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Mike Leigh with Sally Hawkins, who plays a primary school teacher in Happy-Go-Lucky |
Mike Leigh: Happy talk
He may admit Happy-Go-Lucky is ‘anti-miserabilist’, but director Mike Leigh isn’t smiling as he tells Simon Wroe about his new film based in
Camden Town
WATCH Sally Hawkins cycling through Holborn to the jovial harrumphs of a brass band, her halcyon clubbing episode at Koko or the several visits to Camden Market throughout Happy-Go-Lucky and you could be forgiven for thinking Mike Leigh’s latest film is a paean to north London.
Just don’t try telling Leigh what his film is about.
“London is where we made the film and therefore it becomes an implicit character in the film, but it’s not a film about London – you could make the film anywhere,” he says curtly when quizzed on his location choices during an interview round-robin. “It’s about what it’s about.”
Despite living much of his adult life in Camden (he currently resides in Bloomsbury) and “very, very glad” to be a resident of the borough again after a period living in Wood Green, the British director is not about to confer false accolades.
The reason it is shot in Camden, he tells me, is a simple matter of expedience: the film crew found an abandoned British Telecom building in an industrial estate behind Tufnell Park Tube station and this became the centre of the film’s universe.
“These films are always born in a rehearsal space,” says Leigh. “We rehearse for six months.
“We started to improvise the driving lessons around Tufnell Park, then we found a flat in Finsbury Park that was interesting and gradually we began to put down roots. Once you create a reality you go for it.”
Hawkins’s character Poppy, which won her the Silver Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, is the eponymous heroine of the piece: a primary school teacher so perennially upbeat, so unfalteringly optimistic, that the average cynic will shrivel up in disgust on first contact with her, sure as a slug to salt.
Give her character a little time, however, and you may find yourself coming around to her colour-blind wardrobe and idiosyncratic world- view, told through a series of improvised vignettes – Leigh’s preferred method of working.
Poppy is certainly less irksome than the saccharine Amelie that Leigh’s film has been compared to by some critics, who were surprised the 65-year-old director famous for the bleak, kitchen-sink realism of films such as Secrets and Lies and Naked had made a film largely devoid of suffering or despair.
Leigh happily acknowledges he has made an “anti-miserabilist” film but is quick to debunk any overzealous readings of his new work this might engender.
When one gushing interviewer asks him if this is the way all films should be made, without recourse to tragedy, Leigh looks incredulous: “Look, Happy-Go-Lucky is a film. I’m not really disposed to begin to say this is how films should be.”
Another asks a convoluted question about directorial hegemony and Leigh replies bluntly: “I could patronisingly invent a smart-alec answer to that, but honestly it’s not a question of any relevance.
“A film like this comes out of a warm, sharing collaboration.”
Before anyone else can tell him what his film is about he continues: “People can talk any amount of crap they like really. If anyone was to say Happy-Go-Lucky is devoid of social comment then that’s just plain stupid because obviously it’s got plenty to say about the way we teach, the way we learn, the way we have relationships, the way people accumulate ideas.
“It’s rooted in social issues but it’s not a tract. To me, a film can only be interesting if it’s rooted in reality.
“It is overall a bright, energetic experience that I hope makes you feel that it’s worth living. But within it are darknesses and sadnesses of various kinds.
“As such it’s hopefully a complex film.
“People say ‘Why doesn’t something horrible happen to Poppy?’ There is nothing in the film that suggests that something bad is going to happen.
“You’re not being manipulated, not by me. I’m not concerned to create synthetic plotlines that patronise the audience.
“To me, it’s my impulse to make films that show life in a real way.”
This, says Leigh, is the chimera of Hollywood: the notion that films have to be simplistic and formulaic.
“Sadly, we’re all imbued with that.
“But at any given moment there are all kinds of films being made around the world which don’t embrace those formulaic criteria.
“I see my films in a world cinema context, not an Anglo-Hollywood context.”
How Leigh sees his films, others would do well to observe.
• Happy-Go-Lucky is out on April 18 |
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