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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.

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
People
Film
Used
Young
Character
Cinema
Real
Characters
Great
Wouldn
Thinking
Instead
Like
Actors

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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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Resolve was never stronger than in the morning, after the night, when it was never weaker
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If a film or any piece of work doesn't entertain, it fails - and that is using the word entertain literally, meaning it holds you there and you become absorbed by it so that you don't walk away and get bored and so on.
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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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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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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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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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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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But actually I make films that I think are extremely sophisticated and cinematic.
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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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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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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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Some deeply untrusting actors - the kind that need to know exactly what's what and are completely insecure - might be quite good within the parameters of a certain sort of acting.
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Independent filmmaking has always been there and it's not to be forgotten.
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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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One of the reasons the whole Hollywood way of making films wouldn't work for me is because the way I operate would be anathema to anyone who wants to hold a job down in Beverly Hills.
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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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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 discover what my film is by embarking on the journey of making it.
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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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