Mike Leigh on Hard Truths

The Film Comment Podcast

A new film from Mike Leigh is always a cause for celebration. Starting with his first feature Bleak Moments in 1971, Leigh has carved out a singular place in British and global cinema for his beautifully sensitive and detailed portraits of the lives of his largely working-class characters. His latest, Hard Truths, arrives six years after his previous release, the 2018 historical drama Peterloo. The new film reunites Leigh with the great actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste, with whom he worked on the Oscar-nominated Secrets & Lies in 1996. In Hard Truths, Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a middle-aged Londoner teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Perpetually unhappy, she spends her days spewing vitriol at everyone she encounters—especially her resigned husband (David Webber) and depressed adult son (Tuwaine Barrett). Only after she is confronted by her sister, played by Leigh veteran Michelle Austin, does she begin to confront the roots of her inexplicable anger. On today’s Podcast, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute sat down with Leigh to dig into his process—everything from casting actors and choosing locations to working with music composers and choosing the film’s title. A true actor’s filmmaker, Leigh works closely with his cast over months to develop characters and their backstories. What we see on screen is only, as Leigh remarked, “the tip of the iceberg.”