Thomas Harris chats with filmmaker Mike Leigh…
Mike Leigh may be our formative filmmaker. His career has spanned close to fifty years, encompassing the minutiae of interpersonal relationships and tackling epics with that same deft touch.
His latest, Peterloo is his most expansive piece; a sprawling epic that, as with his other films, finds the personal stories amongst the grandiose.
I had the opportunity to chat with Leigh about the fear of the future, the prescience of Peterloo and his experiences working with longtime collaborator Dick Pope.
Could you talk about the search for authenticity? The world feels worn, down to the piecrust and industrial smog…
Well you’re familiar with my films I’m going to guess, and I’m in the business of making a world that feels real, showing people life and how it is. In a way there is a prevailing convention of period films in the many of them, what you’re looking at doesn’t have the sense of the real world; it’s a sort of idealised, sexified chocolate box world. And obviously it goes without saying that it’s [Peterloo] not what it’s about because indeed the joy of making the dramas about life is the texture and grain of the real world. So that’s really what it’s about, and you know, the fact that we’re two hundred years on, so that’s where we are, so lets get stuck in and bring that to life.
And I’m presuming you worked directly with historians? The vast crowd scenes create the sense of intrusion…
Well one particular historian, Jacqueline Riding, she brought in research from all over. It’s a necessary and very stimulating part of the process, but in the end, you’ve got to make it live in the moment. It’s great that you feel like you’ve intruded upon something, but that’s what it’s about, if you’ve seen any film of mine, even if it’s three people sitting in a contemporary living room having an argument, you should feel like you’re a fly on the wall, as if it’s actually happening and you shouldn’t really be there, that’s the same thing, the difference is merely a matter of the event.
Logistically how tough was it?
Yeah, it took five weeks and plainly it takes a vast amount of organisation and work, but part of that was in order to free ourselves to make it organic and spontaneous; a lot o it was shot with three cameras. If you analyse what you’re seeing there, and there are within the whole chaotic action, there’s a whole lot of individual scenes within it, of characters interacting. And obviously these were rehearsed separately so that they were there to slot in. Three people having an argument on a staircase in a suburban house is one manifestation of human conflict, and eighty to one hundred thousand people being attacked chaotically and randomly by hostile forces is another version of the same thing.
It’s also an interesting study of abuse of power. You have a sequence where a judge sentences a man to be hanged for simply stealing a coat; there’s a sense that you’re treating them live true villains, almost dehumanizing them…
See, I don’t think that’s what we’re doing. Firstly, the cases of the three magistrates were all real magistrates, and each of those cases were tried by them, and so we didn’t dramatize any of that. I don’t agree, and certainly don’t think I’ve demonized them, we’ve just told it how it is. They behaved as they behaved, they behaved outrageously but don’t tell me you’ve never seen people who’ve behaved like that, you were taught by people like that at school. In the context of the piece, people can say they are the demons but that’s not the same things as me demonizing them. They’re certainly the baddies in the sense that they’re not the goodies.
You know, people have said that why have you made the Prince Regent such a caricature, why is he wearing make up? Well it’s because he did wear make up and he was a fat, self indulgent character, and what he says in that final scene when he congratulates the magistrates on maintaining the peace, well he said that in a letter and all we’ve done is dramatize this. We didn’t have to bend over backwards to demonize him, we just presented it how it is.
With Henry Hunt, who is a really interesting figure, he almost has the feel of a demagogue, a modern celebrity…
He was a radical, he fought the cause, he was rich, he could afford to, he plainly had oratory skills, he had a booming voice, he plainly believed in the cause. But he was one hell of a self-promoter and egotist and no question about it. And what we’ve done again is dramatize it and bring it to life based on what we understand about it.
Dick Pope’s cinematography is remarkable. He shoots as if an elegiac painting, the whole thing looks beautiful.
He always shoots a lot of tests photographically. It’s very considered. Once upon a time I’d make these Play for Today films for the BBC. They were shot on 16mm and if you were lucky, you might meet the cinematographer a couple of days before, but on the whole they’d likely turn up on day one and ask what’s the shot, because there was no question as to the look of the film, or the quality of it, because that wasn’t what it was. There was a machine called a camera and you’d press a button and you told the story with it, and that was fine. If they were any good, and some of them were very good and went on to do movies, but that’s a zillion years away from what we do with the features.
Like Naked for example, as soon as I had the chance to say that this was a nocturnal film, this bleak, this is a solo journey and were shooting on film, he [Dick Pope] said we should bleach bypass, which is a process that gives you a monochromatic, desaturated quality, so we shot a lot of tests and made sure there weren’t too many reds in front of the camera, and we do that across the board.
It’s harder to pin down the issues photographically with this film, and with Mr. Turner, we obviously had the reference of his paintings. But it’s very much a sophisticated collaboration.
There’s a point when Maxine Peake questions the future. We know there’s going to be years of war and 200 years on we still have issues with unions, it feels very prescient and how deliberate a moment was it?
Actually, that scene, that moment was a very personal moment. We created that scene moments before we shot it. It was about a week before my first grandson was born, so I was thinking about where will this kid be in 2100, he’ll be about the same and those were the thoughts I was having.
And as you say, it’s particularly interesting, because for us [the audience], apart from making you think about the fear and hopes for the future, which thinking about 2100 really does, you want to be optimistic but it’s hard to be. Because as you say, and you’re onto this, we know what 1900 had in store, it also pulls us nearer to the event and links us to them. Actually, 200 years ago is not really that far, Peterloo happened less than a century before my folks were born.
It grounds it in time in a really beautiful, moving way. Thank you for your time.
Many thanks to Mike Leigh for taking the time for this interview.
Thomas Harris
