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Another Year

Coverage by Nobuhiro hosoki

Story : An aging receptionist (Lesley Manville) desperately tries to ease the pain of her loneliness by flirting with her employer's much-younger son.

Opens December 29, 2010

Runtime:2 hr. 9 min.

Interview with Actress Lesley Manville, and Director Mike Leigh

 

(Q): It was really fascinating to see a film with at the center of it two characters that kind of present a positive process of aging and being a couple. Mike, for you was this reflective of anybody that you knew or anybody that you had in mind? Or was there something that prompted the interest in that?
 
(Mike Leigh): It’s a question I can’t really answer. Obviously, to talk about it is some kind of interest. Obviously I am passionately concerned about everything the film is about and these people, like all people, are fundamentally important to explore. There’s no passing interest involved really. There are all kinds of aspects in film – characters, predicaments, relationships – which resonate with people and things in their life and my own life and their friends and people who are growing old, people who have children, people who are lonely, and places that we’ve all been and it’s all going on. So yes on every level basically.
 
(Q): But the key point was to have at the center these two people in a positive relationship at that age, which sometimes you don’t see often in films. You see but you don’t necessarily see it portrayed in films because they’re always looking for something.
 
(Mike Leigh): They’re a great couple and they have got great strength. In some ways you could say we are experts in failed relationships, we could say that know something we don’t know. In that sense they’re ideal, but I don’t think they’re ideal in the sense that they’re not plausible.
 
(Lesley Manville): I guess it’s unusual isn’t it that characters like that are put at the center of a film. If it was a film possibly just about Tom and Gerri it might be harder to inject drama into it as it were.
 
(Mike Leigh): It would be a bit boring.
 
(Lesley Manville): But there is plenty of drama that comes into their life because of the other people that are in the periphery of their life.
 
(Q): For me it was very fascinating to see that I reacted to connect with this kind of couple, because you look and see how it mirrors or doesn’t mirror your own life and that was fascinating, given their realness to me.
 
(Mike Leigh): Well that’s what I would hope it to do with the film is to create a world that you absolutely believe in and resonates with your own.
 
(Q): You’ve been shooting quite a long time in England, during the course of 20, 30 years. Is the process and approach different back then and now? When you’re involving the landscape it’s probably different.
 
(Mike Leigh): Well the fact of the matter is that when you make a film you’re making it now. Now is when you’re making it. So because it’s kind of organic material I don’t particularly think about how it’s changed or changing from one film to the next. I’m living now, I’m absorbing now, and apart from a couple of films I’ve made, “Vera Drake” and “Topsy-Turvy,” which were not contemporary, which lie outside the remit of your question anyway. I don’t really know what else to say about that really. Anything that’s changed in the form or content of my films in relation to what’s changed in society or in the landscape or the environment has looked after itself in a sense. But one doesn’t feel the change particularly.

And there are so many variables. First of all, for me there will be a difference in the whole experience of making a film when I’m 66, which is how old I was when I made this film, from making a film when I was 28, which is how old I was when I made my first feature film. But then on top of that there’s all sorts of stuff to do with the difference of one’s experience, the more sophisticated approach one has just to the material because you get more sophisticated at the way you work, the change in technology, what you can do and how you can do it and how it looks.

When we first made a film together in 1980 for the BBC it was shot on 16mm by a very sophisticated cinematographer, for example, Remi Adefarasian, who’s shot lots of feature films. But nevertheless it was pretty crude technically in relation to the work that would have gone on in shooting “Another Year.” Another variable is that I spend much more time rehearsing, much more time shooting than we used to. There are so many variables involved that it’s hard to isolate something that’s just to do with the environment. If you look at my films, of course if you look at my first film you’d be looking at a very strange, rather ancient environment, back in 1971. But that’s just a fact of life.
 
(Q): I want to speak with both of you about your opinion of or just like that time and that period when the BBC was supporting these kind of hard hitting, realistic depictions of England. What was that like during that time when you were younger and starting out and having this freedom to do more interesting stuff for television?
 
(Lesley Manville): I think it’s got less interesting at the BBC these days really. I mean the last 10 years it’s got less interesting. Not only did I make a film with Mike for BBC and Alan Clarke, I did a couple of what was called “Play for Today.” And that was a really good vehicle for new writing, and that doesn’t happen anymore now. But the time that you’re in it you’re just thinking this is great, we’re doing this, I’m working with Mike, I’m working with Alan Clarke, and you’re there doing it and you know that it’s kind of cutting edge stuff. Obviously there’s a lot of controversy about the film I made with Alan Clarke because of the subject matter and because of the language. It was really difficult to get swear words through the BBC at that time.

Well how can you make a film a film about football hooligans without having swearing? All sorts of stuff and all sorts of political stuff because, not going off track, but my character in that Alan Clarke film, she swore a lot. There was a scene that was completely cut where she was being quite violent. They didn’t mind the men being violent but they wouldn’t show the woman being violent. It was times of a heavy censorship and all of that stuff that we don’t quite suffer from now, but very good in another way because the BBC was being much, much braver and much more supportive of maverick work.
 
(Mike Leigh): Of course they weren’t driven by commercial considerations. There were three channels and everybody watched their three channels, whereas now they’re so neurotic and there are dozens and dozens of channels. It’s like Hollywood really and they’re sort of nervous about the material.

(Q): So television is not as of an interest to you then I guess at this point.
 
(Mike Leigh): Right.

(Q): So with that in mind, how do you see your process having evolved? You said that rehearsal times have gotten longer, times to develop characters have gotten longer, have there been any other things that have been imposed?
 
(Mike Leigh): There have but I can’t talk about them because we don’t in any specific, detailed way talk about what we actually get up to because it’s nobody’s business and it’s far too esoteric and it involves things that frankly it would be hard to impart even if we wanted to. Basically it’s the same, isn’t it?

(Lesley Manville): Yes, it’s the same. The biggest difference from a statistical point of view is you just get more time.

(Mike Leigh): It’s also actually, and we can’t go into the details, but there are quite a lot of aspects of what we actually do that have evolved over the years.
 
(Lesley Manville): There is, yeah.
 
(Mike Leigh): And it’s more sophisticated. And besides, each project has got its own requirements, and so I sort of reinvent the so-called process of doing it per project.
 
(Mike Leigh): That’s true actually, yeah. If I think about the different films I’ve done with you there are subtleties in the way that the rehearsal time has gone because of what’s been needed.
 
(Mike Leigh): For example, we worked on “Topsy-Turvy.” Now “Topsy-Turvy” was hugely about research, wasn’t it? I mean massively. And we didn’t really get that much time to get down to the acting until we got on the actual shoot and started to do things in the location. You couldn’t just get in there and start, everybody had to learn so much about so many aspects of life in the 1880s to get it up and running.
 
(Q): How long do you keep something percolating?

(Mike Leigh): Well it depends. “Vera Drake” was an idea for a film that I had on the go for 40 years or so because I am old enough to remember what it was like when people had unwanted pregnancies and abortion was illegal. But going back to “Another Year” and going back to your original question, if I was to say I’ve had the idea for “Another Year” on the go for a long time that wouldn’t be true because actually, even embarking on doing it I have to sort go on the journey of making it to discover what it actually was. However, what it is actually about goes so deep and back so far in my own experience that you could argue that I have had it on the go for a very long time. It’s academic.
 
(Lesley Manville): Exactly. It’s on the go but without you knowing it because it’s just called living your life.
 
(Q): As maybe a movie like “Happy-Go-Lucky” might not have necessarily been something that’s been percolating for a long time. It might have had just a particular incidence that prompted it.
 
(Mike Leigh): No, I don’t do films that come from a particular incident; that’s not what they’re about really.
 
(Q): Do you feel like you have a catalog of things that are there that you hopefully will tackle?
 
(Mike Leigh): Of course. It’s called life. I’m serious. That is a catalog. Absolutely seriously. If you’re a kind of artist whose work comes out of life experience and your response to life out there and people and issues and all the rest of it, then it is an ongoing catalog. Yeah, obviously there are particular things, notions but in the end they all come down to fundamental things that I continually come back to by definition.
 
(Q): Lesley, you spoke how there were subtle differences with the change for each film in terms of the method, the process. What were your first impressions of working with Mike on “Grown-Ups” to now with “Another Year”?
 
(Mike Leigh): “Grown-Ups” incidentally wasn’t the first time.
 
(Lesley Manville): It was the first film that we made together. Obviously I was much more of a novice then in every single way. I was in my twenties…
 
(Mike Leigh): Your early twenties.

(Lesley Manville): My early twenties, yeah. So it was a great discovery for me working with Mike because I think the crucial thing that happened for me through him is that it determined what kind of actor I wanted to be, and up until that point that thought hadn’t even entered my head. But the big thing was I realized I could play people who weren’t like me, and that’s been such a liberating thing for my career, not just in the work I’ve done with Mike but across my career. And I just tapped into that with him and it was just like this light coming on and it was fantastic.

How it compares to now, well all of that’s in place. I come to working with him now with a knowledge, a real, very deep understanding of how we’re going to work together. And of course, I suppose alluding to what we’ve both been saying, is that somebody like Mary is a result of me having had a life, me having had observed life around me for all these years. I could argue that maybe I couldn’t have played Mary 20 years ago. Obviously I couldn’t have played Mary as she is because I’d have been too young. But my understanding of that depth of her grief is obviously quite deep and significant now because I’ve lived my life. It’s just been very nice to work with Mike over these decades and for us both to have matured as individual artists and to have been able to bring all of that together so often.
 
(Q): Mike, could we expand on that a bit? You’ve worked with most of the actors in this film several times, not necessarily with them together but with all of them individually. Is it hard for you now to take on a novice?
 
(Mike Leigh): No, no it isn’t. It so happens that there are a number of people in this film that I’ve worked with lots of times. But David Bradley, who plays Ronnie, the bereaved brother in the film, he’s a first-timer. Karina Fernandez, who plays Katie was a first-timer in the last film; she played the Flamenco instructor. Everybody’s a first-timer sometime. If people are any good at it in five minutes you forget that they’re a first-timer, they just got on with it basically. I’m up for new acting all the time and I spend a lot of time finding new actors. In this particular film there’s an unusually high proportion of old-timers, and we are in the presence of the record holder.
 
(Lesley Manville): But not the oldest, thank goodness.
 
(Mike Leigh): Is that right?

(Q): I heard that your father is a doctor.
 
(Mike Leigh): He was; he’s been dead for 25 years.
 
(Q): When you were growing up in some way you learned some part of how he spoke to patients of how he spoke to your family. In some way you subconsciously adapted it in your mind, particularly when you see the character of Gerri and how she talks. In some way have you actually done that?
 
(Mike Leigh): Yes.
 
(Q): As you’re saying that there’s a catalog of life experience that are all formulating in films, when do you know that you have something that at this moment you’re ready to jump in and do?
 
(Mike Leigh): Well you see the thing and the truth of the matter is that that is actually defined by when there’s a project. We’re going to make a film and then we hunt around for money and we can’t say what it is so we have to find the backers who are happy to give me the money without knowing what they’re going to get and who aren’t going to insist that Brad Pitt’s in it. When I know I’m making a film it starts to focus me. There are things I would like to do which would take longer and cost more.

For example, tomorrow at 6 o’clock I’ve been persuaded to take part in a discussion about shooting in London, and I am regarded now by some quarters as being the sort of cinematic poet of London. It’s kind of nonsense really because apart from anything else, the reason why I make films in London is we can never afford to go anywhere else. A number of times I’ve said to my deceased producer, Simon Channing Williams, who died last year, “Can’t we go up North?” And in the end, because we work with a London based crew and all the rest we stay in London. But London is a huge place and in the end London isn’t the subject. It’s about the human condition and you can tell a story, so there are all sorts of different kinds of London in my films. What was the question? I can’t remember.
 
(Q): The question was at what point do you know that with all these ideas percolating it’s ready to be made into a film?
 
(Mike Leigh): If I know there’s x amount of time and y amount of where we’re going to be and whatever. But the idea is sort of that you then mesh the ideas with this. And also mostly it’s who I cast and who I invite to take part. Immediately the mind starts and one thing you know is that whatever happens Lesley’s going to be at the center of things. One of the interesting things about this film in a way is that we had a lot of stuff with Mary off somewhere else not really part of it all.

And so the thing I talked about earlier of finding the structural and viable premise so that you can explore Mary’s insistent relationship that in itself is interesting. So you’ve got it all going on and then you sort of in a way bend it round so that Mary’s this sprung coil and put into the middle of it all, even though she’s actually got less to do with the rest of them than anybody else really.
 
(Q): Do you actually audition? You said invite; that’s a fantastic word to hear a director use.
 
(Mike Leigh): No, I do auditions. I don’t audition her because I know her.
 
(Q): But you do hold auditions?
 
(Mike Leigh): Of course. For new actors of course, you have to. And it’s quite rigorous and detailed.

(Q): So it wouldn’t be sending a tape in, it would be somebody actually has to come in and show you.
 
(Mike Leigh): Oh yeah, I’ve got to meet them and talk to them.
 
(Q): And do you find people that are not necessarily actors but something about them you want to see if they can?
 
(Mike Leigh): No, I only work with actors; seasoned, professional, proper actors. I don’t work with amateurs at all.

End.