Mike Leigh’s first film in six years finds the writer-director teaming up with one of the stars of the 1996 hit, Secrets and LiesMarianne Jean-Baptiste. Both Leigh and Jean-Baptiste received Oscar nominations Secrets and Lies (Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for him, and Best Supporting Actor for him), and the smart money has them in contention for another similar one from Leigh’s latest. Can be Hard Factswhich emphatically elevates Jean-Baptiste into a shining star.
A nostalgic tug makes this film roll. Almost thirty years had passed since Leigh did Secrets and Liesand Jean-Baptiste suddenly went into his head. “We haven’t been able to meet since then,” Leigh said The viewer. “So I thought, ‘Let’s get Marianne, see what she’s up to now.'”
The people Leigh chooses for his photos largely determine the location of the film and the story he wants to tell. Because of Jean-Baptiste, Hard Facts focuses on an extended black family in North London. Jean-Baptiste is Pansy Deacon, a premenstrual bully who yells at family and strangers alike; and hired from Secrets and Lies it was Michele Austin, who plays Pansy’s sister Chantelle, a relative of the sun who is compared to Pansy.
Pansy embraces all kinds of mistakes and imperfections in life. Delivering hard facts is a full-time job with him. Whether you’re a dental assistant or a grocery cashier, you use a flashlight. His day starts when he wakes up screaming for blood thinking about what is coming. This is a review at the breakfast table, undisturbed by her plumber husband (David Webber) and her sleazy son (Tumaine Barrett). A long time ago they were silenced, allowed him to rant and rave about the discontents of his mind, and then released him into the poor, unsuspecting world.
“We live in a difficult society with all kinds of people,” Leigh explained. “No one can say they can’t relate to someone who is a Pansy of some kind. The truth is that people do not analyze each other. People live by what happens. They don’t criticize or question. It is part of the nature of life. People put up with things and live and continue with their things. Not all people question everything the way they do in the movies.”
If Leigh’s characters don’t act the way people usually do in movies, that’s because Leigh builds his films around them, rather than telling them. “The truth is, I work the way banks and novelists write novels and poets write poetry,” he said. “I work with the material and find out what the film is in the process of making it.” Although he describes his work as “tightly scripted” (and that’s certainly how he plays) his movies aren’t scripted in a conventional way. The scripts come from a practice program that involves development. He says: “We have come to what you see. “Everything is built on a setup. When we got to the filming, we fixed it by improvising and changing what came from me and the actors doing the action.” Development sets the stage, but that’s not what’s being recorded. “There’s not a single moment in this film where there are any commercials when we get to the set,” said Leigh. “The crew came to shoot this thing in the old fashioned way of film etiquette.”
This process brings the feeling of life as it comes to life on screen. “I put together a group of actors and work with each individual to find and create a character,” Leigh explains. “Actors are always imprinted on real people that the actors know personally. Then, together, we establish the personal history of the characters, their personalities, and even some sense of how they walk and think. The most important thing that happened long before we got into music was that we created a world of actors.”
Two thirds of the way through Hard FactsPansy advises her vulnerability to the audience. “I want it to end,” he growls more than once. Leigh ends the film inexplicably, without an answer to her grief. “You give it to me. I have done that many times. It’s not a police officer. It’s important for me to leave a department with things to work on and have fun with and argue about.”
All of Leigh’s films are written and directed by him. He leaves the production to others, happily. “I can’t really talk in Hollywood terms about where the idea for the film came from,” he says. “Actually, it’s a straightforward thing. I was like, ‘Give us the money to make the film. I can’t tell you what it’s about. We don’t know what it will be. I can’t discuss the costume. And please don’t disturb us while we’re doing it.’” Amazingly enough this works, although it’s more difficult than before. “I have done 28 films, so I didn’t throw them away—butlately, it’s become more intense because there are all kinds of reasons that may or may not be related to the issue. I hear, ‘We really like what you do, and we appreciate the way you work, but it’s not happening for us.’ ‘We’re not going to support a film if we don’t know what it is,’ ‘And we sure as hell aren’t going to make a film where we can’t mess it up and mess it up.’
At 81, Leigh still works with hard truths. But he plans to return before the end of the year.
