eddie marsan

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.

Click to enlarge/shrink. Left/right arrows cycle through images.

“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.”