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
character thinking skills
When it comes to thinking about how a character talks, there are literary and language considerations. For actors to be able to differentiate between themselves and the characters they are playing while at the same time remain in character and spontaneous requires a sophisticated combination of skills and spirit.
character needs raw-materials
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.
running character want
The delineation between the actor and his part is a practical matter. When the camera runs, you want the actor to be the character.
nice moving character
He's [Constable] a great painter as far as it goes, but I don't think he's remotely interesting. Not really. It's very pretty and it's very thorough, but it's not evocative, it's not dramatic, it doesn't do what Beethoven does - it doesn't shake you down to the roots of your soul, which Turner does. Constable is just very nice, basically. And moving on to personality, Constable was a very dull character.
character location spirit
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.
character judging-people interesting
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.
real character thinking
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.
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.
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.
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.
actors able film
The reason my films work is because every actor on set is very secure. They're able to fly.