“We are thrilled by the success of our two very British films currently in the cinemas – Mike Leigh’s charming Happy-Go-Lucky and Martin McDonagh’s irreverent In Bruges. Martin, famous for his playwriting, initially made a short film with Film4 so we were delighted to work with him on his first feature. Each year we strive for a mix of first-timers and experienced film-makers returning to Film4.

I am desperate to find a brilliant, ambitious and yet low-budget British sci-fi. It’s also really hard to find incredibly taut British thrillers that are not just aping US films – we would love to find one not set in the usual environs: perhaps an NHS hospital, or a boarding school?

Film4 is all about innovation, supporting the film-maker’s voice, coming at British stories from new perspectives, finding stories that resonate strongly with our contemporary British audience. We’ll continue to be driven by these principles, building on our already strong focus on new talent and film-makers from diverse and regional backgrounds.

We offer many of the best opportunities for new talent in the country, in terms of the films we produce – both short films (through the Cinema Extreme scheme), low-budget first features (via Warp X), and other first-time film-makers we support outside these schemes. We also run projects with new theatre writers via Paines Plough and the Traverse theatre; have a new writers’ lab for writers from diverse backgrounds with B3 Media, and back one or two projects in development from film-makers at the NFTS every year. We’ll continue to concentrate on our new talent initiatives for both directors and writers to secure our position as the home of new film talent in the UK.

There’s already an increasing awareness that British films telling contemporary British stories can work for British audiences in the cinema – look at This Is England – and it would be great to see more contemporary-set films taking risks coming from the industry as a whole. Certainly the US is more than aware of the huge talent pool in the UK film industry right now, so our job is to keep supporting new voices whilst trying to entice our successful British film-makers home now and again!”

Katherine Butler: Head of Development, Film4

Words: Claire Spencer
Images: Courtesy of BAA

Animation in the UK is constantly subject to change. Always up for a challenge, the British Animation Awards (BAA) have tried to keep pace: we chat to some of 2008’s talented crop to gauge the state of the UK scene.

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You don’t need super-sensitive radar to pick up that at a time when computer-aided animation can be produced so quickly, slower techniques have fallen out of favour with many major studios.

This general trend continues despite of the efforts of studios like Aardman, and major film-makers like Tim Burton, who have continued to reap success with audiences through the tried-and-tested methods of stop-motion and replacement. Their success is encouraging, as it shows a real willingness on the part of global audiences to accept animation as a multi-faceted medium: so long as you have the scripts to back-up your chosen technique. And the popularity of ads like Sony Bravia’s Play-Doh, winner of the Commercial Craft and Commercial Direction categories at 2008’s BAAs, suggests that even the biggest global brands can harness the value in variety.

As such, many animators see the BAAs as a useful yardstick to gauge the UK scene. Aardman director Luis Cook praises Britain’s current crop of animators: “The UK, to my mind, produces some of the most original and interesting animation in the world.” He should know, having both won the Craft Award and been a runner-up in the Best Short Film category.

“It’s quite disparate, ranging from kids’ shows to commercials, short films to music promos. Every two years the BAAs bunch it all together, get it screened around the country and then celebrate it with an awards ceremony.” Luis stresses the face-to-face aspect of these kinds of meet-ups as key in what can be a lonely industry: “It also gives animation folk the opportunity to surface and say hello to each other which is great as we don’t get out much.”

In mid-March, this year’s finalists were invited to attend the ceremony at the BFI South Bank. But winning and losing seem to be alien concepts to those involved.

“It’s weird to think about this ceremony as a competition,” muses Tibor Banoczki, a runner-up in the Student Film category. “Who do I compete with? We are really different directors with different tastes and approaches. It’s like a strange Olympic Games where every kind of sport competes with one another. It would be impossible to decide which category was better.”

This attitude is typical of animators, particularly as compared to industries like music or film, where auteur culture can attract hefty egos intent on hogging the limelight. Animation is usually more collaborative, with its devotees seeing themselves as sharing a common passion.

The animators we spoke to believed that animation’s current strengths revolve around its diversity as an industry, which allows animators from all areas to come together and enjoy each other’s work. An event like the BAAs is an ideal opportunity to get the thoughts of a variety of animation talent, and that’s exactly what we’ve done, hunting down insider tips and tricks from the finalists.

Craft

Luis Cook’s comically macabre piece, The Pearce Sisters, was a worthy winner of the Craft Award. The piece tells the tale of two charmingly grotesque sisters, whose desire for human contact leads them down a slightly grisly path. The process for producing the piece was, in true Aardman style, painstaking in its precision and attention to detail – and not a piece of clay in sight. Cook and his team started off by animating the blank characters and the set in 3D, before printing out the frames and animating the details in 2D. Both strands were then matched up in After Effects to achieve a hand-drawn finish. It took 18 months to complete.

The worthy runners-up were Ian Mackinnon with Adjustment – his combination of flip-book animation and live action – and Joanna Quinn with Dreams and Desires: Family Ties, showcasing her refinement with deceptively complex pencil-on-paper animation. Ian’s film follows a close relationship as it degenerates in a world where the line between an artist’s animation and live-action ‘reality’ has become increasingly indistinct.

We grilled both Ian and Luis for their views on what it takes to be a successful animator in the modern market.

Both parties assert that inspiration for their work comes from a wide variety of sources – within animation alone, Luis cites everyone from Philip Guston and Saul Steinberg to Pee-Wee Herman as having had an impact on the way he works.

For The Pearce Sisters, he did a lot of research into outsider art, particularly St Ives artists Ben Nicholson and Albert Wallis. The resulting rough-around-the-edges effect frames the tale perfectly.

Ian, who graduated from his Masters course 18 months ago, has found plenty of mutual inspiration in classmates and colleagues. “We keep in touch,” he says. “Collaboration is so important; there’s a real community element.”

Luis agrees, asserting that the industry couldn’t survive without that sense of community. “A smart director simply surrounds himself with people far more talented than himself – writers, editors, designers, animators, and sound people. He pulls it all together by keeping everyone happy with money and cake and then takes all the credit at the end,” he chuckles.

Luis’ journey from student to animator has been a varied one, passing through Berkshire College of Art and Middlesex Polytechnic before becoming a freelance illustrator and teacher. Subsequently, he produced pieces for the BBC and Royal College of Art (RCA) before becoming part of the Aardman family.

“I never intended to be an animation person; it was an accident really,” he muses. “However, as I was working as an illustrator I obviously drew a lot, so a friend of mine threw me in at the deep end and got me to work on a series for the BBC called Small Objects of Desire. That got me into the idea of moving illustration, so I applied to the RCA and VSO at the same time. VSO didn’t get back to me, so I ended up doing animation.”

Ian is also an RCA alumnus, but his path to the BAAs had a more technical base, kicking off with a degree in Computer Animation – which involved a great deal of mathematics. “That opened up a lot of ideas to me,” he recalls, suggesting that the conceptual end often comes first for him as a result.

“With Adjustment, the medium definitely inspired the story,” he admits. Indeed, the two are inextricably interlinked – the animation is the story.

From Luis’ point of view, the industry has a way of restoring balance, just when it seems as though one medium is reigning supreme. “I think it ebbs and flows. A few years ago we thought 2D was being killed by computers, but it seems to be coming back as a response to the masses of CGI features. Maybe it’s more of a cross-fertilisation. All these ways of working seem to reinvent themselves, forming a collage of old and new technologies.”

There may seem to be less sand animation, or oil-on-glass, such as Clive Walley was making in the early 1990s, in the mainstream in 2008. But rather like the winklepickers, tank-tops and drainpipe jeans of decades gone by, just when you think a trend’s been rightly ditched in the dustbin of history, suddenly it’s everywhere again, perhaps under a new name, or more interestingly, having evolved into a slightly more complex beast.

Short Film

Osbert Parker seized the award for Best Short Film firmly in both hands with his technically-precise masterpiece, Yours Truly. Using a combination of miniature 3D environments and camera-manipulated magazines and movie stills, Osbert has created a thrillingly dark tale of love and murder.

His is a fine example of how to use stop-motion technique to its full effect, as the slightly awkward, jerky movements impart an air of film noir to the proceedings.

The equally compelling runners-up were Elizabeth Hobbs with The Old, Old, Very Old Man, and the aforementioned Pearce Sisters. Elizabeth plumped for watery blue ink on white tiles, inspired by the images of Charles I on the Delftware at the British Museum: “I couldn’t have made the piece in any other way,” she asserts.

Alongside Craft, the award for Best Short Film is one of the most highly-regarded at the BAAs. Elizabeth Hobbs shares how it feels to be recognised in such a category. “I was surprised and delighted,” she smiles. “I often feel a little bit outside the animation industry because I work mostly on my own at home, only really emerging to have a drink with my producer by the canal, or to do the sound design at Fonic. Having invested so much in a film and persuaded other people to do the same, it’s nice to have the film noticed.”

The variety within even a single category emphasises the varied backgrounds that these animators have. Elizabeth, like Luis, started her journey as an illustrator. “I was writing and making artist’s books and prints, and developed the desire to make the narratives work over time. I started by making flip-books and Jacob’s Ladder books, and then took it to the next level by borrowing a camera and making two films using fuzzy felt,” she recalls.

This eventually led her in 1998 to a postgraduate degree in Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, where she started to make films using the familiar materials from her printmaking days. However, Elizabeth’s different background and approach makes her consider the process of animation in a slightly different light. “I have the feeling that the best animations come from single-minded, slightly bonkers people working on their own in the dark,” she laughs. “But I do appreciate that it is slightly different for adverts, pop videos and features.” Some types of animation do lend themselves to solo flight, and Elizabeth’s delicate techniques are among them. Ultimately, it comes down to preference, media, and how much you are willing to undertake.

Cutting Edge

This category is perhaps one of the most important, as it represents the crème de la crème of the industry’s most daringly innovative artists. Semiconductor’s Magnetic Movie was the overall winner: shot at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory in California, this stunning short film unleashes itself on reality, exploring magnetic fields by bringing them into a dimension that we can sense and appreciate.

Set to a backdrop of NASA scientists discussing their techniques, Magnetic Movie is a marvellous marriage of sound-controlled CGI and 3D compositing.

The runners-up in this category were Osbert Parker’s Yours Truly, and Interstellar Stella, produced by AL and AL. The latter sees a child model exploring the mystery of herself and her contrasting lifestyle via the advertising stills in which she’s featured. The film is a visually-stunning combination of high definition live action and 3D/2D CGI composited video. As one might expect, the techniques demonstrated by all the finalists were quite extraordinary, making it incredibly difficult to narrow it down to a single winner.

Getting in at the ground floor, we spoke to winners Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor, finding again warm words on the subject of diversity in animation: “The scope of the awards has definitely opened up the field of what is considered animation,” Joe notes. Things that were once products of the underground can use the BAAs to emerge into the mainstream – Magnetic Movie itself would not look out of place as an advertisement, and the techniques it showcases have limitless potential. However, both Ruth and Joe consider themselves to be artists over animators, and Magnetic Movie was the result of introducing time and space into their art. AL and AL also have a background in Fine Art, which they studied at St. Martin’s School of Art, graduating in 2001.

Like many of their contemporaries, the idea came before the medium, but the media bring ideas of their own. For their next project, Ruth and Joe are working on a multi-screen installation drawing on the movement of the sun and earth – still animation, but approached in a completely different, more interactive way. Of course, comments-enabled video-sharing sites like YouTube have provided a platform from which the artists can interact with the audience if they choose to do so. But is it a good idea?

“It’s nice to establish a dialogue,” admits Ruth, “and we’ve always aimed to get our work out to people. We released material on a DVD in 2001, and this is just another way of achieving that effect, only faster.”

It doesn’t seem to have harmed their success, although several of the animators we spoke to admitted to having had their hands burned by particularly harsh audience feedback – in such an subjective artform, with so much time and effort invested, criticism can cut deep.

“To an extent, you have to make up your own rules,” Joe asserts. “You have to bring yourself into everything you do, and you have to be willing to spend a lot of time on it. It’s probably one of the most time-consuming things in the world.”

As such, he warns against rushing to get your work out there for its own sake. “Don’t expect it all now – just work through your ideas, work hard, and the results are their own reward.”

Student Film

As the most grass-roots of the awards on offer, it is in the Student Film category that we may peer into animation’s future. “I think it’s good for people to collectively recognise achievements within the industry, as new standards can be set making for better things to come,” asserts George Gendi, the creator of Pingpongs, a runner-up in the category.

“Awards ceremonies also do a pretty good job in bringing everyone in the industry together in the same place at the same time. Everywhere you look you see someone you’ve met or slightly recognise. I think to give awards is to say that this is what people are enjoying at the moment, but it also highlights the direction in which things are going.”

The winners of the Student Film award (and joint winners of the Public Choice Film Award) were Tom Brown and Daniel Grey, with t.o.m., the uncomfortably curious tale of a young boy’s unusual daily routine. Originally produced for their final year project at the International Film School of Wales, the plot revolves around Little Tom’s decision to remove his clothes in order to get out of a day at school.

Using the 2D frame-by-frame effect on the computer, Tom and Daniel have demonstrated how truly flexible animation can be if you’re willing to put the hours in. Short-cuts could have been taken, but the resulting piece sympathises with the young protagonist in a way that a hastily-constructed Flash movie never could.

The runners-up in the category were Pingpongs and Milk Teeth, and we spoke to their creators, George Gendi and Tibor Banoczki, to see how they feel about their future as animators.

Also using a mixed-media technique, Pingpongs deals with the intimacy of relationships in an easily accessible manner, which is undoubtedly what has brought it to the attention of the BAA board. “Its selection affirmed for me that there are certain aspects of the film that are really strong,” George says cordially. “Ultimately, making work that lots of people can enjoy is very important to me.” This represents one of the greatest strengths of the BAAs – by recognising the quality of the work being made by students, or anyone who is at the beginning of their journey into animation, it encourages them to continue working towards their goals.

Tibor on the other hand combined photo-realistic 3D backgrounds with 2D paper cut-out characters to create the eerily tense Milk Teeth. The lack of dialogue is a masterstroke, as it sets the scene for the slightly creepy young boy who follows his elder sister to a secret rendezvous one night, and everything that transpires as a result. “We didn’t start with the story,” he recalls. “The first things we wrote down were the character of the place; the atmosphere. After that we started to think about the human characters and the plot. The medium just came after that. It was a long process to find the right visual word for the film.” He also highlights the importance of his Hungarian roots on his work – inspiration comes from life, not just from art.

As the category title would suggest, all of the finalists are recent students. Tom studied animation at the International Film School of Wales, whereas co-director Daniel studied Fine Art at the University of Wales before enrolling on the same course. Tibor graduated from Moholy-Nagy Arts University in Budapest, and more recently attended the NFTS in London, with Milk Teeth as his graduating film. So, how do the bright hopes of animation characterise the industry facing them today? Nominees in other categories have identified genres that have been less popular in recent times, but like his contemporaries, George is not too worried about what lies ahead.

“Although some sub-genres have become less popular, they can’t be replaced and they can always be found. As long as we make an effort to look for what we like if the mainstream isn’t living up to expectations, then there will always be variety, and nothing will totally die unless technology goes backwards.” Tibor agrees, and asserts that as long as animators care about the message they are putting across, the medium and its surrounding techniques will fall into place.

“Keep your talent busy,” asserts Tibor. “It’s important to have talent, but it’s equally important to keep on working. If you finish a film, start another one. It doesn’t matter what kind of film it is, or whether you have money. Just keep your mind and hands busy.”

Words: Catherine Bray

Mike Leigh’s award-winning Happy-Go-Lucky was touted as a change of pace for a director of reputedly dour films. Here, he sets the record straight and tells us exactly why he’s pleased to have made an anti-miserablist, anti-Hollywood piece of art.

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“People can talk any amount of crap they like. Anyone who wants to say Happy-Go-Lucky is devoid of social commentary is just plain stupid.” Mike Leigh is coming out fighting, or at least wearily prepared to rebuff the flurry of film press articles seemingly desperate to foist a Leigh-goes-fluffy angle on the Brit director’s latest film about chirpy primary school teacher Poppy.

“Obviously this film has got plenty to say about the way we live; the way we teach; the way we learn; the way we have relationships; the way we interact with people; the way people accumulate ideas and don’t know what to do with them. It’s a film about love; surviving; dealing with problems - I mean, you name it,” he continues. “It’s rooted in social issues, so in that sense it’s implicitly political. It’s just not a tract; it’s not a piece of propaganda of some kind.”

In non-descript slacks, military green shirt, navy sleeveless fleece and neatly-trimmed beard, Mike looks more like an off-duty bus driver when we meet in the Soho Hotel than any stereotypical mirror-shaded, mad-haired, multi-award-winning director. Mid-way through the press period for his then yet-to-be released film, the idiosyncratic director has had plenty of chance to get bored of explaining that he hasn’t made a Bridget Jones-style tale of a single London lady’s trials and tribulations.

But at least on the surface, the film in question - Happy-Go-Lucky - confounds some expectations of what a Mike Leigh film might be like. This is after all the man who brought us the neurotic, middle-class tension of Abigail’s Party, the proto-Shameless travails of Life Is Sweet, a rapist for a protagonist in Naked, the bleak backstreet abortion drama of Vera Drake, and countless other explorations of the kind of themes you won’t see Jerry Bruckheimer going near any time soon.

Happy-Go-Lucky, by contrast, follows the mostly cheery everyday adventures of a North London primary school teacher as she begins driving lessons with pitiable conspiracy theorist Scott. There are no abortions, rapes or deaths. As Mike would probably be quick to point out, this is a simplistic, plot-oriented way of arriving at the conclusion that Happy-Go-Lucky marks some kind of Pollyanna watershed in his body of work.

Mike Leigh films do all have something in common, but that something is not misery. Even his bleakest films have plenty of humour, making the Mike Leigh x-factor hard to pin down.”My impulse, my compunction, is to make films that show life in a real way, as it is,” he suggests. “So why manufacture a kind of quasi, pseudo-moral thing?”

It’s clear that in attempting to pin down common characteristics in his work, it’s almost easier to talk about what a film is not. Which is precisely what Mike does when I suggest that it’s good to see a wholesome character not punished somehow for her wide-eyed approach to life: “The putative film you’re implicitly invoking, which is the film where somebody’s goodness comes back to haunt them, is simply another sort of film with another set of preoccupations.”

Such precise, almost lawyerly, language - putative, implicit, invoke - betrays an interviewee who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and, you sense, has had to deal with a number of misconceived interpretations of this film.Mike states baldly: “I’m not concerned to create synthetic plot-lines, and patronise the audience accordingly. People have said, ‘Why doesn’t something horrible happen to her?’ Actually, when she’s finally in the car with Scott in that last driving lesson, it pretty well does, but she knows how to deal with it.”

It’s from the apparent cul-de-sac of imaginary patronising films that one of Mike’s central concerns emerges: the irrelevance of Hollywood to what he sees as worthwhile in film. I ask why films crammed with synthetic plotlines that patronise the audience are so popular - people seem to watch them?

“The question is not so much why people watch them: they watch them because they’re there,” he argues. “Why are those films there? is the question. And the answer to that, I’m afraid, goes back to the roots of how cinema in the world functions. Somewhere during the First World War, and then helped by the entry into the Second World War of the United States, Hollywood started to dominate the world market with the ethos that films have to be simplistic and formulaic. Sadly, we’re all imbued with that.”

As his new film suggests, it’s not all doom and gloom in the film industry according to Mike. “Actually, at any given moment - even as we speak - there are all sorts of interesting, entertaining, important films being made in different languages that don’t embrace those formulaic criteria.”It’s a bracket in which this director would place his own work: “I see my films in a world cinema context, not an Anglo-Hollywood context. But people see film this way, and watch Hollywood pictures, because that’s what’s there.”What’s there is starting to change with the advent of long-tail distribution, something Mike implicitly welcomes: “The good news is, partly because some barriers have been broken down and partly because of DVD, what people are watching is getting to be more comprehensive.”

But what constitutes a good film? The London-based director is certainly not anti-American per se. Just one of his favourite recent films, Irish effort Garage, doesn’t hail from the States, although the directors he salutes - the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jason Reitman - are broadly on the indie side of things.Expanding on what makes a good film, the idea of veracity is crucial to Mike: “To me, a film can only be interesting if it’s rooted in reality. Things can only be funny if they’re rooted in reality, and things can only be tragic if they’re rooted in reality. All those elements, so far as I’m concerned, are on the go in this film.”

All of this is central to understanding how this director works. His ‘process’ is legendary, and it repels some actors just as it repeatedly attracts others, with regulars having included Timothy Spall, Alison Steadman (Mike’s ex-wife), Lesley Manville and Jim Broadbent.There is no script for a Mike Leigh film, simply an idea, and a lengthy rehearsal process will involve workshopping characters, improvising dialogue and scenes, with Mike then tying the emergent material into a collaborative, coherent whole. As the man himself - who has been tagged ‘Britain’s Bergman’ - puts it: “Films like this come out of a warm, sharing collaboration. The whole thing about directing, authority and all those things isn’t really relevant.”

Beginning his career with a stint at RADA and a couple of 1963 bit-part TV and film roles, Mike is hugely enthusiastic about acting as a craft. “I love it. I love actors. Having started life training as an actor, to me my mission in life is to elevate acting to being a creative art, and to elevate actors to being creative artists, not just people who show up, read their lines and, like we used to say, don’t fall over the furniture.”

It’s a subject on which Mike can enthuse at length, and in doing so, he loosens up a lot. He expresses deep affection for his band of regulars and when asked whether he keeps up with the careers of favourites like Timothy Spall his accent broadens as he replies with a cackle, “Can’t help it mate! If Tim’s on I’ll go out of my way to see it. I stay friends with actors and hang out with them.”

It’s a far cry from Alfred Hitchcock’s infamous statement: “Actors are cattle.” Although Hitch would later amend this - “I never said actors were cattle; all I said was that actors should be treated as cattle” - it’s still a world away as a sentiment from Mike’s avowed interest in the actor as an involved artist, and his proud passion for the level of talent on offer in this country. “The thing is, you know, we are blessed with fantastic actors here in the UK. There are too many very good actors I’d like to work with for me to ever get around to working with all of them.”

Luckily for Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan and the rest of the cast, Mike did find the time to work with them, resulting in what has been described as Sally’s break-out role, and the latest in Eddie’s string of successful character roles, which have seen him work with everyone from Tom Cruise on Mission Impossible III to Terrence Malick on The New World.

In Happy-Go-Lucky, this collaborative journey of cast and crew has resulted in what the film’s director describes as “a bright, energetic, positive experience that, I hope, makes you feel like life is worth living. But within it are darknesses and sadnesses of various kinds, and in various places, which are there for Poppy to react to, deal with and care about. As such, hopefully it’s a complex film - for all that it has its comic and celebratory side.”

The ‘brightness’ of the film refers not only emotional timbre, but quite literally to its kaleidoscopic palette. With vibrant cobalt blues, tiger-lily oranges and screaming magenta leaping off the screen, Happy-Go-Lucky doesn’t look quite like the majority of Mike Leigh films, and it’s the first time he’s used widescreen. “That reflects the energy and explosiveness of the film, as does the colour,” he explains.

While Mike insists that his directorial attitude has remained consistent across the lifespan of his career, he’s happy to admit to having refined his work stylistically. “All artists, the more you do, the more you learn, you hone your skills, and in some ways you may move on. In principle I’m doing the same kind of thing. Apart from anything else, Nuts in May is delightful - but it’s a very crude piece of film-making, done very quickly. Happy-Go-Lucky is a highly-sophisticated, beautiful piece of film-making.”

He’s also stuck close to home for much of his career: true to form, you’ll see a lot of London in Happy-Go-Lucky, although Mike insists that it’s something of a red-herring to regard the city as integral to the action, as some reviews have. “London becomes an implicit character in the film, but it’s not a film about London as such. You could make the film anywhere. I’ve made lots of films in London, because it’s cheaper. We can’t really afford to go away from base.”

As our interview draws to a close, I wonder, broadly speaking, whether it’s possible to fit Happy-Go-Lucky into a narrative of current trends in British film, or British film, perhaps, as it should be? Mike’s reply suggests that for all his reputation for social critique, he wouldn’t want to be too didactic about things.

“Happy-Go-Lucky is one film. There’s all kinds of stuff that’s going on. I’ve already implicitly expressed a view about films that are made for cynical reasons. But to be honest, I’m not really disposed to say, ‘Well this is how films should be, Poppy’s the sort of character we should see more of,’ or anything like that. This is this film. I think, and I suppose I hope, that it’s quite unique in its own way, with its own box of tricks.”

Love or hate Happy-Go-Lucky - and there will be plenty of people who find a character as determinedly positive as Poppy irritating - in an age in which we’re constantly being told we’re all heading to hell in a handbasket, it’s refreshing to encounter film-making that walks a path between straightforward escapism and miserablist hand-wringing.Mike views this through the prism that is his central character: “Poppy’s a teacher. She’s like many millions of people in the world who are getting on with it. Yes, we’re destroying the planet, we’re destroying each other - it’s bad news. But this is not a planet entirely populated by a lot of people sitting around committing suicide and wringing their hands. People are out there getting on with it, and not least the people who are teaching children. In that sense I wanted to make an anti-miserablist film.”

The type of character who just gets on with it, helps others and acts unselfishly has an interesting history in the Anglo-Hollywood films from which Mike aims to distance himself. Commonly, an impulse to save and protect individuals or people en masse culminates in self-sacrifice, whether of life or self-interest. It’s a narrative thread you can find in most genres, from cheesy big-budget action behemoths (think of Bruce Willis exploding himself to unintentionally hilarious effect in Armageddon to save the world, his friends and especially his hot daughter), to popularly acclaimed classics (see: Humphrey Bogart letting the woman he loves go in Casablanca).

In Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy’s nurturing drive to protect and save people doesn’t demand a sacrifice of this type, placing the film outside of the conventional path followed by this type of character. This is partly a function of the genre - not too many north London primary teachers are called upon to sacrifice life or love for the good of humankind - but also of a desire to step outside convention. Or am I wrong? “No, I don’t think that’s wrong,” responds Mike. “I think the point is it’s not a simplistic film that you can easily sum up. I hope it works, if it works, because it’s real and therefore the characters are real and resonant and layered.”

Clearly Mike Leigh is a director who cares about the experience of watching his films, as well as making them. What is he aiming for in this respect with Happy-Go-Lucky? “You go on an emotional journey when you watch this film. People have said, ‘I watched this film and I felt good and positive,’ but some people have also said, ‘I actually felt I wanted to cry,’ so you go through a lot of things.”

“Lots of people have told me that they assumed because it was called Happy-Go-Lucky, and because everything seemed to be going so well, that something bad would happen. They’ve said, ‘I thought I was being manipulated.’” And here, the man who has just released his first avowedly anti-miserablist film, twinkles with a rare smile. “You’re not being manipulated. Not by me.”