The last time Mike Leigh set a film in modern-day England, David Cameron had just become the country’s Prime Minister, leading Britain’s first coalition government in almost seven decades. That was Another Year, released in 2010. It is a story of great gentleness, chronicling the life of a happily married couple nearing retirement as their unhappier friends and family step in and out of the warmth of their house. 2018’s Peterloo, Leigh’s period drama about the titular 1819 protest for the right to vote, came out bang in the middle of another incendiary referendum, releasing in the UK after the Brexit vote in 2016 and before the de-facto sealing of the controversial deal in 2020.

It feels fitting, then, that one of UK’s finest filmmakers would return to the London of today with a tale of great bitterness. Hard Truths reunites Leigh with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who became the first Black British woman to receive an Oscar nomination for acting in 1997 for her superb work as the soft-spoken Hortense in the director’s Secrets & Lies. Here, she plays a much less contained character, the embittered Pansy, who spends her days berating those around her with the kind of cruel wrath only deep-rooted grief can fuel.

A housewife, Pansy obsesses over the cleanliness of what looks like a newly remodeled suburban townhouse while constantly onishing its other two inhabitants: plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Outside of her home, Pansy lashes out at couples who look too happy, babies who have far too many pockets and drivers who cannot drive for their life. Tenderness comes in sparsely, mostly through Pansy’s sister, hairdresser Chantelle (a brilliant Michele Austin), whose salon is filled with cheerful gossip and laughter alike.

I meet Leigh and his star separately in two imposing London rooms at the thick of fall festival season, but the two echo each other when it comes to not only their renewed enthusiasm for filmmaking after reuniting for Hard Truths but the importance of pursuing projects that allow for true collaboration. Below, the key learnings that defined our conversations.

There’s no one like Mike

Leigh’s method is notorious: the director doesn’t work from a script, starting his creative process from a basic premise or storyline developed through improvisation with his actors. It begins with one-to-one sessions, where the actors are asked to bring a list of acquaintances they can feed from, with the director pulling and plucking from this human catalog until a character’s foundation is built.

“We embark on a journey to discover what the film is, in the same way people write novels, paint pictures, make music, write poetry, and make sculptures,” the director tells me. “It is a constant cornucopia of surprises, and each film demands subtle ways of approaching it within the way that I do it. That’s the joy of working the way I do: I’m not simply interpreting a strict script or scenario, I am actually exploring and enjoying the surprise elements that can then be distilled into the film.”

Jean-Baptiste finds Leigh’s method “freeing.” She explains, “You are not thinking about your reaction. There is no real agenda. Once you get into character, you allow yourself to be changed, depending on what you are given by your fellow actors.”

“Within the process of developing the character, there’s, of course, a lot of talking and discussing detail and history, but we are getting up and moving and finding the characters’ rhythm, finding their tempo, the weight, how heavy they feel, how tight they might be.”

Despite the creative benefits of Leigh’s method, there is also one big downside: the unpredictability of the process is a red flag to pragmatic, money-driven investors. Speaking about why financiers might not want to back his projects, Leigh says it could be because he makes films “the way I want to make them.” 

He adds, “I tell a potential backer: ‘I can’t tell you anything about [the film], won’t discuss casting, and [you cannot] interfere.’ That puts off a lot of backers, because they like to interfere and want a Hollywood star. That’s been more of a problem now than it used to be. But nobody’s suggested that I don’t make films the way I make them.” Decades on, one of Britain’s finest chroniclers continues to fight.

Leigh says there is no great difference in working with actors he has collaborated with before or ones new to his method, as “it takes five minutes to forget we are new to each other because of the way we work, which is very personal.”

He adds, “The actor has a lot of space to explore privately with me and, quickly, the rapport is established. The deal I always have when I sit down with an actor I’ve worked with before is that, whatever we do, we’re not going to repeat ourselves. I work with character actors, people who are versatile and good at playing all sorts of people and don’t play themselves, so any actor you see in any of my films more than once, you’ll see as completely different characters.”

And this method pays off, with Leigh having been responsible for either career-making or career-defining performances from some of the finest British actors of the past half century, from David Thewlis’s raw lead turn as a London flaneur in Naked to Sally Hawkins’ anti-Pansy ever-chirpy schoolteacher Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky.

Warming up to cold Pansy

“I’d pay a lot of money for Marianne Jean-Baptiste to yell at me like that,” writes Moviesmovington, but the great triumph of Hard Truths allows the audience to find empathy for Pansy—even when so persistent in her tartness. ing when she first began to feel empathy for her character, Jean-Baptiste says that she doesn’t “judge” the people she plays. “You protect them, you look after them. Comion was there from the very beginning. It is different when it comes to when the audience starts to feel it, depending on where they are in their lives. There is a definite shift when the laughing stops and it gets deathly silent.”

“Obviously, the empathy that you feel comes from the empathy that I feel,” adds Leigh. “There are other kinds of movies that are made by other kinds of filmmakers where empathy with the characters doesn’t come into it. It’s all about action or movie conventions of various kinds. This film is entirely motivated, as all my films are, by empathy on my part with human beings, with people that I believe in as real people and care about.”

Did playing a woman who speaks whatever comes to mind feel liberating to Jean-Baptiste? Not really, she says. But it was fun. “Because we’re so different—I don’t have a problem expressing myself, but I certainly don’t express myself as Pansy—it was fun. I felt the fun of saying what this person was thinking and would come up with. I might make the same observations, but they wouldn’t irritate me. It wouldn’t irritate me that a baby has pockets. I’d probably just laugh—it’s so silly. But Pansy looks at the world and says, ‘That’s really stupid.’ That’s her way of looking at the world, as somebody who is not joyful.”

“Of course, it’s a challenge,” he goes on. “It’s dangerous, you have a lot of responsibility. We are talking about a thing you have to deliver by a certain date and that costs a lot of money. But that, in a way, is a bonus because it makes you get out of bed and do it every morning. There is no, ‘I don’t feel very creative today.’ There is none of that. You have got to deliver, which is good for me.”

Is the British director hopeful for the future of cinema? “There was a time, years ago, when people were convinced about the death of cinema. I don’t think that’s the case. Of course, films evolve. I think the time will come [when cinema will die], but certainly not within what we would call civilized times, which may or may not last for very long. Who knows? I think movies will always be there. It’s important that they are.”