The Case for Mike Leigh

Squeezed into a surprisingly small number of blocks, London’s Soho district resembles a miniature city, a tiny metropolis with appetites both intense and specific.

Food is one, as a lifetime’s worth of restaurants line the short streets. Sex is another, with strip clubs and licensed shops promising “an astonishing collection of adult publications including Amazons in Action” serving as a reminder of the area’s red-light district past. And film is a third.

Twentieth Century Fox and the William Morris Agency decorously share a squat brick building on one Soho corner (“Prepare for Impact!” says a noticeably British window poster for “Independence Day”), and numerous film company offices and post-production facilities such as De Lane Lea Sound Center are dotted throughout the area.

Slumping comfortably (a usual position) in a chair at an upstairs dubbing stage at De Lane Lea is a director putting the final touches on the soundtrack to a forthcoming film, still unfussily named “Untitled ’96.” “We’re into the realms of higher Zen refinement now,” he says with typical easy wit as he shares a laugh with his editor about an item in a London paper: Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights,” a reviewer said when the book came out in 1847, “will never appeal to general readers.”

The director is 53-year-old Mike Leigh, considered by many critics the preeminent filmmaker in the English-speaking world. He’s a man who works in a way completely and totally his own, going well below the surface to create an unmatched level of emotional intensity and, in the process, stretching the boundaries of psychological truth on film as far as they will go.

Leigh’s ability to work with actors and create characters of unequaled complexity is marveled at not only by critics but by the performers as well, even veterans of stage, television and film like Brenda Blethyn. “If I see myself on screen in a conventional scripted piece like ‘A River Runs Through It’ [she played Brad Pitt’s mother], I’m more analytical, wondering ‘why am I looking like that, why did I make that choice?’ But when I’m watching myself in one of Mike’s films, I don’t ever do that. I feel like I’m looking at a completely different person.”

Even more remarkable than Leigh’s impressive results is the unconventional and unlikely way these projects come into being. His way of working is so at variance with how Hollywood operates that despite the considerable interest he arouses in the industry, it’s impossible to imagine Mike Leigh on a studio sound stage.

“I absolutely love his movies--it’s mesmerizing filmmaking,” says Laura Ziskin, who produced “To Die For” and numerous other Hollywood films before becoming president of Fox 2000, 20th Century Fox’s newest film unit. “Though they aren’t the kind of movies I can feed my machine, there’s a kind of life there that keeps all of us on our toes and, hopefully, affects our work.”

While conventional movies begin with the written word, Leigh doesn’t put anything on paper until the film is shot and edited, and only then if a script is needed for book publication. Hollywood considers nothing more critical than matching actors to specific characters, but Leigh hires performers without knowing what their characters will be like. As for titles, “Untitled ‘96” indicates they come last of all.

“The thing about my job,” says Simon Channing-Williams, Leigh’s producer and partner in Thin Man Films Ltd., “is that I have to go to financiers and say, ‘I’d like you to give us a very large amount of money, but I can tell you nothing about the project, not even who’s in it.’ It’s a terrible leap of faith for them, and however much you explain how Mike works, they always say at some point, ‘But there must be a script; you have to have a script.’ They think what we’ve been saying is a game we perpetuate to create some sort of mystique.” The producer allows himself a weary shake of the head at the foolishness of it all.

Leigh has made 14 feature-length films with his unique working methods over the past 25 years, and they’ve not gone unrecognized. “Life Is Sweet,” for instance, was named best picture of 1991 by this country’s National Society of Film Critics, and 1993’s “Naked” won the best director prize for Leigh and the best actor prize for David Thewlis at Cannes. Leigh’s last three features have earned back their production costs (between $1 and $2 million) in the United States alone, doing better at the box office than the similarly budgeted British films of director Ken Loach.

The director was awarded an O.B.E. (Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993 (“Terribly difficult at the moment, isn’t it?” she commented about his profession) and producer Channing-Williams echoes what most objective observers agree on: “If he’s not a genius, he’s something bloody close to it.” Yet despite all this, Leigh is still largely unknown by the average moviegoer in this country, a situation that is about to change in a big way.

“Secrets & Lies,” Leigh’s latest film, has had the markings of a breakthrough since it won both the Palme d’Or and the International Critics Prize at this year’s Cannes festival (plus the best actress prize for Brenda Blethyn) and followed that with a similar double at Australia’s Sydney Film Festival, being named best picture by both the audience and critics. That kicked off the director’s most commercially successful run across the U.K., where “Secrets & Lies” has already made more at the box office than his last three films combined, a feat paralleled by its being the first of Leigh’s works to make a sizable impression world-wide, with rights sold in something like 100 countries.

In this country, “Secrets & Lies” debuted over the Labor Day weekend at the Telluride Film Festival and--accompanied by a biography, Michael Coveney’s “The World According to Mike Leigh,” just published by HarperCollins--is headed for Friday’s prestigious opening-night slot at the New York Film Festival. The film opens in Los Angeles Oct. 4, and then, according to Bingham Ray, co-managing executive of American distributor October Films, it’ll head gradually into about 150 markets. “We’re going to play this to an extent no Mike Leigh movie has played before,” says Ray. If, after decades of hellacious work, there is to be a moment for Mike Leigh to become an overnight success, it is now.

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Paradoxically, Leigh’s growing preeminence has surprised no one more than his fellow countrymen. Uniformly esteemed in America, the director has been subject to considerable criticism in Britain. The carpers run the gamut from those who question his work methods, claiming that he’s exploiting the actors who obligingly “write” his films for him, to those who complain of what they perceive as a condescending attitude toward his characters.

Most vitriolic of these vilifiers was the late Dennis Potter, who insisted that Leigh’s 1977 “Abigail’s Party” was “based on nothing more edifying than rancid disdain, for it was a prolonged jeer, twitching with genuine hatred, about the dreadful suburban tastes of the dreadful lower-middle classes.” And though his Palme d’Or victory has started to turn Leigh into “our Mike,” before that, it was the rare British article about him that did not contain digs.

More than that, Leigh’s success, like that of “Wuthering Heights,” has come in the face of considerable initial disbelief that such a thing was possible. He was told, for instance, that his working methods meant that “you can never get professional actors to do it.” Yet he gave Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, both in 1983’s “Meantime,” and Ben Kingsley, in 1973’s “Hard Labour,” some of their first work.

Similarly, when Leigh talked to the BBC, for whom he made “Hard Labour” and seven other features, about shooting them on theatrical 35mm instead of made-for-TV videotape, “they didn’t see it; it sounded like adolescent fantasizing to them.” And though his most passionate following may be in the United States, Leigh remembers being told by American companies during his television years, “Your films of all films will not travel, and they especially will not travel to the United States.”

Sitting in his comfortable Soho office located a floor below the intimate working environment of “Yvonne-French” and “Josett, formerly of Brewer Street,” Leigh in person is a passionate, articulate man--friendly, yet wary, with a reflexive edge of asperity about him.

“You have to have your wits about you to work with him,” says producer Channing-Williams. And Alison Steadman, who’s appeared in several of his features, says, “Mike doesn’t suffer fools gladly. If someone gets up his nose with a stupid remark, he will say so. He’s quirky, not your run-of-the-mill Mr. Nice Guy, and he doesn’t disguise his difficult side.”

Yet Brenda Blethyn--who remembers him fooling with the sides of the box that his Cannes award came in, quipping, “These must be the doors of the Palme d’Or”--says he’s “one of the funniest men on the face of the earth.”

Overpowering all of these traits, however, is Leigh’s compassion. “As a man, as a person, he’s working from a loving, caring point of view,” says Steadman, married to the director for more than 20 years. (The marriage is ending but the the two, who lived in a comfortable house in North London, remain on good terms.)

Journalists have commented on his resemblance to Charles Laughton, but with his full beard and deep, expressive eyes, Leigh looks surprisingly like a wonder-working Hasidic rabbi, able to examine the most intimate secrets of the soul.

Not surprisingly, Leigh makes films, as he said in accepting the Palme for “Secrets & Lies,” “about people, love, relationships, caring, real life--all the things that are important,” what Leigh has called elsewhere “a lamentation and celebration of the human experience.” Focusing on the awkward comic agony of life’s unexpected crises, Leigh manages to exquisitely balance humor and pain without ever tipping over.

“My films,” he says with energy, “aspire to the condition of documentary. If you’re a newsreel cameraman and you go and shoot a real event, you know that that world exists whether you film it or not. What I want to do is create a world with that kind of solidity to it, something so three-dimensional and solid you could cut it with a knife.” “Secrets & Lies” typifies the expert way Leigh zeros in on the emotional stress points of relationships. An examination of what happens when a young black woman named Hortense seeks out Cynthia, her white birth mother, it is laced with scenes that tear at the heart, none more so than their initial face-to-face meeting in a deserted London tea shop.

Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), who gave her daughter up without even looking at her, initially thinks that Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) must be mistaken in thinking they are related. If she’d ever had sex with a black man, she says, she’d surely remember. Then, with awful suddenness, in a scene of exceptional emotional power, we see the memory literally flood Cynthia’s face as she breaks down into convulsive sobs. “That moment is devastating,” agrees “Secrets & Lies” cinematographer Dick Pope. “You can’t believe it’s acting, the emotion is so true.”

The source of such a complex, heartfelt and unerringly realistic sequence is Leigh’s celebrated, often misunderstood working method, the way he, in collaboration with his actors, uses a labor-intensive, improvisation-based system to, in effect, “grow” a film’s characters from the ground up.

The director is fond of calling his method “organic,” as in “growing properly rooted and centered,” and his actors, making short work of the notion that they are exploited, are at a loss to find superlatives strong enough to describe the Great Adventure his films are for them. “An ultimate acting experience,” says Brenda Blethyn. Katrin Cartlidge, who co-starred with David Thewlis in “Naked,” says: “It’s not an acting job; it’s a life experience, a profoundly fascinating and philosophical journey that’s like climbing Mt. Everest.”

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The best way to understand how Leigh’s method works and where it comes from is to examine the origins of the man. He grew up in Salford, a city next door to Manchester in the north of England, the grandson of Jewish immigrants. His father, who changed the family name from Liebermann to Leigh, was a doctor who was very much a part of the working-class area he lived and practiced in, and Leigh has vivid memories of the characters he either met or knew of, like the man who showed off a newspaper clipping headlined “Unknown Hoodlum Raids Bank” and boasted, “That’s me!”

Even as a child, Leigh was a tremendous movie buff and always saw things in cinematic terms. “I used to make up films in my head, that was always my thing,” he says. “I remember when I was 12 and my grandfather died, these ancient pallbearers were schlepping his coffin down the stairs. One of them had a long drip hanging from his nose, and I was thinking, ‘You could make a movie out of this.’ I remember just wanting to capture the spirit of it. My subject matter always is and was just looking at people they way they are.”

Two other forces influenced the spirit of Leigh’s work and his personality. One was simply growing up in the industrial North, a traditionally radical area with a strong working-class consciousness, where “people talk plain and direct. They don’t mess about; they’re in your face and honest.”

The other factor, though Leigh has not often spoken of it, is his Jewishness in general and his having spent “my formative years in Habonim, a left-wing Jewish-Zionist youth organization” in particular. Since Habonim was “a kibbutz-oriented movement, I learned at an early stage about collaboration and sharing that, in a way, is how I work. I feel sometimes that I carry on a great Jewish tradition of a rebbe surrounded by Talmudic students, talking things out.”

He insists on the caveat “at the most fundamental and obvious level it would be perfectly wrong to read my films as being primarily in any way about Jewishness” and says “for years and years I shut up about the whole thing, because you don’t want to be labeled and the whole thing has a different currency in the English dimension.”

But Leigh also knows that “on another, more sophisticated level it would be quite dishonest if I were to deny my films are Jewish in their way. The tragicomic view of life, the melancholy, if you know what you’re talking about, there is a Jewish flavor to it, a Jewishness in the spirit of it. I could deny it, but it would be stupid.”

Deciding that training as an actor would be the surest route to involvement in film, Leigh unnerved his parents by applying for and getting accepted at RADA, London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in 1959.

During his brief time as an actor, Leigh managed bit parts in a few British films. Knowing he “just wanted to see film happening, no matter what the film was,” Leigh hung out on movie sets, spent considerable time at the National Film Theatre and took classes at night at the London School of Film Technique.

Since it was easier to get directing jobs in plays than in films, much of Leigh’s early experience was in the theater. He began his improvisatory methods with teenage actors at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham in 1965, and he mentions a 1968 London play, “Individual Fruit Pies,” as the point at which he felt “I’d got how to do it: work separately with actors to create characters, gradually introduce them together, let it build and grow and then distill and refine.”

Leigh’s first film, 1971’s “Bleak Moments,” was a theatrical feature taken from one of his stage plays and partly financed by Memorial Enterprises, the production company of fellow Salford native Albert Finney, who facetiously suggested “Carry on Gloom” for a title. Leigh is still pleased by the rave this story of a woman who struggles with the care of a mentally impaired sister got from a young Roger Ebert, who called it “a masterpiece, plain and simple,” adding that “its genius is not just in the direction or subject, but in the complete singularity of the performances.”

Given reviews like that, a career in theatrical features would seem a matter of course, but, in fact, Mike Leigh did not direct another film in 35mm until 1988’s “High Hopes.” Though he now understands that “Bleak Moments” was “the fluke, the anomaly,” he can’t rid himself of the memories of all that time “when we made these films and nobody out there in the world knew about them. They’d be shown once and that was it. I went mad for 17 years. It was terrible.”

Leigh directed nine made-for-television features during those years, almost all of them for the BBC. (Eight of these, including such Leigh classics as “Home Sweet Home” and “Grown-Ups,” are still available on video through Water Bearer Films, 800- 551-8304). And these TV years did have their strong points. One was the enormous audience his films reached: The very popular “Abigail’s Party,” for instance, was seen by about 9 million viewers in its Play for Today slot. More important was the opportunity for Leigh to fully learn the craft and perfect his method. “We complained about this and that, but the BBC was brilliant; it was good news,” he says. “When I got the films, boy, it was carte blanche. Nobody ever interfered with casting or editing. I never made a cut that wasn’t mine.”

What started to change things for Leigh was the appearance as a potential financier of a new television entity, Channel 4, which rapidly became Britain’s leading filmmaking institution. Channel 4 smartly shot its films in 35mm and made the decision to show them theatrically before their television debuts.

This was exactly the situation that Leigh had been looking for for years. Unfortunately, his first film for Channel 4 was shot before the decision was made to go to 35mm. That meant that 1983’s marvelous “Meantime” was consigned to the video graveyard.

It was partly as a response to Leigh’s growing success that the controversy about his treatment of the lower classes--a point of view that British film critics called patronizing, condescending and worse--began to build. But Leigh’s collaborators, like cinematographer Dick Pope, are equally steadfast in his defense. “The British don’t like to see themselves portrayed warts and all,” he says flatly. “They find Mike a tricky customer. He gets under people’s skins over here; he shows what’s inside the dustbin.”

Leigh, for his part, agrees that the criticism, which has no counterpart in other countries, says “more about England than about my films. This is a deeply class-ridden society like nowhere else, and everything resonates around that. Since I make films which are about England, because I’m specifically concerned with creating a real world, implicitly and inevitably, problems of class are part of the texture. People see what I do as a patronizing attack on the lower orders; they say it’s wrong and immoral to patronize. But I’m not doing it, and Dickens didn’t do it either.”

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The notion that there must be something written down is also something that refuses to die. “Secrets & Lies” actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste reports that “people keep talking about the script, asking what attracted me to the role of Hortense. There was no role--what you’re attracted to is the process.”

Similarly persistent and wrongheaded are the notions that Leigh’s actors improvise on camera, or that the whole process is loose, mellow and unstructured. “It’s no happening,” retorts Leigh acerbically. “It’s a great deal of order and discipline.”

This lack of understanding is part of the reason, along with a sense of boredom, that Leigh talks about how he works with some reluctance. Also pushing him to hold his tongue is his belief that “in the end, the only thing that matters is what is on the screen; everything else is neither here nor there.”

If there is a key to understanding Mike Leigh’s process, it lies, in a typical paradox, in forgetting how smart and articulate the man is. In every aspect of his work, Leigh is intuitively depending almost exclusively on instincts too basic and fluid to stand articulation. On a profound level, asking him how he does what he does makes no more sense than asking a novelist how he writes or a painter where his canvases come from.

What comes first, as it would with a more conventional writer, is the vaguest of notions, something that hovers in the air. Sometimes, as with “Secrets & Lies,” where Leigh knew he wanted to deal with adoption, the notion is fairly concrete. At other times, it’s not.

“I’m always walking around with certain feelings and ideas kicking around, and I put myself in the position any artist can understand: Here is the space, here is the canvas. Every decision I make, starting with choosing actors, gives you different combinations, stimulates you. What I’m doing is looking for the film, testing what is going on against what I think I’m doing. It’s an elusive combination of what I know and what I don’t know, and no one should underestimate the importance of the fact that I’m only answerable to myself, even if I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Cast selection has a paramount position in Leigh’s method. As Steadman says, “the act of choosing the first actor is for him like an artist choosing the first brush stroke.”

“They’ve got to be intelligent, have a sense of humor and be good character actors, able to play something other than themselves,” Leigh says. “And they’ve got to have a sense of the real world, to be fascinated by everybody and everything.”

“Not every actor can do it,” says actress Katrin Cartlidge, who appeared in “Naked.” “You can’t be primarily interested in what your role is or how famous you’re going to be. You need a huge amount of patience and the ability, if possible, to keep paranoia well and truly out the door and under lock and key.” Adds Steadman: “You need a terrific commitment to the work. It’s no use thinking you’re going to have much social life or much family life. The work just does take up so much time.”

The process, which Cartlidge describes as being “like going on a journey blindfolded, feeling your way along,” always begins with Leigh working one-on-one with each of the actors in a joint quest to find the character that can last up to two or three months. These sessions are strictly private, as is all of Leigh’s process. They begin with talk of people the actor knows, even casually, and proceed, via questions and discussion, to expand on characteristics and possibilities. It all leads to the moment when the director chooses someone to focus on.

Now comes the laborious work of fleshing that choice out that sets Leigh’s work apart. Every imaginable facet of the character from infancy onward--from “when you learned to swim to what color toothbrush you use,” according to David Thewlis--is brought up and discussed in detail with the director. “You build up memories, experiences, a whole life that becomes almost as real to you as the one you live yourself; it infiltrates the fabric of your subconscious,” says Cartlidge, who reports, as does Thewlis, that she actually began dreaming as her character as the process intensified.

The work actors do in this regard is physical as well as mental. Since Brenda Blethyn’s Cynthia in “Secrets & Lies” worked 10-hour shifts in a box factory, the actress did so as well and also spent time in libraries reading newspapers about her character’s formative years. And since daughter Hortense was an optometrist, actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste went to a university to study optometry three times a week for three months.

This verisimilitude continues during actual filming. On 1976’s “Nuts in May,” about the adventures of an eccentric couple on a camping vacation, Leigh insisted that Steadman and Roger Sloman, who played the pair, follow their vacation plan even when he was not filming them. “So we had to put on our costumes, go into character, and take a 15-mile up-and-down hike around Lulworth Cove in Dorset. It was tiring and exhausting, we were in character all day, and I honestly didn’t think I was going to make it.”

All this differs, the actors emphasize, from the more common acting practice of working out a backstory, a “past,” for a character. “I could create an entire history for Lady Macbeth and nobody would ever be the wiser,” says Cartlidge. “Your responsibility is far greater here. I’m being invited by Mike to use every ounce of my creative and imaginative soul to provide the fabric that goes into the making of this film.”

And it’s not only the leads. Every character in a Mike Leigh film is this carefully worked out. On the earlier “Life Is Sweet,” “Naked” star David Thewlis admits to having felt “disgruntled and paranoid” when it turned out that he had only a small part as the boyfriend of Nicola, a character played by Jane Horrocks. “All I did was come in, cover Jane Horrocks with chocolate and lick it off. I’d done all this work, and they could have gotten anyone off the street to do that--no offense to Jane.”

(Because Leigh insists that characters, even if related, know only as much about each other as they would in real life, Steadman, who played Horrocks’ mother, was shocked to find out at “Life Is Sweet’s” first screening what her daughter had been up to with all that chocolate. “I said, ‘What? She was doing what?’ Whenever I’d come home, her character would be in the bath, but I suspected the problem was that she had a washing disorder. It turns out I’d gotten the wrong end of the stick, as we do in life.”)

Once Leigh decides that his characters are at the appropriate stage of readiness, the director brings them together for more months of extensive improvisations. “Actors can be very afraid of it, because you’re very vulnerable; you can make a fool of yourself,” says Steadman. “But when Mike sets one up, he makes sure the actor has all the relevant information, so you feel 100% secure in your imagination.” To emphasize this, Steadman says, Leigh at a certain point will set up what he calls The Quiz Club for his actors. “We all gather in a room and he asks us questions which we answer only in our heads. ‘What does your character think about Margaret Thatcher?’ ‘What does he or she think about sex before marriage?’ ‘What did you give for Christmas presents?’ When you realize you are secure enough in your character to answer all these questions, you know that everything’s clear and water- tight.”

Leigh, in fact, expects you to know the person you play so inside out that, during the filming of “Secrets & Lies,” he bawled out Blethyn when another character drank out of the wrong mug in a scene set in her kitchen, ruining two hours of filming. “It wasn’t a continuity problem; it was my problem. He gave me a striping in front of everyone,” says Blethyn, still a bit shaken at the memory. “He said I lived in the house--I should know which cups I had. He expects that precision from everyone.”

Even though your character may be ready for improvisation, the character Leigh intends you to interact with may not. Or the director may be busy with some of the film’s other characters. But it’s always possible that you’ll suddenly be wanted on short notice. It is this need to be on standby for what can be weeks on end, “waiting around like a doctor on call while keeping your character on the boil,” says Cartlidge, that leads to the unavoidable bouts of paranoia that all Leigh’s actors experience.

“You start thinking, ‘He’s not impressed with my work, he doesn’t think I’m right, I’m not serving any purpose,’ ” remembers Thewlis. Even Blethyn, who turned out to be the star of “Secrets & Lies,” says there were moments when “I started to think, ‘I’m not going to be in this film.’ If Mike would be working elsewhere I’d say to myself, ‘I bet the whole cast is in that bit, I’ll bet that’s what the film is about.’ ” As Cartlidge says, “you need to have nerves of steel.”

Though they start with the characters meeting each other cold, these improvisations, which regularly go on for hours, can have explosive results. Perhaps because of the incendiary nature of its story, the strongest improv tales come out of “Naked,” the harrowing story of a nightmarish few days a sullen Manchester drifter named Johnny (played by Thewlis) spends in London.

One of Johnny’s street encounters is with an equally hot-tempered Scottish vagrant named Archie (Ewen Bremner, who went on to play Spud in “Trainspotting”). “In the initial improvisation on a London street, we became very hostile,” Thewlis remembers. “There was a lot of shouting, beer cans were thrown, one of us had a screwdriver and wanted to fight--it got a little dangerous. Then Mike came over and very quietly said, ‘Come out of character’ and we’re required to shut up. All these people watching must have thought, ‘What did this little character in the beard say to these hoodlums?’ Then the police came along and Mike had to explain his work methods and walk back to the rehearsal rooms to produce his documents from Channel 4.”

Equally intense was Johnny’s interaction with a woman named Sophie (played by Cartlidge), his former girlfriend’s roommate. “There was an instant rapport between our characters, and though we’d never met before as actors, we ended up kissing and exploring each other’s bodies,” Thewlis reports. “Then Mike said ‘Come out of character,’ and there was a moment when she held out her hand and said, ‘Hello, I’m Katrin.’ We were terribly shy with each other then--our first conversation was so stilted. She’s since become one of my dearest friends, but it was the strangest start to, hopefully, a lifelong friendship you could imagine.”

With uncounted hundreds of hours of improvisations to choose from, it is Leigh’s particular genius to know exactly which sequences and moments are worth saving, reconsidering and paring down. So much of the success of his method depends on this ability that Leigh himself admits that “though, in the early days, I would tend to proselytize about it, what I actually specifically do is so idiosyncratic that I suspect it is exclusively useful to me.” Though he never writes out anything more than bare one-line outlines of scenes, once he hears what he wants in a sequence, Leigh expects his actors to recall their words for the camera exactly the way they’ve rehearsed them. Unlike the work of John Cassavetes, for instance, absolutely no spontaneous speech is allowed once filming begins, a situation that demands that actors be able to switch from the free-flow of rehearsal to absolute precision.

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While Leigh is happy to name American actors like Jennifer Jason Leigh, who he’s confident could work for him, the intensity of his methods makes it unlikely that major Hollywood stars would fit in, and it’s something of a parlor game among his actors to imagine what that interaction would be like. Steadman, for instance, comically widens her eyes to indicate sincerity and mimics, “They might say, ‘Believe me, I’m ready, this is what I want,’ but a week in they’d be saying, ‘What is this? I’m Brad Pitt, I’m not doing a 15-mile hike on Lulworth Cove.’ ”

As for Leigh himself, those same methods, plus his insistence on brooking absolutely no interference, means that no matter how much Hollywood might be fascinated by what he does, asking if he could make films here is pointless. “What I do is very narrow, very rarefied, very specific,” he says. “It’s not portable, so why would I want to shoot myself in the foot and work in Hollywood? I’d rather drink arsenic or ground glass and get it over with quickly.” But if a way could be found to furnish Leigh with ironclad guarantees of autonomy, he would accept Hollywood’s money, because the thoroughness of his labor-intensive methods does not come cheap. When the talk returns to that marvelous tearoom scene between mother and daughter in “Secrets & Lies,” Leigh suddenly raises his voice over the din of a Soho night seeping through closed windows to make his point.

“That film cost over 3 million, and people might say, ‘Where’s the value for money? Where’s the helicopter shots?’ That scene is where. You can only do that kind of stuff because of weeks and weeks of preparation, of building history. Anyone can get two actresses in a room and say, ‘She’s your mother, improvise,’ but it’ll still be crap. We’ve lived through it all, we built it all, and it all earns its keep. That time spent gestating is value for money, and nobody gets it for nothing.”

Not even Mike Leigh.