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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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Mike Leigh
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 20
Actor
Author
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Television Director
Theatrical Director
Writer
Worry
Greatest
Portrayed
Since
Worrying
Everyone
Stopped
Important
Presses
Long
Press
Ultimately
Integrity

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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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.
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I hope I make films where you walk away . . . with work to do, arguments to have, things to worry about, things to care about. In that sense, I would regard what I do as political.
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Film-makers should remain true to their principles and never compromise, there is a real revival in the British film industry but there is a danger that we will become colonial servants of Hollywood. We need to maintain our own integrity.
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It's important to be true to the events, but the most important thing is to get to the essence of the experience. Not to be bogged down in an academic way by a notion of the truth. First of all, the truth is an illusive and spurious concept.
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The delineation between the actor and his part is a practical matter. When the camera runs, you want the actor to be the character.
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I wonder if I would have been capable of producing anything if I worked in a more conventional way with a prewritten script, because I'm of the procrastinator class.
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There's a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one's awareness really and consciousness of things.
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There are plenty of bad actors and there are plenty of bad directors. There are actors who will always be bad and there are good actors who you cry for because they're being badly directed or the material isn't good enough.
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My work is about life as you and I experience it. You're either lucky or you're not lucky either your relationship works or it doesn't.
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My job apart from anything else is to build an ensemble composed of actors who all come from a secure place so that they can all work together to make the film.
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Independent filmmaking has always been there and it's not to be forgotten.
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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 mean, artistic processes are all about making choices all the time, and the very act of making a choice is the distilling down and the getting to the core of what it is that you care about and what you want to say, really.
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I discover what my film is by embarking on the journey of making it.
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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.
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Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins.
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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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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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It creeps up on you and becomes an obsession. It comes out of watching a million movies.
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