In nearly 50 years of filmmaking, British director Mike Leigh has ranged from comic portrayals of ordinary life amid the social breakdowns of Thatcher’s Britain (Life is Sweet, High Hopes) to gritty renditions of working-class constraint and bourgeois hypocrisy (Meantime, Abigail’s Party, Hard Labour) to period films that reveal the “profoundly trivial” elements of artistic life even two centuries in the past (Topsy-Turvy, Mr. Turner). (if you want to skip all intro, here is the audio.)
Leigh contains multitudes. What Roland Barthes says about the novels of Marcel Proust is true of Mike Leigh films as well: you notice different things every time you return to them.
In this Columbus, Ohio conversation, Mike and John they discovered their shared love for a hometown boy made good: James Thurber. The conversation ranged from recording working-class voices in the 19th century to Method acting to the pointlessness of fetishizing closeups to the movies John had never seen and should have–and that’s only the first twenty minutes. It cries out for footnotes, but maybe the best result of all this talk would be simply your decision to go off and see a couple (or like John seven) of Mike Leigh films you’d never seen before. You won’t be sorry.
Discussed in this episode:
Peter Jackson (dir.), They Shall Not Grow Old
John Osborne, Look Back in Anger
Ingmar Bergman (dir.), The Seventh Seal
Harold Pinter, The Caretaker
Jean-Luc Godard (dir.), A bout de souffle
John Cassavetes (dir.), Shadows and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Sam Mendes (dir.), 1917
Alexander Sukorov (dir.), Russian Ark
James Thurber, The 13 Clocks, “The Unicorn in the Garden” and “The Greatest Man in the World“
Norman Z. McLeod (dir.), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Stanley Davis (dir.), Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint and Exit Ghost
Ermanno Olmi (dir.), The Tree of Wooden Clogs
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse“
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Recall This Book 