Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh OBEis an English writer and director of film and theatre. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Artbefore honing his directing skills at East 15 Acting School and further at the Camberwell School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design. He began as a theatre director and playwright in the mid-1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s his career moved between theatre work and making films for BBC Television, many of which were characterised by...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth20 February 1943
insecure acting actors
Some deeply untrusting actors - the kind that need to know exactly what's what and are completely insecure - might be quite good within the parameters of a certain sort of acting.
actors able film
The reason my films work is because every actor on set is very secure. They're able to fly.
acting actors useless
The kind of acting that's wholly literary or cerebral is wrong. It's useless for me to have actors so much in their heads that they can't be organic.
actors cases process
Very occasionally I hire an actor and get it wrong. The actor just doesn't trust the process or me as fully as I thought they would. In this case, you can be quite sure that if an actor is untrusting, it's got nothing to do with me or the process.
insecure people actors
In the first place, I'm pretty thorough about whom I choose. I instinctively look for the kind of actor who is going to be trusting. There are all kinds of insecure people out there called actors.
artist way actors
The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.
acting actors way
The notion that acting is simply about intuitively responding to situations the way you feel couldn't be farther away from how I ask actors to work.
actors directors cry
There are plenty of bad actors and there are plenty of bad directors. There are actors who will always be bad and there are good actors who you cry for because they're being badly directed or the material isn't good enough.
thinking perfectly-good actors
I think Michael Caine is a perfectly good actor but it's obvious he's not going to be in one of my films.
audiences derived education enjoy great pleasure
I've derived a lot of pleasure and education from the theatre. It's great when audiences really enjoy it. It's part of my life.
airplane jumping
jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.
hollywood popular successful
There is a popular misconception that film-makers have to look to Hollywood to be commercially successful but this is how we have been conditioned.
anybody concerned films kinds obscure share talk
I am not concerned with making esoteric, obscure kinds of films. These are films that can share and talk to anybody about real things.
jobs would-be want
One of the reasons the whole Hollywood way of making films wouldn't work for me is because the way I operate would be anathema to anyone who wants to hold a job down in Beverly Hills.