can’t interfere with the script. And we can’t f**k up the end.’ All of that. So that’s part of it. It’s a bit of a struggle.”
I wonder if funders and potential producers still try to alter his strategy. You’d think everybody in the business now knows how he works. Surely they don’t still try to get a part for Lady Gaga or for Dwyane Johnson. Surely they don’t dare to suggest he won’t get final say on the screenplay.
“There was a time when my late producer, Simon Channing Williams, would come back from meetings with potential backers and say, ‘Look, they absolutely don’t care that there’s no script. They don’t care that they don’t know what it’s going to be about. But they will insist on a name.’ Now it never gets quite to that. They haven’t got the audacity to actually say that. But you know that that’s the issue.”
From a Jewish family, Mike Leigh was born in Hertfordshire, near London, and – the vowels are still there – raised in Lancashire, in northwest England. During the 1950s he became besotted with an array of culture, high and low: The Goon Show, Picasso, Gilbert and Sullivan.
His father, a doctor, did not much fancy the idea of a son in the creative industries (as we then didn’t say), but when the lad won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art there was no stopping the advance of bohemia. Leigh must have been a decent actor to get into Rada. What drew him elsewhere?
“Oh, I knew I wanted to direct,” he says. “I knew I didn’t want to be an actor. And I’d already been making things up. There was what we called a ‘scruff minority’ at Rada, including David Halliwell, whose play Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs I directed in the original production.”
It sounds like a thrilling time. Leigh immersed himself in Pinter and Beckett. He watched the early films of John Cassavetes. At the East 15 Acting School, in Essex, he met Alison Steadman, who later created the fearsome Beverley for Abigail’s Party, his legendary stage play that, in 1977, became an even more legendary TV production. The two were married from 1973 until 2001.
I have heard that he and other contemporaries talk wistfully about how easy it was to get a play filmed at the BBC in those days. They would mention an idea to an executive in a corridor and it just got done.
“That’s spot on. That’s exactly what happened. They would say, ‘We don’t know what it’s about. Here’s the budget. Go off and do it.’ The BBC in particular was a liberal and fertile place.”
So emerged Ken Loach productions such as Cathy Come Home. So emerged Leigh’s Abigail’s Party and the equally hilarious Nuts in May. British cinema opened up again in the early 1980s with the arrival of Palace Pictures, David Puttnam and Channel Four Films. Leigh never looked back. But I wonder if he ever frets that the creative energies of the 1960s were squandered. It does feel a little as if cold-eyed business is now more unyielding than ever.
“I am very loath to be pessimistic about that,” he says. “After the war things happened. We were teenagers in the 1950s: the great decade of respectability and being good. Neat and tidy and all the rest of it. In the 1960s we let our hair down. All kinds of things were new, which is what you’re talking about.
“But eventually you reach a point when these things aren’t new any more. And they’re definitely not as radical as they were. To put it more crudely and simply than it deserves, that is what’s happened. But it’s wrong to lament that. It’s simply the natural order of things.”
At any rate, Leigh, at 82, has proved to be an extraordinary survivor. Hard Truths is as moving and acute a work as he has ever produced. Maybe the acclaim will make the next film a little easier to get into production. He makes his hangdog face. It seems they are already trying to find the money.
I suppose one advantage of his process is that he doesn’t have to come up with any precise pitch. The offer is simply: do you fancy a Mike Leigh film?
“That’s exactly right,” he says, almost laughing. “And it’s got tougher to persuade people to go along with that.”
Hard Truths is in cinemas from Friday, January 31st
