Mike Leigh’s Love Affair with Real Life

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. His new film, “Hard Truths,” reunites him with the superlative Leighian character actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who co-starred in his drama “Secrets & Lies,” from 1996, for which they both received Oscar nominations. There, she played Hortense Cumberbatch, a serene young optometrist who seeks, and finds, her lovably chaotic birth mother; in “Hard Truths,” set in a working-class British Caribbean community, she’s Pansy, an anxious, middle-aged wife and mother who keeps a spotless house and rages at everybody she meets. As the movie begins, the camera pans across a series of cheerful row houses with gardens, landing on one that’s identical but for its unadorned severity. Inside, Pansy wakes up screaming; in some ways, she never stops. As the movie progresses, Pansy, constantly at her wits’ end, fights with shop clerks, a dentist, her long-suffering husband and son, her sister. Some fight back; many look baffled, at a loss. Her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a warm and kindhearted hair stylist, greets life with an easy openness, and keeps trying to connect. “I don’t understand you, but I love you,” she tells Pansy. Audiences might feel the same way.

“Hard Truths” is Leigh’s first new film in six years. His most recent before it, “Peterloo,” about the Peterloo Massacre, and “Mr. Turner,” about the painter J. M. W. Turner, were realism of a different kind: well-funded historical epics about actual people and events, à la his wonderful “Topsy-Turvy” (1999), about Gilbert and Sullivan. “Hard Truths” is 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. 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.

Now eighty-one, Leigh was recently in town for the New York première of “Hard Truths.” We met in a sunny room overlooking Madison Square Park. In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, he was lively, exacting, and precise, prone to urgent gesticulating. We discussed the making of “Hard Truths,” 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.

Let’s start with “Hard Truths.” How did you decide to work with Marianne Jean-Baptiste again?

Well, as you know, we go back a long way. I mean, this is the third time I’ve worked with her.

The second time being when she did the music for “Career Girls”?

Sorry—it’s the fourth time I’ve worked with her, because yeah, she did the music for “Career Girls.” The first time was back in 1993, when she, and indeed Michele Austin, who plays Chantelle in “Hard Truths,” were sisters in a play called “It’s a Great Big Shame,” at the Royal Stratford East, in London. That was a play which, in the first act, dramatized this famous Victorian song. And we set it in the East End, and the first act was all white working-class folk. And the second act is in the same house a hundred years later, in 1993. It was a Black family, and the two sisters were played by Michele and Marianne.

Marianne was then two or three years out of drama school, and you just knew immediately that she was a hoot. She has a great sense of humor and she’s really good at characters. And, as you know, I work with character actors, that’s what it’s all about. And then, of course, she did “Secrets & Lies,” and Michele plays her friend in that.

They’re great together, those two.

Oh, absolutely. And a pair of actors who click don’t have to be buddies, but it’s a bonus, and they’ve kept up. Marianne lives in L.A. She’s had a terrific career, and she’s in her fifties and she’s raised daughters and all the rest of it. And so she brings a great perception to it. She’s very, very sharp and she’s very, very compassionate. And [with Pansy] she can go into this dark place, and know how to handle it. So that’s it, really.

What was it like being around this character, Pansy, so much?

Well, it’s not in the great misunderstood tradition of so-called method acting. Actors absolutely get into character, and then—I’m very strict about this—they come out of character so they’re able to be themselves. And, more importantly, they’re able to be objective about what happened when they were in character, so that we can then work with it. I mean, the thing that doesn’t make sense is when actors are just “I am the character.” It’s not viable artistic material. So, to answer your question, it’s not really an issue.

When you’re shooting, how much do you—I don’t know if “direct” is the right word, but do you weigh in on what they’re doing? Do you say, “Let’s try it this way,” or—

It’s an interesting question. I think it needs a bit of exposition. First of all, as you may know, we spend, in the case of this film, fourteen weeks creating the characters, exploring the relationships, the backstory, doing a lot of improvisation and all of that stuff, before we get to the shoot. So you know, scene by scene, sequence by sequence, location by location—we script through rehearsal, and arrive at something very precise, and then shoot it. So obviously that involves directing, writer-directing, on my part. So, in that sense, “A lot” is the answer to your question.

But one interesting thing that you said is “Let’s try it this way,” which is kind of—“Well, we’ve done it like that, let’s try a different and opposite interpretation.” But because of what we’ve done—in the sense of interpreting a script a different way, it doesn’t really arise, because the whole thing is grounded in a sort of, I’ll say this cautiously, inevitable way. But we’ve arrived at that through all sorts of choices in the foundation.

So they know their characters so well, you wouldn’t need to do that.

Yes. They’re not looking for a character. Of course, you get moments of inspiration, because, apart from everything I just said, the only thing that matters is the moment in front of the camera. What will often happen with my shoots is we’ll do a take and I say, “O.K., let’s go again.” And everyone says, “Why? That was great!” And I say, “Well, you never know.” It’s not about something obviously different. It’s about nuances in behavior, which you’ve then got in the cutting room to be very refined with.

So do you shoot many takes of the same scene?

Compared with most conventions, no. Because you don’t need to.

Right.

I mean, it isn’t for me to say this, but 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, because everybody’s grounded. Certainly, the biggest myth about my stuff is that what you’re looking at is improvised in front of the camera. It virtually never is. It’s very, very tightly rehearsed and distilled.

I think the dialogue is a little too good to be improvised on the spot.

I think that’s right. I mean, it should seem like real people behaving like people behave. But what I don’t do is let things happen and just shoot in a quasi-documentary way and then try and bail it all out. That just doesn’t interest me at all.

One of your techniques is not letting the actors know what’s happening in the scenes that they’re not in. Do you feel like there are moments that have paid off because of that, with the surprise or the freshness of—

Yeah. It’s fundamental. When I ask an actor to take part in a film, I say, “O.K., please be in it. I can’t tell you anything about the film because it doesn’t exist. I can’t tell you about the character because there is no character. You and I have got to collaborate to make the character. And here’s the thing: You will never know anything about anything except what your character knows.” So the actor doesn’t have an overview, which lets you explore truthfully, without any trace of bullshit, what the reaction of the character is and how they build relationships. That’s what it’s all about. So it’s interesting you call it a technique. It’s probably more than a technique. It’s a given requirement. It informs the entire process, and thus the story.

So does the process start with choosing an actor, or a couple of actors?

Yes. But there are several answers to that, perhaps. First of all, with some films I’ve made, there was a kind of agenda. “Secrets & Lies” arises from the fact that lots of people in my family adopted kids. And so I decided to explore that, because once I started to look into it, I realized that it was far more important to make a film about the baby that’s given away and the birth mother rather than the people who adopt, which is less interesting or less important, in a sense. “Vera Drake” arose from the fact that I’m old enough to remember what it was like before the 1967 Abortion Act in the U.K. I remember people with unwanted pregnancies, and abortionists around, and all of that. So in those contexts, I knew what I had as a premise. And also with the historical films—“Topsy-Turvy,” “Mr. Turner,” and “Peterloo”—we knew what we were dramatizing. So that’s one answer to the question.

Then, in most of the other films, I say, “Well, actually—let’s just get Marianne. I don’t know what we’re going to do, but that’s a starting point.” It’s about time that I did what I’ve done in this film, which is to have a focus on a Black community, and, in this particular case, the central characters were all Black folk with a Jamaican background. So that obviously informed the casting. But very often I’ll cast somebody with a notion as to what they may do, which turns out not to be what I actually do. The world is full of possibilities and that’s part of the buzz. I mean, if you look at—are you familiar with “Happy-Go-Lucky”?

Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin in “Hard Truths.” Photograph by Simon Mein / Thin Man Films Ltd / Bleecker Street

Yeah.

Now, I had no idea what Eddie Marsan was going to do. I knew that the starting point in that particular case was Sally Hawkins, tapping into her energy. And of course, in some way, the idea of him being this driving instructor evolved. Incidentally, just an anecdote for your amusement: He was working by himself, he didn’t know what anybody else was doing, and all of that. He admitted later it was obvious to him that all the other actors were going to play different people having driving lessons. [Laughs.] And he eventually realized that was not the case. He was not the central character in a film about a fascist driving instructor. So yeah, it varies.

What was it like casting the rest of the characters in “Hard Truths”? How did you find them?

I work with a very brilliant casting director, Nina Gold. Casting is just a matter of—well, it’s an empirical thing. You’ve got the core actors [in this film]. But the actors who play supporting roles, for my money, are immaculate. Some of them came out of auditions and some not—I mean, people like Samantha Spiro, who plays the rather horrid cosmetic executive, I’ve worked with her and she’s quite well known. [The supporting actors] are not there in the early preparation period. You do a potted version of the process.

So for the cashier who gets yelled at, for example, how much would you be working with her? How much would you talk about—

The cashier—she’s actually very brilliant. I’ve just seen her lately in a revival of my play “Abigail’s Party” in London. Very funny. Again, you know, you give them a bit of an advance notice, usually on the phone, about the basis of the character. And then they come in. We do a bit of work and put it together. If you get the right actors, who are smart, they’re on it. The nightmare, which very rarely happens, is when an actor is not on the case. It’s very seldom: it’s only happened about four or five times. And it’s usually for some other reason—they’re preoccupied with something else, you know.

Do they ever try too hard to be interesting?

It’s a given that they don’t—in the first place, part of the instructions is “Don’t try and make it interesting. Just react as the character.” And also, it has to be said, one of the first requirements is you have to have intelligent actors. Not all actors are intelligent.

Not all people are intelligent.

Well, that’s also true. So, it’s that, really. They’re smart.

So many of the actors you’ve worked with have talked about how much they appreciate your process. I don’t think actors are always asked for their input in such a significant way.

Well, I collaborate with them as artists. They’re artists in their own right. It’s a very creative process, not only through the acting but through the decision-making and the research that they do. They research anything and everything just to give substance to the character: background, work, culture. I mean, look at Marianne in “Secrets & Lies.” She went off and learned how to be an optometrist. I don’t know what the American word for that is.

Optometrist.

Optometrist. And you see her actually doing it with a little kid.

That’s such a great scene.

Yeah, because she can do it, you know? And [in “Hard Truths”] Michele really immersed herself not only in how to do the hair stuff, so that she could talk to the customers about other things while doing it, but also just everything. Everything gets researched, basically.

So when you were growing up, you took in all kinds of plays and theatre and movies and music—

Circus, pantomime—

Just from that alone, it sounds like you had a pretty great childhood creatively.

Yes. I mean, it’s weird to think about that, because—no disrespect to my well-meaning parents, but it was very bourgeois and quite philistine. But we were always taken to the circus every year, and pantomime, and variety, you know, vaudeville. I actually saw Laurel and Hardy live onstage at the age of nine.

That’s incredible.

Being completely useless. And Stan Laurel sitting at one end of a bench in a railway station and Oliver Hardy totally out of control, just giggling and not doing it, you know? That was the tour where they finally said to him, “You’ve got to retire.”

Do you think you learned something in that moment?

Yes. It was a window into something about the nature of performance, you know? I mean, I was nine. But I wrote a couple of actual plays at primary school, put them on and all that.

What were they?

One was called “Muddled Magic.” And, in a way, the title tells you what it was about.

A funny magic show, or a tragic magic show?

No, no. It was probably influenced by Gilbert and Sullivan slightly, because it was about people mixing up—you know, the wrong person being the object of the spell or something. And then I was involved in putting on stuff in my teens. My dad was a doctor, and his father was a commercial artist.

Doing what kinds of stuff?

You remember photograph tinting? That’s what he did, and he had a firm that did it. Now, in the Depression, people couldn’t afford loaves of bread, they certainly couldn’t afford to have photographs colored in by Grandpa or anybody else. And so they had a bad time. Grandpa really couldn’t feed the family at a stretch. So my dad was a doctor—for him, the notion that I would be any sort of an artist was anathema. If I was drawing, which I always was, he’d come in to say, “Haven’t you got anything better to do?” I wasn’t good at the academic stuff at school. I was very diligent with history, but I was useless at maths, all that stuff. And, of course, I was good at art.

Did you feel pressure to succeed as an artist, to show your father that you could be a success?

Yeah, I suppose so. That’s just a natural thing. But when I finally decided to abandon the conventional course—not passing exams but doing plays and all that—I secretly went off and researched drama school. And I discovered that whilst you couldn’t get to university without the academic qualifications, you could go to drama school. So I decided that’s what I wanted to do. Of course, there was an incredible fuss. I mean, it was outrageous. Apart from anything else, the theatre was for pansies, you know, all that stuff.

Right.

But here’s the thing, since you invite me to indulge in a bit of claptrap: I went to Salford Grammar School, in Manchester, and just before I arrived there Albert Finney had left.

Oh, wow.

And Albert, he’d gone off to RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. So, of course, I arrived [at Salford] and joined the Dramatic Society and was in the plays, and everybody was talking about Albert and the influence of Albert. They all loved him. And so my dad, in a state, went off to see the headmaster, who, much to my dad’s shock, said, “Well, if he wants to apply for drama school, that’s what he must do. He’ll have to leave at the end of this year, but I’ll help him with his auditions.” Which he did! I went off to London and applied to RADA. And, long story short, I passed the exam, the audition, and I got a scholarship to go there for free. It really was a shock for everybody.

And then how did your dad feel about it?

Well, look, he eventually realized that not only was I getting somewhere but also that I was doing something quite original. He got to appreciate it. He lived long enough to see my work in the theatre and, indeed, on BBC television. He died just too soon for—my mother lived long enough to see us win the Palme d’Or, at Cannes, [for “Secrets & Lies”] and all that.

Growing up, did you think, Wouldn’t it be great if there were real people, real situations, in dramatic—

Well, yes. When I was drawing, I would draw whole street scenes, very observational stuff. This was the end of the nineteen-fifties. I went to the movies all the time. I never saw a film that wasn’t in English till 1960, when I went to London, apart from that awful French short “Le Ballon Rouge,” which for some reason they screened at school.

In 1959, I watched [the kitchen-sink British drama] “Room at the Top.” You suddenly realized that the world being depicted was a world you would actually find if you walked outside, a working-class community. A year or so later, you had Karel Reisz’s “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” with Albert Finney, and that was a grounded and real kind of film. And then, of course, I went to London, and wham. There was world cinema, there was the Nouvelle Vague. “Breathless” was playing at that moment. [John Cassavetes’s] “Shadows” was playing. I discovered the Russian cinema and the neorealist cinema and Ozu, Kurosawa, Bergman. The first week I was in London, somebody said, “There’s an arts festival at St. Pancras Town Hall. They’re showing a film.” So I went along. It was a film about a knight playing chess with Death. What?! [Laughs.] Can you imagine what that was like? But, throughout it all, there was this thing about capturing the real world.

What about the real world? Were there certain things you wanted to see that you weren’t—

No, I—there isn’t an answer. I mean, let’s not wallow in our own delusions about ourselves. I’m not the first artist to want to capture the real world in a real way, you know?

Do you remember seeing “Breathless” for the first time?

Yeah. It was part of that whole experience, those first years of the sixties. Everything that was radical and interesting was going on, except inside the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which was very old-fashioned, quite stale in its approach to things. Apart from the movies, “happenings” and improvisational stuff, all that was going on. And so I started slightly reacting against the conventions of rehearsal and everything. The convention of work in RADA was “Learn the moves and learn the lines and don’t fall over the furniture,” basically. There was no improvisation, no discussion about the characters, the background.

Not even their motivations?

Well, motivation-ish. Not at a sophisticated level. So I started to have notions about the possibilities of combining rehearsal with writing, and what the actor could do, and all the rest of it.

I wonder if you’d gone to a less traditional school—if some of what you developed was spurred by a reaction to how conservative it was.

I don’t think there would have been a less traditional school. I don’t think such an institution at that time existed. And then I left and acted for not very long, particularly in a film called “Two Left Feet,” directed by Roy Ward Baker. It wasn’t a great film at all. I went to Camberwell art school, and to the London Film School in the evenings.

What was the first project where you tried out your new ideas?

Well, by a fluke, I got this very strange job in Birmingham. There was a brand-new arts center called the Midlands Arts Centre for Young People, and they had a state-of-the-art studio theatre. Really great stuff. I was hired as assistant director. And when I got there, there were no actors, no company, because for some reason they decided to delay that for another year or something. And they said, “O.K., we’re going to call this the Arts Club, for sixteen-to-twenty-five-year-old kids, local people.” And you could do whatever you wanted with them.

Wow.

So the first play was called “The Box Play,” and you had a box, like a cage. There was a family in the box: a mother, father, son, and daughter. And every so often the son would go out, wander around, and meet different characters and then go back in. And that was it. And then I did a play called “My Parents Have Gone to Carlisle,” which was about a teen-age girl having a party when her parents had gone away. And then I did one called “The Last Crusade of the Five Little Nuns,” which was literally five nuns in a rowboat arriving on a desert island where there was a man and a monkey. So that was the furthest from the real world I ever got. But, then again, the girls were doing characters, and so was the monkey.

And were you collaborating a bit with the students?

Yeah, it was an early version of what I do. I was on the case by then. [Before I’d come to Birmingham,] there was that play “Marat/Sade” (1963). [The play is set in an asylum.] I’d watched a television documentary about how they’d gone to a mental hospital and taken notes and based the characterization on the patients. And they’d done these improvisations. So I knew I wanted to experiment with it. That year or so in Birmingham got me onto it, and it has remained so till now, really.

Your description of “The Box Play” made “Hard Truths” pop into my head. There’s such a vivid sense in your movies of people’s houses, people’s apartments, where they live, and when there’s a cut from one house to the other the contrast is usually stark. It made me think that our house and our family can be such a self-contained world, and you go out and encounter the rest of the world, which could be anything at all, and then you return to the weird little family box. What was “The Box Play” like?

Well, it was seventy minutes of—it was a little more extremely stylized than the work that followed. In fact, the next play I described to you, “My Parents Have Gone to Carlisle,” was very natural. “The Box Play” was a little bit heightened and cartoonish, but it was at heart real, in the sense that they were being real characters and interacting with each other. It’s hard to say what it was like, other than to say that it was a sort of realist cartoon strip.

When you were in London—I saw you mentioned this somewhere—was “A Hard Day’s Night” shooting outside your window?

Yeah, it was! There was a theatre where they shot a lot of the stuff, and loud hysterical teen-age girls ran round and round the building. I lived in a flat on the corner, and you could see the shoot. At one point, the Beatles ran out of the stage door across the road into a courtyard, and I just stood there watching. I went to stand in the street.

What was that like?

It was great! I mean, first of all, I’m exactly the same age as them—I think George Harrison was a few days younger than me. Then there was the film itself.

What did you think of it?

I loved it. You couldn’t not.

I haven’t thought about this much, but “A Hard Day’s Night” has the feel of realism in a way—the look of it, and the dialogue is scripted, but it has their voice.

I think it’s wrong to invest too much in the correlation between scripted and real. I think that’s a technicality in a way. But Richard Lester is very good at directing in that verité style. And also—this is a whole different ballgame from what we’re talking about—but the four lads were playing themselves, you know, in a natural way, and were very relaxed at doing that.

So when you finally develop the script, after all the work that you’ve done leading up to it, is it mostly you editing and rewriting?

At no stage is there anything called a script that’s on paper. So the improvisation, we take it and we break it down and we say, “Let’s reconstitute that, do that again, no, change that, move that, swap that around, let’s cut that out or whatever.” So we arrive at something, and we arrive at it in a reasonably precise form. I am then rejoined by the cinematographer and the rest of the gang, and we’ll decide how to shoot it. And then invariably there’s a gap while it’s being lit and set up and organized. And I will then go off to some spot, the bus or the caravan or whatever, with the actors and refine the dialogue. So in that sense, what you’re talking about, yes, it happens.

So that must be written down, if you’re—

Well, there’s always a script supervisor around who logs it, but the actors never look at it. There’s a rule that they’re not allowed to, because they’ve got to have it here. [Points at head.] And they have. It’s amazing. Crews that work on the films say, “It’s extraordinary! They just seem to know it, how do they know it?”

I was thinking about “Hard Truths” last night, and I realized there are two dramatic scenes involving stairs.

This is the famous thing. Dick Pope—a cinematographer who sadly died some weeks ago, a great loss, I’d worked with him on everything since 1990—he always said, “Mike loves staircases.” And it’s true. There are lots of staircases, but it’s not a deliberate fetish or aesthetic trope or something. It so happens to arise, you know?

I nearly had a heart attack during the scene where Pansy’s husband, Curtley [a plumber], and his apprentice carry a bathtub down the stairs.

They did very well, because it was supposed to be a cast-iron—it’s actually a fibreglass thing. It was as light as a feather.

That makes me feel better. Curtley [David Webber] and the son, Moses [Tuwaine Barrett], are such quiet, sometimes passive people. Do you think it’s hard for an actor to play a character like that?

No, if that’s the character, that’s the character. I didn’t talk about this, but the first part of the process is to get the actor to talk about a lot of people he or she knows, always of the same sex. I very seldom give instructions as to the kind of person. And I gradually say, “Let’s whittle it down.” And we arrive at usually two or three sources, and then we put them together and that becomes the basis of the character. And once it becomes solid—whether it’s a character that’s got verbal diarrhea or is completely catatonic, or anywhere in between—it’s purely a question of “What’s that person like, really?” As it happens, both the actors playing those characters are quite loquacious, talkative fellows, but they were acting their characters.

Have people that the actors know ever recognized themselves onscreen, do you think? Have you ever heard of anything like that?

No. It’s an interesting question. It may partly be because I found a way, which I can’t really talk about, of kind of mixing up sources. So what emerges is not quite one or the other. It has been the case—I mean, my partner, Marion Bailey, I’ve worked with a lot. She’s reported several times that she’s met a woman who said, “I know that you based that on me!,” and it invariably wasn’t the case. But, even if we did, it’s academic—what’s important is the artifact, the fiction that we’re creating.

Pansy is the way she is for reasons that are unrelated to the pandemic. But do you feel that the pandemic influenced—

No, I don’t. I think if we made the same film ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, her condition, the issues, would be the same. They are universal. She spends a lot of time locked up in the house anyway, and the pandemic is referred to, I think, one and a half times in the film, in passing. Some people say, “This is obviously a post-pandemic film”—it’s not obviously a post-pandemic film at all. It’s people’s prerogative to read it that way, but it isn’t.

But there are things that resonate strongly, I think, with the particular way things feel now—Pansy’s blowing up at everybody all the time. I feel like people are going crazy in public.

Yes, I think that’s a fair comment. I would accept that. But it isn’t something that I thought about whilst making it.

You made a few historical movies before this. What made you want to go back to contemporary now?

It felt natural. Also, I mean, here’s the truth. When we go to a potential backer and say, “There’s no script. I can’t tell you anything about it. Please don’t interfere with this when we’re making it. And, please, can you give us the money to make a film?,” only two things ever happen. Either they say, “That’s fantastic. We really admire what you do, here’s the money.” Or they tell us to fuck off, basically. Mostly, the latter happens. That’s for contemporary subjects. With “Topsy-Turvy,” “Mr. Turner,” and “Peterloo,” we were able to say, “It’s about Gilbert and Sullivan, it’s about J. M. W. Turner, it’s about Peterloo.” And that made it possible to get bigger budgets.

With “Hard Truths,” we struggled and struggled. I wanted to go back and make a contemporary film, for no reason other than, you know, that’s what I do. But it really has got tougher. When we decided to make a film about the Peterloo Massacre, my producers went and met a guy called Ted Hope, who had just become [head of production for Amazon Original Films]. And he said, [slams palm on table] “You’re on.” They backed it to a huge extent. They were fantastically supportive, even when we had finished the film and it was running about twenty minutes over its contracted length.

However, when we got to the next project, which eventually turned out to be this one, we went to Amazon and they’d stopped being new boys on the block. They’d become Amazon Studios for real. Didn’t want to know, basically. And Netflix doesn’t want to know. The mantra I hear is “We really like what you do, but it’s not for us.” And “not for us” is code for “We can’t get involved with a project we can’t interfere with.” We can’t, you know, screw it up by insisting that you have this actor or that actor, or that the end’s got to be changed because of algorithms or whatever it is.

So, to go back to the question, we have a relatively low budget, and we said, “Well, it’s going to be a contemporary film, and that’s what we’re going to do.” I’m hoping to do another film soon. And, again, the scale of it will be defined by a much more limited budget. I mean, the budget for “Hard Truths” is way smaller than the budget for “Secrets & Lies,” for example. Right at the beginning of the conversation, you started asking about Marianne, and we talked about how brilliant she is.

This character, her as Pansy—I just feel like it will never leave me.

Good. And do you know Pansys?

Yeah.

Yeah. Everybody says that. Everybody knows a Pansy or two. I certainly do.

I feel like my affection has been growing for her. I felt a little stunned when I came out of the movie. But you certainly empathize with her.

I think that’s important. I think anybody who says, “Well, that woman was terrible, I don’t want to be around her”—I think that tells us more about that audience member than it does about anything else. Some people have said, “Well, obviously she’s the flip side of the main character in ‘Happy-Go-Lucky.’ ” I could see what people mean, but it’s of no consequence. Some people, when they saw “Happy-Go-Lucky,” went, “God, that woman was terrible! All that horrible enthusiasm—she just wouldn’t shut up!” An incredibly blind reaction to a complex character who, sure, she’s a bundle of laughs, but she’s grounded, she’s caring, she’s intelligent, she’s responsible. So I hope, going back to Pansy, that people do in some way empathize with her. They might find it hard to articulate how or why they empathize. But then you don’t need to articulate it—it’s just a feeling, isn’t it?

Her sister might be more the flip side of her.

The flip side of what?

Of her anger and pain.

Yes, I think that’s academic, really. I mean, she’s different. But it’s not really the flip side of anything. I wouldn’t have said so, anyway.

It’s just interesting to see how people in the same family—

Yeah!

Same parents, similar childhood experiences, can turn out so—

Yes. Although you get clues, particularly in the cemetery scene, that their childhood experiences were in some way different, with one looking after the other, although there’s only a few years between them. But, yeah, we’ve all experienced that.

And sometimes siblings will have totally different interpretations of their parents.

Yeah, and that’s certainly what we see in this particular case. Definitely.

At what stage of the process do you tend to figure out the setting?

Well, that simply looks after itself. I mean, you know, where do they live? How do they live? And then, of course, it’s important for the designer to join in and start sharing possible notions. In the case of this film, for example, we had Suzie Davies, who is a great designer. She did this thing about the Pope [“Conclave”]. She’s very, very talented but extremely nice and very open. She did “Mr. Turner” and “Peterloo,” and she joined in and started to tune into the background of the characters. She got a lot of stuff together for Pansy and Curtley’s house, lots of Jamaican artifacts and stuff. And she shared that with the actors and with me, and Marianne, of course, said, No way. This woman would not have any of that. This has got to be completely antiseptic, kind of bland. Couldn’t be bothered, couldn’t be hassled with anything.

Or she doesn’t like having stuff around.

No! She doesn’t like stuff. Sterile.

I feel like we all know someone with a bit of that, too. I love that first shot when you see the other houses on the block, cheerful trees and bushes, and then you see her house, everything bare and pared down. And you start to realize that you’re getting to know this character even before you see her.

And then see her sit up from a nightmare. Yeah, absolutely.

And the title always comes to you at the end?

Way down the line. Last thing. I mean, there have been occasions when the guy that does the graphics has done all the other graphics and they’re still waiting for me to decide what the title is. That’s always a tough one. What the hell do you call a thing? “Hard Truths.” ♦