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Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins.

Mike Leigh

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Mike Leigh
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 20
Actor
Author
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Television Director
Theatrical Director
Writer
Hollywood
Choice
Eyes
Choices
Eye
Poking
Given
Pins
Steel
Prefer

More quotes by Mike Leigh

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I think Michael Caine is a perfectly good actor but it's obvious he's not going to be in one of my films.
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Resolve was never stronger than in the morning, after the night, when it was never weaker
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People have been very resistant to giving me more than the standard amount of money. So I keep making films on a similar scale. Which is fine, but also frustrating.
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Given the events of even the 19th century, Zionism was inevitable. Given the events of the 20th century, Israel was inevitable.
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The main problem is that the Hollywood system has already made the film before the director shoots a single frame.
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I discover what my film is by embarking on the journey of making it.
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I've long since stopped worrying about how I'm portrayed in the press because ultimately it's not that important. Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity.
Mike Leigh
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I am very happy to be part of European and world cinema as a British filmmaker.
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The reason my films work is because every actor on set is very secure. They're able to fly.
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When I was young I used to sit in the cinema thinking wouldn't it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real people instead of being like actors.
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I can't negotiate and collaborate with a character to create a distilled dramatic investigation of the raw material. I need to work with an actor. That stuff about actors who stay in character all the time is nonsense.
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I don't know what the character is going to be. We sit down and we create a character, and all of the characters in all of my films are made like that.
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I'm old enough to have friends and contemporaries who have long since retired, and that's their prerogative - enough is enough it doesn't mean a thing to me. But I haven't got any money, so, you know, I just keep on working.
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I think it’s important that nobody forgets that although Hollywood commercially dominates the world cinema, in fact what comes out of the filmmaking here is only a tiny slice out of the massive amount of operation that goes on around the world.
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But actually I make films that I think are extremely sophisticated and cinematic.
Mike Leigh
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It creeps up on you and becomes an obsession. It comes out of watching a million movies.
Mike Leigh
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As a general habit and general tendency, I prefer not to bog a piece down with a great number of transitory, contemporary references, because in the end, I'm concerned, not in an abstract way, but an actual way, with creating a world which has a universality to it - even though what goes on is made up of texture and detail, contemporary detail.
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There have always been and there always will be the peripheral sideline activities which are a form of entertainment, which is to say you pay a couple of cents and you see something freakish. That is what reality TV is.
Mike Leigh
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I think the camera has got to be motivated. You can't have things arrived at gratuitously. Everything has to have an organic function, but the more comfortable I've become and the more imaginative and sophisticated and the more exploratory I've become at the medium, the more I've subtly deviated away from that in various ways.
Mike Leigh
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Life is about luck and it's about circumstances and socioeconomic conditions and all the rest of it, but you know, you can also make choices. It's about spirit and generosity and all the other things, too.
Mike Leigh