This article appeared in the October 11, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024)

A six-year hiatus in the filmmaking career, more than half a century long, of Mike Leigh has come to an end with the release of Hard Truths. From the film’s opening shot, it is clear we are back on Leigh’s native soil: a contemporary suburban street in London, containing a row of prim, if not affluent, family homes over which the camera slowly pans to the pensive string composition of Leigh’s longtime collaborator Gary Yershon. We spend the next 97 minutes in the lives of two sisters, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Chantal (Michele Austin), and their families, observing the emotional wear on all caused by Pansy’s uncontrollable, and unfocused, rage. (Chantal despairs to her, “Why can’t you enjoy life?”) Jean-Baptiste’s performance carries the film, but, as with all of Leigh’s work, it is embedded in a thick tapestry of relation and observation—the result of months of collaborative improvisational work by the cast to create the characters and their world.

If Ken Loach’s films are dramas of the kitchen-sink variety, then Mike Leigh’s are those of the kettle, the sofa, and the porch; unburdened by the conventions of narrative cinema, his characters’ lives rarely change substantively from opening to closing shot. Even his latter-day run of period dramas conform to the same principle, emphasizing the accumulation of human experience that makes up what we offhandedly refer to as social change. In Vera Drake (2004), it’s the unsustainable tension caused by the brutal restrictions on British women’s lives in the postwar era, as they took up new economic positions outside the family; in Mr. Turner (2014), it’s the development of a new market for culture and, with it, a new way of seeing in the first half of the 19th century; and in Peterloo (2018), it’s the emergence, through industrialization, of a new proletarian way of life and form of politics.

For audiences too young to have watched Leigh’s contemporary dramas on their initial release, films like High Hopes (1988), Naked (1993), and Secrets & Lies (1996) convey a sense of time and place that can feel as distant as his period work, illuminating the anomie of Thatcherism and the struggle to maintain a good life as the social fabric of the country warped, becoming incrementally strained. For future audiences interested in how it felt to live in Leigh’s corner of the world in 2024, Hard Truths will do the same; for now, it is enough to say that it captures the complex mesh of strife and warmth that constitutes modern life in Britain.

I spoke with Leigh over Zoom before the film’s U.S. premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival.

Hard Truths has been heralded as your return to contemporary social realism, after the period dramas of Peterloo and Mr. Turner. Looking over the whole span of your career, though, it seems that the historical and the contemporary have always coexisted in your work. Do you see Hard Truths as a return to an earlier genre of your filmmaking? 

I don’t look at it like that at all, because all my films are of a piece. Even in the obvious period films like Topsy-Turvy (1999), Mr. Turner, Peterloo, and Vera Drake—as well as the early half of Career Girls (1997), which is set [a decade prior] in 1986—I’m still looking at the same essential themes, of people and society. In some cases, we happen to have chosen historical events to explore, but that doesn’t stop them from sharing the same spirit: of exploring people, how we really are. So, if I’m honest, I don’t really see it as a return to a different genre, except at the most basic level.

In terms of parallels within your work, Hard Truths feels closest to High Hopes and All or Nothing (2002), somewhere between the lightness of the first and the sorrow of the second. Marianne Jean-Baptiste gives a bravura physical performance, which at times feels comic, but has no punch line or release; there’s no catharsis. In the screening I attended, the laughter drifted away by the second half. Is it harder now than it was at the start of your career to make comedies about Britain? 

Well, life is comic and tragic. The elements of comedy and tragedy in this film are in all of my films. There’s no question they all do the same thing. Obviously, you could say that my films are in a particular genre of their own—they’re all part of the same family. But I would suggest that within the 20-odd films I’ve made, no two of them are the same. Each stands alone on its own terms. But all of them, one way or the other, I hope I can say, look at life in a real way and thus are inextricably comic and tragic—because life is, too. People have said, “Oh, well, you’ve obviously deliberately made it a comedy for the first half and then changed it.” I haven’t done that at all. I mean, that is simply a function of what happens and how you feel about it. The laughter drifts away because it ceases to be funny, basically. But, I would suggest, at no point in the film is what you’re looking at merely comic—and not just for Marianne’s character, Pansy, but across the whole spectrum of characters and relationships.

You’re often asked about the rehearsal process and the improvisation that goes into your films, but location choice also seems crucial to developing these characters. At what point in the process do you decide on a setting?

It’s very logical, really. I mean, you create characters and you bring them into existence, invent their background, and it becomes clear what they’re about and the sort of place they live in, and so on. Of course, it’s not just about my collaboration with the actors, but it’s about mine and the actors’ collaboration with the production designer, with the costume and makeup designers. We really do collaborate together, to discuss where the character lives and what the character would have. Most actors will tell you that not only do they show up on a film set and meet, for the first time, the person playing the person their character is supposed to have been married to for 40 years, but they also find themselves in an environment that’s supposed to be a natural environment for them, and it’s not at all what they imagined. Now, obviously, what we do is way down the other end of the spectrum. In this film, most obviously, you can see that Pansy’s house is a function of her paranoia, her fear of stuff and things and plants and insects and all the rest of it, whereas [her sister] Chantal’s flat is a celebration of color and light and plants and joy. For me, that’s what it’s always been about. Of course, I trained as an actor and I went to art schools, and I went to the London Film School, and I am a visual person as well as someone who is concerned with human behavior. So, to me, the joy of what you’re talking about is in the rendering of how it looks, not in a decorative sense but in terms of the actual depiction of life—of the things we have and how we use them.

The choice of locations, though, is crucial. If you remember, in Naked, the flat that those girls [played by Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge, and Claire Skinner] lived in was in a rather neo-Gothic building on a corner, which is in Dalston [an area of East London]. The production designer [Alison Chitty], who’s brilliant, came in endlessly with pictures of flats and blocks of flats. And I kept saying no. Because I had a conception of the film on the go, I said, “No, it’s got to have an edge to it; it can’t just be a bland block of flats.” And then they came in with a picture, and, you know, it looks like something out of Charles Addams. It’s all on an acute corner, and you can view it from different angles, and it’s got these steps up to it, so I said, “Oh, wonderful.” And that was that. So that’s all part of the joy of filmmaking. You know, one of the great things about those period films is how enjoyable it is creating the look of those worlds.

You said in a recent interview that it was much harder to find funding for this film than for Peterloo. What are the conditions for making realist dramas like now, not only for yourself but for other directors interested in similar projects and methods of experimentation? Are you concerned?

Well, with the period films we’ve been able to say to backers: it’s about Turner, it’s about Gilbert and Sullivan, it’s about the Peterloo Massacre. But normally I would say, “I can’t tell you anything about it. I can’t tell you what it’s going to be about, because we’re going to find that out by making the film. I can’t discuss the casting, and don’t interfere with us while we’re making it.” Over the years, I’ve been lucky to find people who’ve said, “Okay, fine, go for it.” Although the majority of those I’ve asked have told us, basically, to fuck off. But it’s gotten worse. People are less and less inclined to embark on a project where they can’t interfere, where they can’t introduce changes based on their research or algorithms or whatever else it is. Now I’ve gotten away with it, and I will continue to get away with it, albeit with small budgets. But young filmmakers are invariably turned down or kept hanging about for years because of those kinds of preoccupations.

I’ve been very, very, very, very lucky over the years. When we made films in the 1970s and ’80s for the BBC, that was the only place, for the most part, where creative filmmaking happened. You’d go in and they’d say, “Okay, we don’t know what it’s about. That’s fine; this is the budget, this is the date of delivery, go away and make a film.” And all kinds of amazingly creative things would happen. That’s really what I’m concerned about for newer and younger filmmakers, realist or not. I want people to be able to explore what they want to explore in the way they want to explore it.

Hard Truths premiered at Toronto and is now showing at NYFF. What has its reception been, and how has your work, which is so concerned with Britain and its national character, generally been received abroad?

It’s also been screened in San Sebastián, and, interestingly, the reaction has been the same in all three places: total enthusiasm and appreciation. And that includes Spain, where it was shown with Spanish and Basque subtitles, and it got the same response, the same laughter, the same sudden silences in all three places. It’s an interesting question, though, because a thousand years ago, between Bleak Moments (1971) and High Hopes, there was a period where we wanted to make feature films and couldn’t. I was doing television films and plays during that time, and once, I went to see an American producer living in London—a nice guy, who said, “I really like what you do, it’s great, but you’re never going to make a feature film because feature films have got to work in America. And yours never will, because [viewers there will] have no idea what they’re about.” And that prediction turned out to be 100 percent wrong. From High Hopes onwards, they’ve been extremely successful and popular with American audiences.

Because they’re human-interest stories?

Of course, of course. Audiences relate to what the film is actually about. You know, I went to Japan to do press for Secrets & Lies. And before I went, somebody said, “Well, you know, they’re not very comfortable with a Black woman and a white mother and all the rest of it.” So I said to the distributor, “How do you think this will go down?” And he said, “It’s a very Japanese film. It’s about families and secrets and lies. It’s about hidden things, which is very Japanese.” So there you go.

Caitlín Doherty is a writer based in London, and an associate editor of New Left Review.