Mike Leigh Quotes
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Because of the way that I work with the actors and because a scene is not in this rigid and literal interpretation of something written, I can constantly change stuff, which means I can get a scene absolutely perfect, and then when we go to shoot it, the requirements of the shot mean it would be useful to extend the dialogue or take a line out or swap things around. So the camera doesn't serve the action. The action serves the camera. That's important. So it becomes more and more organic and integrated.
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But films should be voyeuristic. What else is a film if you’re not snooping into somebody else’s lives?
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The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.
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I'm developing the stuff all the time. There's a film in my head. I'm imagining a film.
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In the first place, I'm pretty thorough about whom I choose. I instinctively look for the kind of actor who is going to be trusting. There are all kinds of insecure people out there called actors.
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It's important to be true to the events, but the most important thing is to get to the essence of the experience. Not to be bogged down in an academic way by a notion of the truth. First of all, the truth is an illusive and spurious concept.
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There's a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one's awareness really and consciousness of things.
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I do not make films which are prescriptive, and I do not make films that are conclusive. You do not walk out of my films with a clear feeling about what is right and wrong. They're ambivalent. You walk away with work to do. My films are a sort of investigation. They ask questions . . .. Sometimes I hear that some [Hollywood] studio is interested in me. Then they discover that this is the guy who works with no script, that there is no casting discussion, no interference, that I have the final cut, and that does it.
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The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.
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I can't negotiate and collaborate with a character to create a distilled dramatic investigation of the raw material. I need to work with an actor. That stuff about actors who stay in character all the time is nonsense.
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It's an unhealthy habit to say that life is what you make of it, and if you want to be happy, then you can be happy. That's just rubbish, basically. Life is about luck and it's about circumstances and socioeconomic conditions and all the rest of it, but you know, you can also make choices. It's about spirit and generosity and all the other things, too.
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It creeps up on you and becomes an obsession. It comes out of watching a million movies.
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I have to get out of bed every day to make something happen.
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What I do is to collaborate with each actor and work one-on-one to create a character. And that is a matter of huge complexity and is a combination of a great deal of discussion and a lot of practical work. It involves a lot of consideration for the real people out there, and all kinds of sources of real people. The result is the character. But I'm not supposed to talk about what it is we do, because it's nobody's business.
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If I'm ever working on a set and anyone talks about a master shot, I say there is no master shot. Before I even went to film school, I learned about movies by being in a British feature film, where everything was shot master shot, mid-shot, close-up. But I reject the idea of a master shot. You don't shoot everything mechanically; you find imaginative ways that serve the action.
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I feel very much ideologically, politically if you like, and emotionally part of the European cinema.
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Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins.
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The problem with the British film industry is the nervousness and insecurity about - and genuflection toward - Los Angeles.
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As a general habit and general tendency, I prefer not to bog a piece down with a great number of transitory, contemporary references, because in the end, I'm concerned, not in an abstract way, but an actual way, with creating a world which has a universality to it - even though what goes on is made up of texture and detail, contemporary detail.
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I can't really see how anybody could be particularly optimistic about the future in general because we are destroying the planet.
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You can't make a movie about the artist without shooting outdoors.
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I did sit in cinemas as a kid looking at English and American movies thinking, "Wouldn't it be great if the characters were like real people?" And the worst thing is films are constantly advertising themselves, drawing attention to their style of things. But actually I make films that I think are extremely sophisticated and cinematic. But you don't want the audience thinking about the bloody film. You want them to think about what's going on, and believe in it. Be flies on the wall, you know?
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One of the reasons the whole Hollywood way of making films wouldn't work for me is because the way I operate would be anathema to anyone who wants to hold a job down in Beverly Hills.
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You will find hardly any improvising on camera anywhere in my films. It's very structured, but it's all worked out from elaborate improvisations over a long period, as you know.
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The good thing from my perspective is that nobody puts any pressure on me to say what it's going to be. The backers accept that they don't know what they are going to get.
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It's an unhealthy habit to say that life is what you make of it, and if you want to be happy, then you can be happy. That's just rubbish, basically.
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The reason my films work is because every actor on set is very secure. They're able to fly.
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A lot of the reasons that I'm resistant to making films in the U.S. have nothing to do with not doing a film in Hollywood, but rather to do with what I'm committed to working on in the U.K. I feel very committed to the British film industry and infrastructure.
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If a film or any piece of work doesn't entertain, it fails - and that is using the word entertain literally, meaning it holds you there and you become absorbed by it so that you don't walk away and get bored and so on.
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I wonder if I would have been capable of producing anything if I worked in a more conventional way with a prewritten script, because I'm of the procrastinator class.
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