Director Mike Leigh gets 'Happy'

Happy-Go-Lucky is, at long last, British writer-director Mike Leigh’s bright, shiny “Have a Nice Day” button of a movie about a cockeyed optimist in contemporary times. It begs the question, “Could Candide cut it in this cynical, depressed world?”

Asked another way, “Why is that girl smiling—all the time?” That girl is a 30-year-old, perpetually pert primary schoolteacher in North London named Poppy Cross.
The cross she bears is that she sails breezily through life, meeting all obstacles with blind, boundless optimism. The consistency of her sunny stance may unnerve and annoy some—especially if The Sound of Music isn’t your kind of movie—but stick with it because she’s right and you’re wrong.

It was an odd choice for a filmmaker to make—fraught with dangerous detours, in fact—but Leigh has never been one to follow the beaten path. Heretofore, for the most part, he has emotionally traveled on the dark side of the moon, dispensing somber meditations on the plights of a kind-hearted abortionist (Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake), an economically strapped and trapped cabbie (Timothy Spall in All or Nothing) and an abuse-spewing drifter from Manchester (David Thewlis in Naked).

Plainly, the world was not prepared for Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky or a happy-go-lucky Leigh—and that was profoundly true of followers of the New York Film Festival where, like five previous Leighs (including High Hopes, Secrets & Lies and Topsy-Turvy), it received its official U.S. launching prior to its Miramax release. Many of the press here were suspicious of the happy face Leigh was putting on, if not irked by Poppy’s Cheer Concentrate.

“Well, I don’t think she is relentlessly sunny,” Leigh argued back at the festival every time the word “irritating” came up (which was frequently). “That’s a misreading of the film. She doesn’t irritate me. I’m mystified by people who say they’re irritated by her. I don’t see it. She’s not your standard movie character who’s got a problem and is compensating for it. She’s for real. To me, she’s a person with great stillness and calm and intelligence. She’s centered, she’s responsible and she has great humor.”

Our first exposure to this humor is the barrage of quips and jokes with which she pelts a glum, grumpy bookstore proprietor, trying to elicit a smile from him. Not only does that not work, her commuter bike is stolen while she’s trying. In her glass-is-half-full fashion, she decides to open a new window (which stays open for most of the film): She uses this opportunity to learn to drive via the Axle School of Motoring (“Good driving is no accident”), and this puts her in painful proximity to a volatile, short-fused driving teacher named Scott, an abusive by-the-book martinet.



This chaotic teacher-student relationship, in which Poppy’s wit fends off Scott’s ballistic rants but fuels his rage, is contrasted with her compassionate work at school helping a playground bully whose real problems start at home; this she learns with the assistance of a young social worker who becomes her boyfriend. She also even gets through to a homeless street-crazy she comes across by accident.

Various vignettes, going nowhere and everywhere—like life—surround Poppy the teacher and Poppy the taught. She copes with a Sunday-afternoon hangover making papier-mâché hats for her kids with her flat-mate, Zoe; she takes tango lessons with another colleague; she visits her pregnant sister and henpecked brother-in-law.

Poppy is not so much a part of the times as she is the panacea for the times, according to Leigh: “The world is in a disastrous and powerless state now. I remember, circa 1970, our expectations of the future were positive. We’d pulled out of Vietnam, and we thought, ‘It’s over. Now, the crap has finished. Now, people are going to start behaving. The world will sort itself out.’ If you’d described to us the state of the world today—and never mind the rise of religious fundamentalism—we would have been more than horrified. The world is a mess, and there’s much to be gloomy about.

“But while we’re being gloomy—and I think we should be gloomy—there are people out there nurturing the future. Teaching is an optimistic act, by definition, and Poppy is just one of those nurturing people. That’s what the picture’s about, really.”

So how did Leigh come up with the idea of a benign lass with unsinkable enthusiasm negotiating her way through the negativism of today’s world? “It was more of a feeling than an idea,” he fine-tunes. “You say, ‘Well, what was the feeling?’ A feeling is the feeling that the film is. But, having embarked on the journey of making the film—and just doing what I do, which is to discover what the film is by making it—I realized that what I was actually working out—the idea as opposed to the feeling I was working out—was, somehow, to make what I call ‘an anti-miserablist film.’”

A collaborator of the first water, Leigh is legendary for his long “rehearsal” periods in which he more or less custom-fits the characters to the people who will be playing them. “I spend months with the actors to create the world of the characters,” he says, “and I work with every actor individually. I get to know them very intimately, very well. They always have direct input into their characters. That’s a major part of it. But they don’t play themselves, y’know. It’s about character-acting.”

Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Katrin Cartlidge, Allan Corduner and Lesley Manville are among the actors on Leigh’s launching pad, and some have come back for seconds—and thirds. “When you’ve worked with somebody and you like them, you go back to them—but I always keep bringing in new people as well. I don’t see it as a stock company, but it is a sort of family. Of course, they all want to be in them all the time. Statistically, I can’t do that. It would become tedious.”

Sally Hawkins, whose Poppy picked up the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival and is already being touted for Oscar consideration, “came through the ordinary processes of casting. This is her third film in succession with me. She was in All or Nothing, in which she played the girl lying around on the estate and being kind of cheeky. In Vera Drake, she was the upper-class girl who is raped. She has done a lot of very interesting work in other films. I got to know her very well—and I just knew that she’d be perfect for Poppy. I thought it was time to get her at the center of things, that she could do it, that she’d carry it off. I was right.”

Another Vera Drake recruit, Eddie Marsan, plays Scott in assorted blasts of bombast—an 180-degree turn from the nebbish Jewish dad he just played in Sixty-Six. “That’s what he does,” explains Leigh. “He is very versatile. He’s been around a decade or so. He was the priest in 21 Grams and some kind of hood in Miami Vice.”



Not the least of Leigh’s achievements is the intimacy and accuracy with which he depicts today’s world of thirty-somethings, something that would seem to be far removed from his 65-year-old frame of reference. Did he send out foot-runners and ask them to report back? “If I sent runners out, I wouldn’t know about it,” he shoots back. “That seems to me Ivory Tower Hollywood, because they don’t research anything. I think that you’ve got to know about life by being out there in the world. How does an artist know about life? You have to have your antenna out and your ears out and your soul open—and just get out there and take in the world.

“All the characters in this film—Poppy and Zoe and so on—they’re around 30. Well, I’ve got a son that age and another son who’s 27, and I’ve hung out with these guys. I knew their world, and I’ve talked to film students about the same age. I’m not someone who’s locked away in a kind of geriatric world of people just my own age.

“But even when I make pictures about people and characters and territories and worlds that I know nothing about, the job is to get out there and find out about it. Also, if you’re a painter or novelist or filmmaker or whatever, it’s because you have some instinct to understand what people are. You use your imagination as well.”

Leigh has displayed this understanding in 18 full-length feature films since Bleak Moments got his cameras rolling back in 1971. Along the way, for a little medium punctuation, he has managed to author some 20 plays, a quarter of which got much-applauded New York premieres from The New Group.

“Because I’m not in the business of looking for scripts and reading novels, I make these films in a very intuitive way,” Leigh confides. “I don’t sit down and write a film in the conventional way. I create the work by working with actors and putting it together. I discover what the film is by doing it. There’s always an ongoing, ever-accumulating backlog of all kinds of preoccupations and ideas. Right this minute, I’ve got all sorts of ideas going on. I will make a film next year if we can get the money, which seems to be tough because these are tough times at the moment. But I can’t say what it is. I never talk about anything till it has actually happened—because of the way I work.”

He can say what it won’t be, to his regret. “The thing that I really want to do—which nobody will give me the money for, which is very upsetting—is a film about J.M.W. Turner, the great painter. He was a great character as well. He wasn’t aware of it when he died, but he was subsequently regarded as the father of Impressionism.”

Another lost opportunity: “We had a scheme to make a film about British flight attendants doing their transatlantic thing to New York, and we were setting it up when 9/11 happened. They said there’d never be another film about an airplane. Of course, that turned out not to be the case, but that idea has come and gone away.”

Leigh is hoping his filmmaking future will improve if Hawkins gets an Oscar shot. “I’ve been to the Oscars three times with films—Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake—and only twice have we won: for Topsy-Turvy’s makeup and costumes. But for acting and directing and screenplay—nothing. Look, we’re outsiders at the Oscars. We make these independent, low-budget European movies, and we slink up to them. We’re the wooden horse of Troy, except we haven’t won the battle yet.”