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
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.
class way scripts
I wonder if I would have been capable of producing anything if I worked in a more conventional way with a prewritten script, because I'm of the procrastinator class.
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.
essence important way
It's important to be true to the events, but the most important thing is to get to the essence of the experience. Not to be bogged down in an academic way by a notion of the truth. First of all, the truth is an illusive and spurious concept.
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.
independent independent-filmmaking forgotten
Independent filmmaking has always been there and it's not to be forgotten.
hollywood film reason
A lot of the reasons that I'm resistant to making films in the U.S. have nothing to do with not doing a film in Hollywood, but rather to do with what I'm committed to working on in the U.K. I feel very committed to the British film industry and infrastructure.
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.