Keeping it real

Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste at the San Sebastian press conference Photo: Amber Wilkinson

Veteran filmmaker Mike Leigh and the star of his latest film, Hard Truths, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, have been in San Sebastian this week, where the film - which focuses on a mum with mental health issues and her family - is screening in Competition. She plays Pansy, a harried middle-aged woman who is angry at the world, not to mention her 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) and husband Curtley (David Webber). She’s also tired of it, as she repeatedly tells her hairdresser sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), who is a force of warmth against the fierce misanthropy of Pansy.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh's Hard Truths Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival

It’s 28 years since the pair of them collaborated on Secrets & Lies and, at the press conference, I asked whether that might make things easier in terms of building character, since Leigh is known for creating characters from the ground up with his actors before they work on the film’s scenarios. As he put it: “We start the film with no script and we build the film as we’re making the film”.

Leigh adds: “I think it’s great to collaborate with people you’ve worked with before, but it’s totally academic. I feel as if I have just as much creative success with people I’ve never worked with. Apart from Michele Austin, who plays Chantelle, I’ve never worked with any of these actors before but after five minutes it becomes organic, creative and collaborative.”

Considering the process itself and whether the actors ever hit roadblocks or have any sort of moments of doubt about the characters they are creating, Jean-Baptiste notes that it all comes down to “trust”. She adds: “Yes, you do hit those roadblocks, because you don’t know what you’re doing. You just know the stuff that is affecting your character so whatever any of the other actors are doing outside of the scenes that they’re in with you, you have no clue. You don’t know what’s going to happen the next day. So, yes, you go through those moments when you think, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’, but it is about trusting the process.”

Leigh adds: “I have job to do, which is to make a coherent film with a beginning, a middle and an end, and to hit the deadline of being there to start shooting it when that’s the plan. And to collaborate with the costume designer and the cinematographer in planning all those things. My own process is no different from what happens to all painters of paintings, writers of novels, writers of plays, writers of poetry, musicians, sculptors, even potters. How many novelists have you heard say, ‘Well, I didn’t know what was going to happen and suddenly it went in this direction or that direction’? That is in the nature of the creative process and that’s what we do when we make such films as this one.”

The word tragicomic could hardly be more appropriate for a film, which often has us laughing out loud as Pansy rails against everything from bows on babies and pigeons to furniture store assistants but also delivers poignancy as she and her family struggle to find moments of connection.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Mike Leigh in San Sebastian Photo: Jorge Fuembuena/Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival

“I was born in the war and I grew up in the 1940s and 50s in a world where honest communication between families was rare, which may explain why I make these films,” says Leigh, although as he points out Chantelle has a very strong connection with her daughters.

He adds: “Life is a comedy. Life is ridiculous. I think its very sad and I think it’s very funny because that’s what life is. People laugh and slowly the laughter dies away but it’s not that i has ‘stopped’ being anything. It’s still real. So far as I’m concerned, the main thing is that it’s real and you can relate to it.”

He went on to ask press conference attendees to put our hands up if we had never laughed at a funeral, to a show of no hands, adding: “Thank you.”

Leigh says he never plans films in a schematic way. “The things that happen in the film are all about establishing the problem, establishing the characters, the relationships, and then the latter part of the film, obviously, is about digging into those issues and in some way investigating them.”

Talking about her character’s trajectory, Jean-Baptiste adds: “We went in order and, as the story developed, we just went where it went. She encountered all these different people, you got to see who she was and then you have this moment when she has to look at herself. Then it shifts quite naturally and organically. As Mike was saying, it doesn’t work in the formulaic way of the 10-page surprise, then you get the obstacle thrown in and then they overcome whatever they’re supposed to overcome by page 40 of the script. He doesn’t work in that way.”

Leigh adds: “As Marianne says, it’s completely organic and about the truth of what’s going on.

Hard Truths will have its UK premiere at the London Film Festival next month and is currently scheduled to be released on January 31 by Studiocanal in the UK.