Mike Leigh interview: “My job is to liberate actors and give them immense scope to be creative”

Sandra Hebron: To get things started I wondered if I could ask you, as I say, something very general to begin with: I’ve heard you talk sometimes about how you see filmmaking and the filmmaking process as a journey, and I’m interested when you came to start the journey that led to Vera Drake, how much of the route map, in terms of the story, was actually in place?

Mike Leigh: Well as it so happens, in those terms, this… I suppose I would have to say that this film constitutes the longest journey of any, because I’ve had it in mind to make a film in some way about backstreet abortion, and a backstreet abortionist, set in a period before the law changed, which in England and Wales was 1967.

I’ve really had that in mind for over 40 years actually, because I’m old enough to remember what it was like before the law changed and I, like people who are above a certain age here… everybody will remember somebody or other, if not yourself, who had the problem and had to deal with it in some way.

So really that’s the beginning of the journey, and we got to a point a couple of years ago or so when I and my producer, Simon Channing-Williams, decided that now was the time to tackle this idea. Apart from anything else, of course, I had dealt with related matters in lots of the films.

Obviously the whole thing of relationships, and having children and not having children, and families and indeed, unwanted pregnancies and abortion-related things have cropped up here and there, for better or worse, in previous stories, in previous films.

So by the time it came to this, there was a lot to explore and then it was all about really researching and getting into the specifics and, of course, into the period, so in a way… though that’s probably not what you were asking me, that’s the… in terms of a journey, that’s the roots of the journey.

SH: And why did you and Simon decide that now was the time?

ML: This is an area, an issue, these are matters that you have to… they are with us, they will never go away. And now, as much as at any other time, they’re under discussion, there are moral debates on the go, and we know perfectly well that whether we like it or not, or what anybody, from whichever side of the argument or the moral dilemma you come, these are realities that will always be there.

I don’t know how many unwanted pregnancies have come into existence since you and I started this conversation on this platform, or indeed how many unwanted babies have been born since that moment a few minutes ago, in the world. But the world certainly hasn’t got any bigger during that time.

So these are matters which… I’m only concerned, in the film, to ask questions and to raise them, which is why I hope I haven’t made a film which is polemical and crudely propagandist and bludgeons you about the head. I hope that it draws… it opens questions because I think we should all consider these things.

SH: Given that the law changed in 1967, you set the film in 1950. I’m interested in why you chose that period.

ML: Well, first of all it has to be before 1967. I could have set the film in 1966, but the truth is that… I think that I chose 1950 because it’s still in that post-war period, it’s not immediately after the war, there’s still that sense of the trauma of the war hanging in the recent air, in the recent memory. It’s still in that functional utilitarian… world of rationing, but there’s a sense of togetherness, there’s a sense of putting things back together again, and all of that’s in the film.

There’s almost a kind of innocence and a wholesomeness, which… these things are very subjective… if it’s a moment after 1956 then rock ‘n’ roll has happened and therefore it’s a different world — that’s my perception of it. And so it felt right, it’s just on the cusp of things. It’s still an old world, but the second half of the 20th Century lies just before it. It just felt right, really, given what has to happen to this family, ultimately, in the story.

SH: And actually, one of the things that I like about the film very much is the way in which it presents the social fabric of the time, so there is all this kind of austerity, but you have the trips to the cinema and you have the dancing and all those things which are actually about reclaiming some sort of pleasures.

ML: Absolutely. Obviously… I make no apology for the fact that the film is very, in a way, kind of distilled. I felt the need to — in cinematic terms — to tell the story, to make the film in a very kind of heightened, pure… the journey is a very pure, direct journey. These are inevitable things that happen, primarily to this woman, but also to other people.

And so, for example, if it were a more naturalistic film, that is to say if it were made and expressed in terms of the surface details of real life, in actual terms, then the radio would be on all the time and you’d hear radio programmes which they would listen to.

But it’s in the nature of the storytelling that it’s distilled, it’s heightened and focuses very much on the raw, emotional, white heat of what it’s actually about — which, of course, meant that we didn’t have the problem of not being able to have all sorts of radio programmes for which we wouldn’t have been able to afford the copyright [laughter].

And that, by the way, is also… some people may know… that’s the reason why Vera hums unidentifiable tunes [laughter]. And indeed, Sid, at some point, whistles unidentifiable tunes.

SH: That’s a tip for all aspiring filmmakers in the audience.

ML: It comes cheaper, yes.

SH: Let’s have some questions from you now, so if you have something you’d like to ask then pop your hand up so that we can see you.

Audience member: It’s quite a simple plot, how did you go about… what’s the process of the film? Do you hear conversations in your head… where do you get the research? For example, the conversations that go on when the two women are in the room on their own…

ML: Which two women?

Audience member: When she’s starting to conduct.

ML: Oh, well the whole film comes out of a… as my films always do, out of a massive amount of work happening over a long period — in this case six months before we shot it — of creating the characters and their world and researching that world and exploring the relationships and doing a massive amount of actors being the characters and improvising situations and so on and so forth.

That, along with all kinds of general research into how people behaved and talked and all of those things, meant that we finally arrived at a state where all the actors were able to do… every actor in the film was able to do a very thorough, three-dimensional character.

But the film is a fiction and the scenes that you refer to are of course a fiction. And I suppose it’s hard to answer the question how we arrived at that sense of the… what I suppose… I hope you mean is the accuracy of the thing.

Except to say that all those elements came to bear in that and ultimately it’s a matter of one’s general sense of verisimilitude that leads to… there isn’t really an answer… certainly it’s not — in terms of your question — I haven’t… you can’t have scenes in which these things, these intimate things are happening, which are based on over… conversations you have overheard. No, so… if you see what I mean.

Audience member: Who was Vera Drake?

ML: Where are you? [laughter] Thank you. I like to know who I’m talking to. What do you mean? Give him the microphone back. What do you mean, who was Vera Drake? I don’t understand the question. Do you mean in real life? Is that what you mean?

Audience member: Yes.

ML: Well she’s a fictitious character that we’ve invented for the purpose of the film. The research that we did into this whole area was general research and we, by various means, found out about all kinds of people — mostly women but not entirely — who did this or were involved in it as procurers and various other things.

We did all kinds including… at one stage we read a huge number of letters that were collected at a certain point in time from women in Holloway Prison who’d gone down for precisely this offence. But having done all that and assimilated it and digested it, we created this entirely fictitious character and that’s what she is, a fiction. Does that answer your question? Or are you asking me something else?

Audience member: No, no, no. I’m just interested about why that particular name. Is it any personal attachment?

ML: No. You’re not related to the person who was… we were just saying when we did the question and answer session at the London Film Festival a couple of months ago, one of the first questions from a lady who said ‘why Vera Drake? Why that name?’ And we were quite… and then she said ‘because my mother was called Vera Drake.’ Now, are you a relation of that lady? [laughter] Are you?

Audience member: I wasn’t there.

ML: Okay. But are you related to any Vera Drakes?

Audience member: No.

ML: Well, the truth of the matter is… you’ve got to call your character something. I could have called her Apotheosis Pantechnichon… or Ichamaleo Majercakolemedagloo. But on the whole that wouldn’t have rung quite as true as Vera Drake and it would have made a rotten title for the film really.

Audience member: Thank you. Thank you very much for that film. I really enjoyed it. It’s a really excellent film. [applause]

ML: Thank you.

Audience member: Do you think it’s inevitable that people like Vera who try to set out and do good deeds… is it inevitable that they suffer in the way that she did?

ML: You mean that all people who do good deeds all inevitably suffer?

Audience member: Well, no. I just think was that an aspect of the film that you were…

ML: No, I don’t think so at all. I see no reason to suggest that do-gooders who genuinely are good people inevitably suffer, which seems to be what your question is about. No. This is a specific matter of society at odds with something that some people deem to be necessary and therefore comes under the heading — as far as they’re concerned — of good deeds. That’s specifically what the film is about. But I certainly don’t think that good deeds inevitably lead to… if that’s what you’re saying. Are you really saying that?

Audience member: I’m not… I don’t think, no I’m not entirely. I think there was just an element in the film where people appeared to refer to Vera as being this person who was good.

ML: That’s right. By any standards, she is somebody who is motivated to be helpful and do… she’s a good person. I know you’re not saying this… but just in passing… there have been… some people have commented that she’s too good and that she’s too angel-like and I reject that. I don’t think it’s true at all. She’s a perfectly real person of the kind — and we all know them — who simply are disposed to be helpful. But I don’t know whether that’s answered…

Audience member: Yes, yes, yes, that’s fine. Thank you.

Audience member: I wanted to know what was the reason for which you wanted to deal with abortion, with back-street abortion.

ML: Well, I’ve already said that really.

Audience member: You didn’t quite, you didn’t quite answer about abortion rather than…

ML: Well I think I did. It is an issue which we are…

Audience member: Could I rephrase that… do you mind? Basically taking a quote from the film… did it happen to you as a boy? Is it a personal story, say?

ML: No. [laughter] No, it didn’t. No, it could have done. And it didn’t as it so happens. And that’s the honest answer to that. But I know lots of people to whom it did happen. Or I knew people. But that’s not really the point.

The discussion about abortion — as everybody here knows and as you know — is very much with us. So I felt that by looking at it through the prism of 1950 and of a world — which of course is a world that still exists in many countries where the law remains such that abortion is outlawed — would be a way of looking at the moral dilemma of the whole thing.

So that the last question was about good and the goodness of her… this is a film that, in some ways, for me is about good and evil, good and bad … a good person, criminalised by society… those things related to the question of abortion. By looking at those questions through the prism of 1950 seems to me a useful way of reflecting on it and looking and debating it. Does that answer your question?

Audience member: It does.

Audience member: Sorry. There’s a point in the film where the inspector asks Vera whether or not she herself had an abortion. And she just starts to cry a bit more… I wondered whether or not the answer was actually yes, or was it supposed to be more obscure than that.

ML: Well, in your bones, do you know what… how to read… when you read that scene, when you experience that scene, do you feel that you knew the truth about her?

Audience member: Yes.

ML: That’s the answer. We felt… no, it’s a… these are the decisions that one has to make in terms of honest, dramatic story-telling in a film. She could not bring herself to say ‘yes.’ She doesn’t say ‘no.’ But my feeling was — and I think that it would seem to be borne out by people’s response — that you get that there’s something in that and that that in some way explains something about… I don’t think it’s always necessary — and indeed it’s important not — to spell everything out in a kind of Hollywood way, graphically.

You get a very strong sense of her, the world she grew up in. You get certain clues about her and her mother and her father if you listen and I think that that’s a legitimate way of my expressing it in the film, really. So, in other words, I’m saying that whilst that’s… in a sense you could say that’s an ambiguous or ambivalent kind of moment, I don’t think it’s an enigmatic moment. It’s an obscurest kind of moment. You sense what is actually going on and what it’s about.

Audience member: Thank you.

Audience member: If I could just quickly go back to what you just said about decriminalising… I loved how she was able to decriminalise herself — how she was never able to actually say she was an abortionist — do you think she’d have been able to carry out the abortions if she’d have believed that’s what they actually were as opposed to just helping out young girls?

ML: She absolutely doesn’t think that it’s a criminal activity. To put this matter in it’s social and historic and universal context, the fact is — whether anybody likes it or not — that there have always been, in all societies, at all times, people, mostly women, who have been there… in your family or in the next street or in the next village or the next town or the next block… who knew how to deal with this problem. We may not like that but that is a reality.

And that she… the Vera Drakes… Vera would be just one of a whole lot of women, many of whom would be — and this I researched very thoroughly — who would not be doing it for money but just do it because they saw it as something to be done.

Audience member: But she was an abortionist yet she wasn’t able…

ML: Oh absolutely. It’s not that she doesn’t know it’s illegal, of course she does. But… you could say well she’s in denial… she copes with the fact of knowing that it’s illegal. She copes with the very difficult fact of not sharing it with her family in order to save them the pain.

Audience member: But almost her brusque manner… how she does the deed and then she’s off… there’s something about that… I think there is an element of denial there.

ML: She does it like… she does that because she knows it’s illegal… the job is to get in there, set it up, do what she has to do, help them up to a certain point and then clear off because she knows that it will be a mistake to hang around. It’s as you see it.

Audience member: Thank you.

Audience member: I was interested to know how far the actors improvising took characters in different directions from what you envisaged when you started and whether you started out with the police being quite as nicely sensitive and non-judgemental as they were — that was a surprise to me and a very pleasant one.

ML: Well, the way that I do these films and work with actors, it’s not about the actors taking off in a different direction from… it’s about… my job is to work with the actors in order to create a film that I want to make and believe in.

The decision to make the police, basically — especially the Detective Inspector and the policewoman — good guys and not bad cops was an entirely thematic and dramatic decision on my part because I felt that to have bad cops come in and just beat her up and give her a hard time wouldn’t… we’d learn nothing from that. Just as we’d learn nothing from if she was a hard, extortionist abortionist. There’d be nothing to learn — there’d be no moral dilemma involved.

My job is to liberate the actors and give them immense scope to be creative. But it’s not about them going off in different directions. It’s about us working together to grow the material and for it to expand in a positive and constructive way.

Sandra’s first question was about the journey that I’ve said before I go on in making these films, and part of that is the journey of working with my collaborators and, in a sense, discovering the film through the process of making it, which is in fact what happens. So there’s never any question of it going off in unwieldy or uncontrollable directions.

But at the same time there’s all kinds of stuff that comes in, not only from actors but from the designer and the cinematographer, which is in the nature of filmmaking, which is a collaborative medium where I am happy… it’s important that one takes from other people’s contributions, that’s what it’s all about.

Audience member: Well I was living in Ireland in the 50s and as you probably know there weren’t very many Vera Drakes available there to soak up some of the problem. But what I wanted to ask you was… following on from that question about her being perhaps in denial… I was very emotionally involved with the character, but I had a difficulty in that I couldn’t fathom how she hadn’t thought about what it would do to her family if she did get found out. Because she would have known that and she wasn’t a stupid woman… surely the price would have been too high.

ML: I think that is her dilemma. And that is all I can say about it. It’s absolutely her dilemma but she…

Audience member: You think she thought about it?

ML: She certainly would know about it and she’s somebody… in a way, yes, perhaps you’d have to… it depends how you describe, how you define things. Certainly she’s living, hoping that she will continue to get away with it because in the… day by day, in the short-term, she just knew she had to… she knows she has to do these things.

In a way, what you’re talking about, I would suggest, is answered by the moment when the cops come into the flat… come into the room and he says ‘the police are here.’ And I hold on her face. And this is not somebody who wonders what the hell’s happening and wonders why the police are there and has no idea what it’s all about. This is somebody who you know, when you see that, this is somebody who is living through the moment that she’s always dreaded.

Who of us can say that there haven’t… or aren’t things in our lives that we continue to hope will not come home to roost or… whatever it is. But you live with them because… you get on with it.

Audience member: Somehow I just… it didn’t fit for me with the rest of her character, that she would have been willing to run that risk.

ML: Okay. I’ll say no more.

Audience member: I accept what you say, yes.

ML: I can say no more. I accept what you say. [laughter]

Audience member: I just wanted to know why you chose not to have her meet her procurer, because that would have developed her character… even some eye contact… in the trial… the woman who was paid for all these abortions was never brought into the film again.

ML: In other words, why we don’t pursue that story.

Audience member: Why you chose not to develop that, yes. It would have been interesting to see her eye contact or something.

ML: Oh, I see. That’s interesting. That had never occurred… that, what you’re particularly referring to, that moment of them seeing each other, it never occurred to me… it’s never occurred to me until you suggested it.

The real truth is that whilst Lilly the procurer certainly could have been prosecuted under the law, the tendency was to prosecute the abortionists rather than the procurers. And they’ve obviously… the cops have obviously rolled Lilly and given… they’ve threatened her because she’s obviously doing other illegal activities as well with black-market stuff in order to lead them to where they want to go which is to Vera. And for that reason I don’t pursue it.

But also dramatically, to be perfectly honest, I felt — and this is something which… it’s debatable whether I made the right decision frankly — but I feel that… I felt when I was putting the film together that it focuses right down onto Vera. And that really, to deal with what happens to Lilly and all the rest of it, at that stage of the film, would be cumbersome and in a way something of a red herring. But what you’re saying is something else which is quite interesting which is the notion of them actually, at some point in time, confronting each other or Lilly being confronted by Vera.

Audience member: Do you think the procurer got off scot-free?

ML: Probably. Yes, yes. She could have been prosecuted but on the whole, the odds are she’d have got off, yes. But I ultimately felt happy to leave that as something from one of the many things for you to ponder really.

Audience member: Thank you. I’m just interested to know if you work with many more actors than we actually saw in the film in the end. Because I’ve heard, through your process, that sometimes you work with more people than actually appear in the film.

That’s the first part of my question and the second part is I just wanted to know to what extent you develop the back story of the minor characters and how far you develop people like the policewoman and the… not the Detective Inspector but the other one… I can’t remember his name… Vickers. I think it was Mr Vickers.

ML: To answer the second part of your question first, all the characters in the film are developed from the moment they’re born, throughout their entire lives in every detail, each as much as the others. And that would certainly be true… you couldn’t get a character like the policewoman unless you’d done that really.

As to the first part of your question, it’s a curious question. The truth is that my job is to get people to be in a film and then they’re in the film. If you’ve heard stories that people… it is the truth that there were a couple of people with a… one of the sub-plots to do with… that was going to be to do with an abortion, and that particular sub-plot didn’t see the whole journey into the film. But that was entirely for practical reasons, to do with the fact that one of the actresses involved was in a show in the West End and it made it very difficult to rehearse as much as we needed to. And for that reason it never saw the light of day. That’s an entirely unfortunate and regrettable thing.

There have been other odd cases where people haven’t been able to do the work for one kind of personal reason or another. But really the job is… it’s not inherent in how I work that people get dumped. It’s about… people get hired to do a job. My job is to help them to see their jobs through and that’s what it’s all about.

Audience member: But I wondered as you develop the characters whether sometimes you realise that you want to focus more on one particular character, so does that suddenly mean that you have to lose other…

ML: No, it just means that… certainly it means that some interesting characters shrink in the size of how much they appear in the story because other characters have become more important, but that’s not the same as getting rid of them.

Audience member: Okay, thank you.

Audience member: How did you cast Imelda Staunton as Vera?

ML: Well, as soon as I was thinking of the film, she just seemed like a really good idea. Imelda is an actress that I haven’t worked with before but I’ve know her for a long time and wanted to do so and she just seemed… my instinct was that she was the right person for it. And so how I cast it was by asking her if she wanted to do it. [laughter] And what she did was say yes. That was the casting process.

Audience member: Right decision anyway.

ML: I feel that. I don’t think it was the wrong decision, certainly.

Audience member: I wanted to ask you if I was seeing something that wasn’t there and that was the moments that people have classed as being incongruous with the character and with Vera’s character and that was… was she doing this… was there an element of trying to dilute her own guilt over her own experience… was that in your thoughts at all?

ML: I don’t think so.

Audience member: Because that tied all the elements together for me… the fact that it was… she’s wholesome and yet seemingly naïve and yet obviously not when the police turned up and then the breakdown in the face of the police…

ML: Yes, the reason I’m cautious and ponderous in answering your question is that these are not black and white things. As — and in a way your question is about precisely this — they’re not in terms of how we are and in terms of human behaviour. And I resist very much a…

Audience member: Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you…

ML: No, not at all, I’m merely saying I’m resistant to come up with instant formulaic answers to such a question. Tucked away in her make-up, in her motivation, in her psychological… in the emotional things that are happening to her… yes, maybe that is there in some way, I’m sure that’s right.

But at the same time it’s complex because — and again this relates to other things that have been talked about here this evening — that in a way it’s not about guilt and she doesn’t feel… she feels that what she’s doing for other people is something that needs to happen.

It may be that shame is more relevant than guilt. It’s a complex thing. But I thank you for that question because in a way it’s a question that focuses on the complexity of… hopefully of her and certainly of how we are.

SH: I’m very sorry to have to be the person to draw this to a close but we have another screening to get into this theatre tonight. I would just say that my understanding from the NFT programmers is that the retrospective of Mike’s work, which I mentioned in the introduction, will be happening in November and December and apart from that really I would just like to wish Mike all the best for the release of the film this weekend and to say thank you very much for coming to talk to us.

ML: Thank you very much indeed. [applause] Thank you.

Interview © BFI 2005