Hard Truths star Marianne Jean-Baptiste with its director Mike Leigh. Image: Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo
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“Why can’t you enjoy life?” “I don’t know.” These two lines, spoken between the sisters Pansy and Chantelle in Mike Leigh’s new filmHard Truths, get you right in the heart. And Hard Truths is, undoubtedly, a hard watch. At various points, it feels intrusive to be watching a woman who is so clearly in so much pain and anguish.
Pansy Deacon – played with supreme skill by long-time Leigh collaborator Marianne Jean-Baptiste – appears at first to be simply angry with the world. In a prison of her own making, perhaps. But there is so much more in both the film and Baptiste’s performance.
The more time we spend in her presence, struggling to connect with her son and husband, raging at the cashier in the supermarket, bitter about her sister’s easy, loving relationships, the more we see that Pansy just finds life so unbelievably hard. She is so very sad and inexplicably angry all the time. It is heartbreaking to witness.
“People will react to it in a whole variety of different ways, according to their own experience of life and all sorts of things, including how perceptive they are or how empathetic they are,” says Leigh, when we meet ahead of the film’s UK premiere.
“But that’s what it’s all about, as far as I’m concerned. It’s about the complexity of life.”
Hard Truths does something special. It takes cinemagoer on a journey towards empathy. Were we to encounter Pansy in real life, we might try to ignore her in the hope she takes her anger elsewhere. But Leigh doesn’t allow us this option. He challenges us to maintain eye contact and look more deeply.
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And the more we are confronted with Pansy, and Baptiste’s astonishing portrayal of the deep-seated physical and mental pain that underlies her unrelenting fury, the more we are guided towards a more empathetic response.
“Mike is the storyteller,” says Baptiste. “He’s the guy that’s orchestrating the symphony. I just want people to have some compassion. Maybe don’t judge people so harshly. Look closer. See that there is something going on with them.”
Baptiste as Pansy with sister Chantelle (Michele. Austin) in Hard Truths
Hard Truths can also be read as a film in which post-lockdown fears borne of extended social isolation combine with post-austerity fury at the state of the nation. Leigh is open to these readings.
But, in his polite-but-firm way, he gently disabuses us of the notion.
“It’s not for me to disagree,” he says, “other than to say that I really haven’t thought about that in the conception or execution of the film.”
Onto things we can agree on. A central performance that should be recognised during awards season.
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“It was certainly about time me and Marianne got back together. We’ve been talking about it for a while,” says Leigh.
“Like all the actors I work with, she’s a brilliant character actress. She’s got a great spirit, a great sense of life, she is politically committed. But above all, she’s a consummate character actor.”
Their first collaboration was life-changing for both. Secrets & Lies is regarded as one of the great British films of the last 30 years and saw Baptiste nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars back in 1997.
“What’s for sure is she bloody well should have got that Oscar,” says Leigh. “When we were at the Oscars and had those five nominations and didn’t win, almost all of them went to The English Patient. We could have a discussion about whether you think The English Patient is a better film than Secrets & Lies…”
He leaves his deliciously bitchy provocation hanging for just a moment.
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“When Juliet Binoche got the Best Supporting Actress, she walked over to Marianne and said, ‘You should have got this.’
“But I make films for audiences to see. It isn’t about a shelf full of badly designed artefacts. And I could do without without standing on any more red carpets and grinning like an ape. But that’s an occupational hazard – and people have worse occupational hazards than that.”
While he has veered into historical storytelling on Peterloo, Mr Turner and Topsy-Turvy, the majority of his work chronicles the joy and struggle of ordinary, everyday contemporary life. From the culture-clash class comedy of High Hopes in 1988, an early window on urban gentrification, to the alienation and rage of David Thewlis as Johnny in 1993’s Naked and the joy of Sally Hawkins as eternal optimist Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), the range of stories he has created with his fiercely loyal band of players is dazzling.
His methodology is the stuff of legends, but collaboration on character is, he says, “non-negotiable. You can only create three-dimensional characters by working from the ground in a completely thorough way, knowing you’re inventing and creating things that will never be mentioned in the end product. But they’re in the foundations. And the foundations have to be solid.”
Gary Oldman, Lesley Manville, Alison Steadman, Jim Broadbent, Phil Davis, Ruth Sheen, Daniel Mays and Brenda Blethyn have all gone on to great things after early success with Leigh.
“It’s wonderful. I love it. The things that brings me down and depresses me most is there are too many very good actors who don’t work enough,” he says.
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“I know fantastic actors who should have had great careers and it’s just never happened through a series of bad luck and flukes. So when actors who are brilliant and deserve to be up there are doing well? I think it’s a gas. I don’t necessarily like what they’re in always, but that’s another matter entirely!”
Leigh sees ideas for films everywhere, he says. “I walk down the street and there are 10, 15, 20 or a hundred ideas. Because it’s people. Today, I walked around the back street behind my flat and there was a group of homeless kids. It’s been a place where they congregate forever. And they were really in a bad way, you could see it, just sitting in the road. I said, ‘That’s dangerous, you might get killed.’ And this girl said, ‘Hopefully.’”
He winces. “And that is Big Issue stuff, you know?”
‘There’s nothing like it’: Hart Truths stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin on working with Mike Leigh
Why do Mike Leigh’s regular collaborators rave about working with him? His process of building characters and stories in collaboration with actors is unique. Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin play sisters Pansy and Chantelle – both previously worked with Leigh on Secrets & Lies, while Austin also had roles in All Or Nothing and Another Year.
Mike Leigh’s new film Hard Truths has been nominated for Outstanding British Film at the Baftas
“There’s nothing like it,” says Baptiste. “We were talking about our imaginations as children and loving to tell stories – and this is storytelling in its purest form. As an actor, you don’t get to use all that you could possibly use – but in this situation, you’re rinsed out doing it.”
Austin nods. “You are rinsed out, but not one bit of you regrets it – because this is the best it is going to get in terms of tapping in to everything you have got. I have been having a nice career, but the agency you get from working this way is very special.”
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So what’s the difference? What’s the Leigh magic?
“On your first day of rehearsal, in isolation with Mike, you come in with a list of people that you know,” says Baptiste.
“These might be people you know well or someone that works in a bakery you’ve gone into – they don’t even have to be that interesting! The list gets shortened until you have about five you start merging to build a character. Then you go through from their first memory to the age you’re going to play, year after year.
“You go on and on until somebody walks up the stairs and you meet your sister or husband. Then you work with them to create a collective history – discussing their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, birthday parties, school.”
Austin adds: “It’s all the details you may need to improvise. Then there are other exercises to create the physical sense of them, what their relationships are like.”
And then – when it’s almost time to start work, one final important element.
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“You have the naming ceremony,” says Baptiste. “You pick names and go through them with Mike. Pansy was my first choice with this one, because it was so culturally on the nose.”
