The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him, it’s a term of great respect, meaning a performer who’s highly skilled, versatile, creative, smart—qualities especially important for Leigh’s actors, who create his films with him, from plot to dialogue.

 

The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him, it’s a term of great respect, meaning a performer who’s highly skilled, versatile, creative, smart—qualities especially important for Leigh’s actors, who create his films with him, from plot to dialogue.

“Hard Truths” is Leigh’s first new film in six years. It’s a return to Leigh’s classic form: a contemporary, intimate ensemble drama exploring regular people’s lives. His famously rigorous and collaborative writing process, often drawing on a trusted cadre of recurring actor-collaborators, involves conversation, improvisation, and extensive preparation and rehearsal, from which a script of sorts is memorized by the cast but never written down. “On many films, umpteen takes happen, because the actors aren’t grounded. They can’t remember their lines, or there’s been no rehearsal, or they’re still looking for the character. But on ours that virtually never happens,” he said. Leigh, a doctor’s son who grew up middle-class in a working-class neighborhood in Manchester, came up with his method after a youth spent studying traditional performance, from music hall to theatre to the circus, and wanting to see real people, real lives, onstage and onscreen.

Read his interview with Sarah Larson, where he discusses his earliest plays, his real-life observations of Laurel and Hardy and the Beatles, his creative process, and the future, in which he plans to keep making movies