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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.

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
Word
Bored
Away
Using
Doesn
Piece
Film
Meaning
Absorbed
Become
Failing
Entertain
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Walk
Fails
Pieces
Holds
Walks
Literally

More quotes by Mike Leigh

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Very occasionally I hire an actor and get it wrong. The actor just doesn't trust the process or me as fully as I thought they would. In this case, you can be quite sure that if an actor is untrusting, it's got nothing to do with me or the process.
Mike Leigh
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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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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 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.
Mike Leigh
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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.
Mike Leigh
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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.
Mike Leigh
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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.
Mike Leigh
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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.
Mike Leigh
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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.
Mike Leigh
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Independent filmmaking has always been there and it's not to be forgotten.
Mike Leigh
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The kind of acting that's wholly literary or cerebral is wrong. It's useless for me to have actors so much in their heads that they can't be organic.
Mike Leigh
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The main problem is that the Hollywood system has already made the film before the director shoots a single frame.
Mike Leigh
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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.
Mike Leigh
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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.
Mike Leigh
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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.
Mike Leigh
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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.
Mike Leigh
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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.
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.
Mike Leigh
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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.
Mike Leigh