CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 10/10/08

Put Your Pencils Down:
Happy-Go-Lucky's Mike Leigh

By peter clines

The unconventional writer-director of Topsy Turvy talks about the latest film he didn't write.

If you want to insult a screenwriter, tell him or her that their work is "just a blueprint." And yet even the most fervent defender of the writers' rights will admit there is a small degree of truth to this. The script is more than just words for the actors and scenes for the director. It's how cinematographers and electricians know to plan for day or night shooting. It's what the assistant director makes the schedule from and where location scouts get their lists of sets. Costume designers, prop masters, stuntmen—all of them work from the script to prep and plan what they'll need for the film.

Unless, of course, your writer-director happens to be Mike Leigh.

Leigh refuses to use a written script, or any written material at all, making movies where his actors create characters and dialogue to fit in his free-form stories (a situation that would cause Borat-sized headaches for credit arbitration and award ceremonies in the States). His latest film, Happy-Go-Lucky, lands in theaters this weekend.

Happy-Go-Lucky is the tale of Poppy (Sally Hawkins), an eternally optimistic, constantly cheerful grade school teacher, as she makes her way through life. She spends her days with her students, her evenings with her best friend, Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), and her weekends finally learning how to drive through the instruction of short-tempered conspiracy theorist Scott (Eddie Marsan). Despite troubles at work, challenges after hours, and the unexpected obsessions of Scott, Poppy keeps smiling and cracking jokes in every quiet moment of whatever conversation she's in.

Leigh took a few moments early in his press rounds for the film to talk with CS Weekly about collaborating with actors, his unusual methods, and his scorn of paper.

I guess the first real question, which you've probably got once or twice before, is why not just write a script?
Well, I wouldn't know how to get the results. I guess it depends whether you think what's on the screen is different from other films in any way. I try to do something that's completely total and organic. To sit in a room and put things down on paper is not filmmaking to me; it's just putting things on paper. And then you've got to find actors to interpret that, and you typically go through some kind of secondary process to make that happen. I like to collaborate with actors, to create characters, to explore, and to discover what the film is by actually doing it. So, the actual notion of a script doesn't come into it. The honest answer to your question is, I've been working my way since 1965 and I really wouldn't contemplate trying to do that whole thing. I wouldn't know how to do it, basically. The dividing line between writing and directing for me doesn't exist. They're two parts of a total process.

Did you even try working with a traditional script when you first started out?
It's irrelevant. No. And I've never tried being a space navigator, either, or a brain surgeon. [laughs]

What's the first step for you? Do you come up with a very basic, core idea?
It depends on the film. It's something very fluid. Take Happy-Go-Lucky. I had a feeling for what it was, but I couldn't have been very articulate about it. Fortunately, given the way my films are made and the nature of the backers—which is to say, they accept that they don't know what the film's going to be, they just give us the money—I don't have to try to justify anything before it's happened. So what I do, it depends on the film, but in the case of Happy-Go-Lucky I had kind of a general feeling for the spirit of the thing, and that really motivated my decisions by way of how I proceeded with the actors. One of the central premises of this particular film was to make a film with Sally Hawkins at the center, because she's been in my two previous films and she's very brilliant and I decided to give her the spotlight, so to speak.

How many cast members do you pull in for these initial sessions of bouncing ideas around?
Well, I actually start working with people one on one. I don't have everybody all there at the beginning. I structure it for them, they're contracted to join in gradually over the course. We rehearsed that film for about six months before we started shooting. But that's preparing the premise of the film. That's discovering the premise of the film through a great deal of discussion, the invention of characters, putting them together and exploring their lives, research, a lot of improvisation, and arriving at the premise of the film. But then we go out on location and I make the film up as I go along, really. So it's a very long process. As I say, the journey of making the film is a journey of discovery as to what the film is.

How long did Happy-Go-Lucky take, from the point you'd consider as "starting to work on it" until camera wrap?
Well, since "starting to work on it" includes casting it—because obviously casting is critical in all films, but in this particular case because there's nothing except the quality of the actors you get. We spent six months in rehearsals and just over three months shooting it and we spent a standard three or four months in post-production.

Do people only work on their own sections, or does everyone work on everything, like workshopping a play? For example, did Eddie Marsan work on any material not centered around the driving scenes?
No. First of all, the deal with every actor in my film is that when I ask them to take part I say, "Look, I can't tell you what it is. We're going to invent the character. We know nothing about it." And also I tell them, I say to each of them, "You will never know anything about the film other than what your character knows." So he would only have worked on—well, he didn't work on only the driving lesson scenes, because obviously part of what it's about is inventing the whole life of the character and researching things that bring that to life. To go back to your first question, about working conventionally, apart from anything else, I hope that on screen you get a kind of resonance of realness, which derives from the fact that you really have built up the whole lives of the characters, finally arriving at whatever is present in the action of the film.

When you're doing all this, how much do you guide these discussions?
Well, the thing is, I am a writer-director. My job is to make a coherent, dramatic, cinematic, filmic, narratively logical film with a beginning, middle, and an end. I guide it completely, because that's what I have to do. Of course, it would be ridiculous if I didn't also take from things that happened organically and spontaneously or there'd be no point in doing the thing. So both things happen, but of course I have to guide it, because otherwise it would be a great random shamble.

Seeing some of the incredible back-and-forth, rapid-fire lines of dialogue, does material get committed to paper at any point, or is this still free-form right up until the cameraman calls speed?
No, forget paper. Paper doesn't come into it. But everything is rehearsed precisely. What you're really asking me isn't to do with paper; it's to do with whether the actors rehearse the lines. And they have. I don't know how many of my films you've seen, presumably quite a few, but you've seen enough of them to know the writing is very refined writing. There's not much in the way of improvised dialogue. It's obviously very precise, which is what you're actually asking about. That's because, through rehearsal, I take it from improvisation into something that is very tightly scripted. But it's scripted by rehearsing. Paper doesn't come into it. They know what to say because they've rehearsed it.

What does the crew do if there's no script? How does the AD create a schedule? How do props or wardrobe do prep?
Well, that's all part of the job. In the end, my producer always says, "It's like making a conventional movie only more so." Everyone understands what's going on so completely because we've created it so thoroughly in the first place. During the rehearsals, as we talked about, it's not just about what the actors do. The production team, the production design team, the costume designer, the makeup, everybody works with me and the actors over a long period, preparing and understanding the characters. Therefore, the props and everything are all very thoroughly worked out so it's very, very precise. It's more precise than movies often are.

When you get to editing do your stories tend to change there or do they stay pretty solid?
No, only in the sense that films always do. I mean, at the end of the day, you and I both know that, classically, movies are made in the cutting room. Whatever you shoot is raw material. But what I shoot is very different. It's very worked out. I always like a structure of some kind before a film starts shooting, but it's a very, very broad thing. It's not a script as such. It's something that's there, that stands as a kind of framework or a scaffolding for the shoot, from which I happily deviate and develop as the thing goes. So, what we take to the cutting room is very well-organized footage, but it is raw footage. In the end, it's all about sticking it together and playing around with it, but on the whole, it doesn't change substantially.

Do you do reshoots ever?
No. We'd never have to. It's never cropped up.

Is this process always the same, or have you changed it over time as you keep working with it?
It's always changing. It changes with each film in particular ways. But overall, in principle, it's the same since I've started.

Where do your actual titles come from? Do people pitch in on those as well?
I make them up, same as the films. Part of the problem from a lot of people's point of view, not least in Hollywood, is it's very hard for people to get their heads around the idea that anybody actually makes everything up. It doesn't all come from secondary sources of some kind. But it's the case. It's about making things up.

What would your advice be to someone who wants to become a writer-director?
Never compromise.

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.


Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky courtesy Miramax

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