Getting Happy
Award-winner Leigh Continues His Lucky Streak

In case you haven’t heard, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mike Leigh’s (Secrets & Lies, Vera Drake) latest motion picture Happy-Go-Lucky has been expanding into theaters for a couple of weeks now, generating major Academy Award heat for its star Sally Hawkins. She plays Poppy, an English schoolteacher who’s also a perpetual optimist able to look on the bright side of things no matter how bleak the situation currently learning to drive taught by Scott, her exact opposite, empathetically portrayed by character actor Eddie Marsan.

Sally Hawkins is Poppy in Miramax Films' Happy-Go-Lucky

Just before the picture’s Seattle release I got a chance to speak with Leigh about the film, and we immediately dived right into to discussing the multilayered character and emotional arcs found within the piece, a trademark going all the way back to his first work 1971’s Bleak Moments. “It’s just in the nature of the stuff,” he says with a smile. “What I do is to explore [things] in such a way we see it as ‘real life,’ really, and it comes multifaceted. The complexity is always there.”

And it is the British working class where he likes to spend most of that time exploring, the intricacies of the common man on the street the thing that intrigues and moves the director keeping him excitedly invigorated to continue bring such stories to the screen. “I’ve always been fascinated by people,” admits Leigh, “I’ve been clocking [them] since at an early age. I’m good at drawing people. When I was a kid I used to draw the adults at night and my dad told me to stop doing it, he said they might be offended. But, you know, I’m a people watcher. It’s what I do, and whether it was my drawing or my [films] it is people that fascinate me.”

“If you want to know [about] that clairvoyant flash of a moment where I knew I wanted to be a moviemaker, when I was 12 my grandfather died and at the funeral – a cold, snowy day in Manchester in this little house with everybody crammed into the place and these guys were trying to navigate their way through to take the coffin downstairs – I thought to myself that this would make a great movie. A great film. That’s what I want to do. I want to make films about just this sort of thing. I remember that very clearly.”

And how do you go from a moment like that one at a funeral to a glass half-full schoolteacher like Poppy? “Well, I had a feeling of a film I wanted to make in spirit, which is often how it starts,” the director explains. “Part of how I definite where I go next is that, when I invite you around for supper I don’t want to dish up the same meal. I do try to do different things inside the same people-driven territory of what I do.”

“Another factor that is majorly important, I absolutely, categorically decided now is the time to make a film with Sally Hawkins. And Sally, who you’ve undoubtedly seen in other things including my last two films, is a consummate character actress, but she herself is full energy and positive stuff. I wanted to collude with her and tap into that.”

It was the two of them together who were able to bring the woman to life, the ones working in tandem who fleshed her out, gave her a backstory and figured out the way she would choose to face the world’s setbacks and demons. Leigh’s trademark is his collaboration process with actors, Happy-Go-Lucky another in a long line of motion pictures where the rehearsal process itself determines the direction things inside the narrative are going to take.

Not that the character herself was a complete departure from what Leigh has done before. “We all know Poppys,” he states matter-of-factly. “People who actually look it in the eye, are done with it and get on with stuff, [individuals] who are there for others, and I wanted to deal with that. I mean, I dealt with that in my last film. Vera Drake is another woman that is there for other people. It’s a different situation and she’s doing different things but actually she’s warm, generous and she’s got a sense of humor. She’s not as sophisticated. She’s not as profound as Poppy. She doesn’t live in a world where she can have the opportunities Poppy has. But she nevertheless has that same generosity of spirit, that same selfless carrying for other people.”

“But there have always been people like that; people who get on with it. Vera and Poppy, although they are from two very different worlds, are just two of them.”

Writer/director Mike Leigh and star Hawkins at the London Premier of Miramax Films' Happy-Go-Lucky

Still, Poppy hasn’t quite spoken to people in ways the director had anticipated. While no film will ever please everyone, some of the critical reaction to the character has been extreme to say the least, especially considering her own almost perpetually upbeat demeanor. And while Happy-Go-Lucky has an astonishing 93-percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, that still hasn’t stopped some reviewers like Josh Rosenblatt of the Austin Chronicle from labeling her, “fixed and unchangeable, admirably optimistic as a person but completely unengaging as a movie character.”

“There must be a denial about something,” admits Leigh candidly. “One [critic] actually said, ‘towards the end you can actually see the cracks appear.’ What fucking cracks? I don’t know what the cracks are. [Poppy] confronts everything, she deals with it, cracks don’t appear. She’s sympathetic! She’s caring. She’s perceptive. She understands what’s happened to [Scott]. She knows he’s in a bad way and she knows she has to walk away, but that doesn’t mean she’s still not going to be decent to him.”

“There is this cynicism in the world which is depressing but, you know, I’ve experienced these kinds of reactions to a lot of my films. Why do we want to know about these depressing people, some have said after seeing a picture like All or Nothing. Sure, it’s sad, but in the end it’s a very positive work, and people who don’t see that must have left the cinema by then. To me, the important thing is that we understand the world and we deal with it, that’s what matters and that’s what I want to show [in my films].”

And what about people who want to try to label Poppy as being mentally ill? “I think that’s just being willfully stupid,” laughs the filmmaker. “If it is what the [person] really thinks genuinely, then they have no experience with life. They are being deliberately cynical. I find it hard to get that, really.”

“Right at the beginning of the film when you really haven’t got the hang of her, like anybody you meet all you’ve got are your preconceptions. But the idea that you could hang onto the notion throughout the two hours of the journey with Poppy that she is mentally ill is totally a denial of so much of what happens. She has intelligent conversations. She takes responsibility. She teaches kids. I don’t get it. That’s just dumb.”

This conversation would be moot if not for the sheer brilliance of Hawkins in the central role. She is Poppy, flesh, blood and bone she becomes this woman completely, and at a certain point it becomes impossible to differentiate the actress from the character she is portraying. It is, without a doubt, the greatest performance of the woman’s career and easily one of the finest – male or female – I’ve seen this year.

“She’s capable of more,” states Leigh bluntly. “[Sally] will do extraordinary things for a very long while to come because she is remarkable, no question. My work is a wonderful experience. It’s tough. It’s painstaking. It’s slow. But it’s also rich, rewarding and it’s just great to hang out for all that time with highly intelligent, sophisticated, mature, funny, sharp, sexy people. It’s great, and Sally is right at the very top of that list. She’s an amazing talent.”

Hawkins in Miramax Films' Happy-Go-Lucky

Part of me can’t help but wonder if the auteur sometimes feels a bit bad for taking screenplay credits on his motion pictures and I ask him about this aloud. Leigh is renowned for workshoping his features, working with the cast in intense rehearsals that flesh out their characters and the stories they’re going to be telling in the process. It’s a style that has earned him many admirers and much acclaim but has also led some to question whether or not he’s the brilliant screenwriter so many give him credit for being.

“No, I don’t,” he states with pointed emphasis. “I have no qualms about that [taking screenwriting credits] at all. The cast contributes to what is going to be the writing because we work very hard to [discover] who these characters are, how they talk, how they move, all those things, and out of those I script it all down through those rehearsals.”

“So there is always input from them as to what is going to be in the dialogue, but every [person] who participates in a film of mine, apart from Topsy-Turvy which is outside of this a little bit, the deal I tell them is to come be a part of my movie but I can’t tell you what it is about and I can’t tell you who your character is because we have to invent that character. Above all, I tell them that they will never know anything about the film except what their character knows. And none of them ever do, the never know what any of it is about until I show it to them well after it’s finished, and then that way they can be in character situations, in improvise situations, and they can be completely truthful and spontaneous.”

“So, they don’t have an overview of the film, so in no way is it ever something like a ‘writing committee.’ That’s not how it works. My roll, then, is an authorial one, as the storyteller. So, therefore, I have no qualms at taking the credit as writer-director because that’s what I am, basically. But people know what they’re collaboration is going in and, frankly, they’re very happy with it. I don’t write a script I make a film. Scripts don’t come into it. What I make is a film, and that’s all there is to it.”

It’s obvious Leigh feels passionate about his work, his intensity almost illuminating the hotel room we’re comfortably sitting in all on its lonesome. “I’ve made 18 full length films and none of them, not one of them, has ever been interfered with by anybody,” he says proudly. “There isn’t a film where I feel I actually can’t bare it. I like some more than others but that’s a product of refinement. I’m not Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, I don’t spend my nights watching my movies in private screenings, but I do like them and sometimes I have a look. I make films I’d like to see. Personally, I think if you don’t like your own films I don’t know how you can expect anyone else to.”

Our conversation gets me thinking about my favorites in the director’s oeuvre and I am immediately reminded of his masterful (and my personal fav) 1997 comedy Career Girls starring the gifted actress Katrin Cartlidge. Almost without meaning to, I ask Leigh about working with her and his reaction towards her tragic death from complications from pneumonia and septicemia stemming from a pheochromocytoma in 2002. His eyes almost sparkle at the question, his intense feelings for the woman almost fatherly in their sincerity.

Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman in 20th Century Fox's Career Girls

“She was terrific to work with,” he states. “Such a warm and generous and talented and smart and funny and sassy person, she was great. Just great. She was open. An open spirit. I don’t know, in a way I think Sally picks up her torch in some way. I get a lot of the same feelings working with her as I did working with [Katrin]. There is a lot of that same magic.”

“Before [Career Girls] we did Naked and she was just great. Just brilliant. And she did a little cameo in Topsy-Turvy, and even that, she showed up on set and I asked her how she was doing and she admitted to going to Paris to do research [on the role]. She’s only there for a moment and she still went to Paris to do research. She was just… magic.”

“But, yeah, I’m glad you liked Career Girls. Some people, they just let it slip away. Its scale is so small, but it’s actually quite epic in its way. There is a lot going on. That journey you make between 20 and 30 is so massive. So massive. I think some viewers, for whatever reason, can’t bring themselves to relive or admit that.”

I laugh that I’ve spent the past decade watching the film on a ratty VHS tape and that he really needs to get on 20^th Century Fox to get off their duffs a release a proper copy of the picture on DVD. “We’re working on that,” responds Leigh with a grin. “We’ve just brought out a new boxed set in the U.K. and I hope we’re going to do the same here. No, no, you don’t want to keep watching [the film] that way. We can’t have that. We simply must deal with that, yes indeed.”

“But, back to Katrin and to answer your question, it’s been exactly six years, and I was with her in Sarajevo two weeks before because they just love her in that part of the world because of No Man’s Land and Before the Rain. They were showing all my films and she was there and we introduced a late night screening of Naked to like 3,000 people and it was amazing. She was wondering around the city, signing autographs, buying stuff in the market, it’s was just great.”

“And then, I was in Toronto two weeks later, and suddenly this news broke that she’d died. I mean, it just couldn’t sink in. If you’d asked me to make a list of everyone who might die she would never have been on the list. It was devastating.”

With time running down I quickly turn our attention back to Happy-Go-Lucky and ask Leigh about what his prospects here in the United States were the film, especially in regards to small pictures like this one, considering just how crowded the market place is. The filmmaker just shakes his head.

“This is a problem,” he admits readily. “We sit around in our office and talk about this all the time. But, I say look, there isn’t anything we can do about it. We’ve made films that have been really, really critically successful and won prizes. I mean, good God we’ve had the Palme d'or, the Golden Lion, Oscar nominations and all the rest of it. But, it doesn’t matter how good these films are because it is, as you say, a crowded market place, and unless a mega blockbuster you’re just going to be in and out before you can blink.”

Hawkins and Alexis Zegerman in Miramax Films' Happy-Go-Lucky

“And there is nothing you can do about that, unless you look that as time goes by there are going to be different ways to be looking at movies, new ways of disseminating films. But, it’s tough, and you just have to keep on battling. It would be great if Happy-Go-Lucky would break out or break through and who knows? Maybe it will. Hopefully it will.”