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No one tells Mike Leigh what his movie is about. Not financiers, not distributors, not even Netflix, which he says could fund him “without batting an eyelid” but never has. At 83, Leigh is exactly the man he has always
been: an artist with integrity. He’s telling this story to prove it.
At the Savoy Hotel in London, a year or so after the 1997 Academy Awards, Harvey Weinstein received Leigh in his room in a bathrobe, a young woman seated in the corner. Weinstein offered the director a line he has never forgotten: “I could have gotten you those Oscars.”
Leigh had come to the Savoy to talk about financing a film he had in the hopper — “Topsy-Turvy,” about the 15-month period leading up to the 1885 premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera “The Mikado”; he had not come to relitigate the night Miramax’s “The English Patient” won nine Oscars and Leigh’s British independent drama “Secrets & Lies,” nominated for five awards, went home empty-handed. This was back when Weinstein ruled independent film, and here he was, the most powerful man in that business, boasting that his awards machine could have delivered the statuettes. Leigh made “Topsy-Turvy” without him.
That refusal is the through line in one of the most distinctive bodies of work in modern cinema. Across more than 50 years and some 20 features, Leigh has been called the poet laureate of British working- and middle-class life. His subjects are deceptively ordinary: A lonely factory worker meets the daughter she gave up for adoption (“Secrets & Lies”); a kindly backstreet abortionist is arrested in 1950s London (“Vera Drake”); an irrepressibly cheerful schoolteacher refuses to be ground down (“Happy-Go-Lucky”). His career is built on a single nonnegotiable principle: Leigh walks into meetings with no script, no plot, no cast list — only his word — and for decades, first at the BBC and later across the independent world, someone says yes, they’ll put up the money.
Now someone has said yes one more time, and it may be the last. Bleecker Street is funding “Tender Loving Care,” Leigh’s sweet, funny study of two social workers, their family and the people they look after. It’s the lowest-budgeted feature of Leigh’s career, and, he says with some reluctance, almost certainly his final film.
On a Zoom from his home in London, he leans into the webcam. He nearly fills the frame — a shock of white beard, tortoiseshell glasses, a checked shirt under a soft gray vest, a sunlit sage green room with a wall of bright pictures behind his shoulder. He is warm, funny and still gloriously spicy: happy to curse, to needle his interviewer, to wave off a question he finds “daft.” Contending with myosotis — a muscle-wasting condition that has left him unsteady on his feet and will keep him from the film’s Telluride premiere — he is clear-eyed about the math. In terms of energy and ideas, the work “wouldn’t be a problem,” he says; the body is another matter.
“Tender Loving Care” plays like a farewell — to cinema, and to movie lovers — though Leigh insists it may not be. The film, wry and melancholy, follows Amy (Kate O’Flynn), freshly gutted by a breakup, as she moves in with her childhood best friend, Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), a fellow social worker estranged from her family. Around them orbit Amy’s long-married parents, Birdie (Marion Bailey) and Geoff (Paul Jesson).
There is beauty and connection in the casting. Marion Bailey — Leigh’s partner for more than two decades — plays the mother. Bailey’s daughter from another marriage, Alice Bailey Johnson, plays the best friend. They aren’t relatives on-screen, yet a real mother and daughter share the frame in a film about who holds us up when we can’t do it ourselves. At the center is O’Flynn, whom Leigh first cast in “Happy-Go-Lucky,” now an Emmy frontrunner for “Widow’s Bay” and, on the strength of this performance, a film award contender too. “He gave me pretty much my first job, in ‘Happy-Go-Lucky,’ when I was 21,” O’Flynn says. “Working with him on probably his last film, 20 years later, is special. No one works like Mike. You’re treated as an artist; you’re creating from the ground up. There’s no scaffolding. It’s terrifying-slash-liberating.”
Leigh and I spoke about the film, the finality and the half-century behind both.
Where did the title come from?
I always title the films absolutely last, as late as possible. It’s about the two social workers, yes, but also the old couple, the girls, people caring for each other. “Tender Loving Care” felt so obvious, I thought, “We can’t call it that.” Everybody said, “No, call it that.” So we did.
So much of that is the friendship between Amy (O’Flynn) and her best friend Rosie (Bailey Johnson). Can you talk about writing Rosie as an extension of a family she’s not related to by blood? Can you talk about writing Rosie as an extension of a family she’s not related to by blood?
We develop these characters through collaboration with the actors — discussion, improvisation and a long rehearsal before we shoot. These are women in their late 30s, still single, who’ve been through relationships and are still trying, who could have had kids and haven’t, committed to their work and to enjoying themselves. I wanted the tension between good-time girls and responsible women — and they’re both.
My sons are in their mid-40s, and there are people they’ve known since childhood who are part of our world. It’s that whole web of long relationships that matter.
You build films around people you know intimately. Marion Bailey has been your partner for many years.
Marion and I being partners, and Alice being her daughter, are good, but it’s neither here nor there.
Birdie has a line — “In the old house, before we moved” — that hands the character an entire history in half a sentence. How much do you think about a character’s past?
A lot. Throughout the film you learn how Birdie and Geoff first met, about Amy as a wayward 14-year-old, about the woman who comes around having lost her husband. It’s always there in my films, but this one does it a great deal — because the audience needs to understand these people in more than three dimensions.
Where does a Mike Leigh film start? When you finish one, do you know what the next will be?
Those are two questions. I don’t do the conventional thing: think what the movie is, sit down, write it. I discover the film on the journey of making it. I start with notions, then work as people paint pictures or write novels: You embark, you get clues back and that dictates where you go next. And it’s not just me — it’s an interaction with the actors and things that happen through improvisation.
In crude terms: having made “Hard Truths,” which for all its strength had a negativity to it, in terms of what Pansy was like, I thought, let’s make a film that, as a corollary, has a positivity. That’s a jumping-off point. The rest is dictated by practicalities. This is a contained piece because of the restrictions on how we made it — but that liberates the idea. You operate within the parameters, and it stimulates it.
You walk into financiers’ offices and ask for the money with no plot or script — just “Trust me.” Could a first-time Mike Leigh get that meeting today, let alone the cash?
The terrible news is probably not. I was extremely lucky in the early days. There have been plenty of times we’ve been told to fuck off by people who could have paid. The problem now isn’t that the money isn’t there; it’s that the people with it want to control things, to interfere. Somebody who won’t tell you what it’s about or who’s in it, and doesn’t want to be interfered with, is anathema to them.
Back in the ’70s and ’80s, when you couldn’t make independent features in the U.K. at all, the BBC would say, “We don’t know what it’s about; we don’t know who’s in it. But here’s the budget; here’s the deadline; go and make a film.” My first film, “Bleak Moments,” was backed by Albert Finney, who’d made money on “Tom Jones.” Complete freedom.
It would be tough now.
Has the way films get financed changed the kind of films that get made?
I’m reluctant to pontificate, because the trap in that question is concluding no young filmmakers make interesting films — and that’s not true. This is international cinema, not just Hollywood or Britain. At any given moment, interesting independent films get made, by hook or by crook. People find their own ways. We must be careful not to say no decent films get made anymore, because there are loads of them.
You’ve said this is probably your last film. Is that really the case?
The truth is I’m somewhat handicapped. Making this film was great; people were very helpful. Even if we decided to make another, it wouldn’t get made for two years. I’m 83, and I don’t know what state I’ll be in at 85, if I’m still here. I say it reluctantly, because in terms of energy and ideas, it wouldn’t be a problem. Those around me keep saying there must be a way. I’m skeptical.
Was there a moment on set, or when you were writing, when you decided this could be your final film?
I don’t, honestly. It’s gradually grown.
Does that truth bother you?
I fluctuate. One minute, “Great. I don’t have to worry about that again.” The next, “Making films is a joyous thing, a gas — I love it.” So not doing it again is frustrating. But, like life, you move on.
Talk about this stunning cast quartet you have assembled — Kate O’Flynn, Marion Bailey, Alice Bailey Johnson and Paul Jesson.
Kate [O’Flynn] is completely devoid of bullshit. She and I come from within a couple of miles of each other in Manchester. She’s down to earth, practical, with a massive sense of humor and no ego — though that’s true of everyone I work with. She’s a consummate character actor, and what she does in “Widow’s Bay” is phenomenal. A fantastic character actor, a great human being and very funny. She’s a hoot.
Marion [Bailey] has a great sense of character, a great sense of humor, easy to work with, a consummate character actor who can become somebody else entirely. But what she taps into here is her empathy and compassion. I agree she’s underrated. And then Paul Jesson — incredibly versatile, great gravitas, a joy — he’ll do anything, no fuss. The guy’s 80 and he just does it. No bullshit; he delivers the goods, with a great sense of humor. He and Marion have worked together with me a few times. Old team.
Alice [Bailey Johnson] has been around, but she hasn’t had the breaks she should have. What she and Marion achieve is a confidence, a freedom — and there’s nothing instant about it; it has to be grown and nurtured. It’s a flawless cast, down to the briefest parts. Bríd Brennan, a great Irish actress, appears very briefly as a madwoman on the ground who doesn’t want to be interfered with — and she just came and did me a favor. These are the cream of character actors.
And we should talk about Lucy Bristow (cinematographer). All my films were shot by Dick Pope. He died a couple of years ago, very sadly. Lucy worked with Dick and me for years — she was a trainee before I even worked with Dick, then a focus puller and second-camera operator. It was natural for her to shoot this, and she does a fantastic job — very understated, direct, beautifully done. I’m really proud of her.
More than 50 years, from “Bleak Moments” in ’71 to now — is there a through line you can see?
That’s hard. It all leads up to this moment. I could ask you the same. How old are you?
42.
So can you look back at 42 years and see what led to this moment?
Both yes and no — I get impostor syndrome, that feeling I’m not supposed to be here, that others worked harder. Does that happen to you?
All the time. And because the film has only just emerged and people like you are reacting to it, I’m astonished at how they’re reacting. It’s not that I don’t understand why — it’s still a surprise. Every day for six weeks at the start of the year, I’d get in a car, be driven across London in the dark, and slave through what we had to do. It was pleasant, everyone was good — but you don’t think, this’ll be a movie everyone loves or hates.
I don’t like a world where I don’t think a new Mike Leigh movie is ever coming out again. Most filmmakers and artists ever know which one will be their last. How are you feeling about that?
I’m not really thinking about it as the last movie. Thinking of it that way isn’t the same as knowing I’m unlikely to make shoot. These are two different things.
This film doesn’t have a label in my head that says “last movie.” It just is what it is. What is happening — which happens to old people, and I am an old person — is that you look back over the years, how things developed, where you were at each stage. But on the whole, we’ve got away with it.
Let’s talk about your Oscars history. Seven nominations — five for writing, two for directing — and no win yet. Is there one loss that stings?
You’d love to win; you’re not surprised when you don’t. I won’t score votes for saying it, but it’s one of the worst-organized events, and I am shambles. What I care about is people seeing the film.
Is there a film of yours you can’t watch anymore — or one you’d happily sit through tonight?
I’m fond of “Meantime.” Honestly, I have a privilege many filmmakers don’t: I quite like my films.
People ask if I ever watch them — yes, especially with an audience at a gig. A lot of filmmakers can’t watch their own films, because it’s not the film they wanted; it was interfered with by the backers. That’s never happened to me. Everything on screen is what I wanted there. I’m not Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard,” watching my movies every night, but I can watch them. Last Christmas Day, Marion and I put on “Topsy-Turvy” and thoroughly enjoyed it.
What would you tell a young filmmaker starting out?
Never compromise. Never say, “This isn’t really what I believe in, but if I do it, then I’ll get to do what I want.” That’s bullshit. Stick to your guns.
Any regrets, as a filmmaker, or in life?
Big ones — and this isn’t a joke. For “Topsy-Turvy,” “Mr. Turner” and “Peterloo,” we got much bigger budgets because we could say what they were about: Gilbert and Sullivan, Turner, the Peterloo massacre in Manchester in 1819. I always wanted to make a contemporary film on that scale — big-budget, multifaceted characters — where I couldn’t tell you anything about it in advance. I tried and failed endlessly, and I’m gutted I probably never will now. Even if I decided to, I couldn’t handle something that size physically. That’s my big regret — I could have made a film, maybe several, with a broader canvas. I regret it bitterly. People said, well, we can’t really — when of course they could have, easily.
And how’s Mike Leigh feeling today — at peace, grateful, restless?
It’s a chaotic world, and you’re calling from a chaotic country — the sooner they get rid of you-know-who, the better. They probably won’t let me in now that I’ve said that.
Do you think you have room in your home for me, my wife and two kids? We make good houseguests.
The problem is, you’re not invited, I’m afraid. You don’t stand a chance.
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