Even then, there is ample room for manoeuvre. The director famously starts his films without a script, casting his actors and then corralling them through a rehearsal period that can last for months as the characters are fleshed out and the story takes shape. "That's a source of the film right there." Leigh is meeting him later for a drink and a catch-up. Up from the west country, makes toys for a living. The caller, it transpires, is a mate from the old days. The phone trills in the pocket of his fleece, and he hastens to answer it. And the influence of comedy, vaudeville, pantomime and circus are just as important to me as the hard, social way of looking at the world." They're tragicomedies, for want of a better term. The convention is realism, but it's not propaganda. I have a natural affection for Ken Loach, but we tend to get lumped together and that's never felt right. "Yes, I do engage in these heightened juxtapositions," he admits. How, exactly, does one square Leigh's lurid yuppies or suburban grotesques with the more nuanced, minor-key figures that populate his work? It's like listening to an exquisite string symphony and hearing the occasional clash of cymbals, or the parp of a comedy kazoo. He also liked comedies and vaudeville, and these filtered through to his work and continues to confound those who would like to view him as a cut-and-dried social realist. As a child, he says, he used to sit in the local fleapit and think: "Wouldn't it be great to have a film in which the characters are like real people?" The kitchen-sink school of British cinema was an early inspiration, but he found it too script-bound, too hobbled by plot, and preferred the films of the French new wave. Mike Leigh was born in Salford, a doctor's son. Even as we speak." He inches down another notch and regards me over his belly. I've been doing that since world war two. I ask if he's a compulsive people-watcher off screen as well as on, and he admits that this is so. That, after all, is what has always fascinated him. Film in, film out, the same preoccupations: having children, not having children the thorny thicket of social interaction.
All his work is basically the same film, he suggests. I'm 67 and I've got mates who are about my age and, you know, you sit and talk with them and then all of a sudden you look around and realise you're just two old geezers talking about the 60s." In particular, he adds, Tom and Gerri's relationship with their offspring (loving, with a hint of smother) mirrors his own treatment of his two adult sons. I wanted to make a film that started where I am now. "There are personal issues that manifest themselves in all the principal characters. "The problem, at least for me, is that it's a very personal film," he explains. He starts out bolt-upright and then inches south, shifting and settling to the point where his chin is on his chest. It skirts on the rim of so much human mystery.īack at the office, Leigh appears to be sliding down his armchair. Another Year is mordant, absorbing and profound. Chief among these is Mary (Leslie Manville), a constant, clamouring presence, half-petrified by the thought that life might already have passed her by. Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen give terrific performances as contented Tom and Gerri, whose amble towards retirement is complicated by visits from various sad-sack friends and widowed relations. Another Year is one of Leigh's best pictures in a rousing 40-year career a bittersweet paean to the pleasures and terrors of growing old. I assure him that I did and he nods, briefly mollified. I confess that, from time to time, I found the couple to be insufferably self-satisfied, and he says he doesn't see them that way at all. I tell him I saw it as a film about the pursuit of happiness, and he tells me he's not sure it is, exactly. But beyond that we're in the dark, like the apocryphal blind men working our way around the elephant. So yes, Another Year is ostensibly about a happy couple and the lost souls that orbit them. The point, I think, is that he makes his films from the gut, and that these stories of human ebb and flow are not easily pinned, pitched and pigeonholed.
Leigh is conducting this charade to illustrate a point. "This is moment where you're meant to show me the door." And they have an allotment and a friend who's a drunkard and a son who doesn't have a partner." He breaks from the script to peer over his teacup. "Well, it's about a very nice couple who are really, really happy. The director has come to pitch his latest picture, Another Year, and I'm here to listen, puffing on a metaphorical cigar as he outlines the plot. The tea is served, the seats are taken and now, for the sake of argument, Mike Leigh and I are playing Hollywood deal-makers. I t's 9am at a Soho production office, downstairs from a flat occupied by a trio of French glamour models.
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