Mike Leigh builds his films from months of improvisation before any script exists
Mike Leigh starts a project with a set of unconnected characters, each invented by its actor. Only after long improvisation does he arrange meetings between them and sketch a bare structure of one-line scene notes, rehearsing until the result feels finished. That method has produced Abigail's Party, Secrets & Lies and seven Oscar nominations.
Leigh grew up in Salford, the son of a doctor whose Russian-Jewish family had changed its name from Lieberman in 1939. His father forbade him to sketch visitors to the house and saw his artistic streak as a problem. In 1960 Leigh astonished himself by winning a scholarship to RADA, where he sulked through lessons in what he called laughing, crying and snogging for repertory theatre, then went on to art and film schools. His only notable screen role was a young deaf-mute in a 1963 episode of Maigret.
Seeing John Cassavetes's improvised film Shadows soon after arriving in London convinced him whole plays could be built from scratch with actors. At Birmingham's Midlands Art Centre from 1965 he began merging writing and rehearsal, then assisted at the Royal Shakespeare Company. By 1970 he had set out his approach in writing: start with unrelated characters, bring them together, and draw the drama from the relationships that develop.
Nine television plays followed in the 1970s, including Nuts in May and Abigail's Party, sharp comedies about middle-class manners. The television Abigail's Party was shot hurriedly while its star Alison Steadman was pregnant, and Leigh's frustration with its lighting pushed him toward cinema. Meantime in 1983 starred a young Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. After his father died in 1985, a planned project in Blackburn collapsed after seven weeks of rehearsal and he stayed home looking after his sons.
In 1988 he and producer Simon Channing Williams founded Thin Man Films, named because neither of them was thin. Later work grew starker, from Naked to Vera Drake, and he earned Oscar nominations for both directing and writing Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake. Mr. Turner, Peterloo and Hard Truths extended a career of more than 60 years.
Source: Mike Leigh
