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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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Mike Leigh
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 20
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More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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Resolve was never stronger than in the morning, after the night, when it was never weaker
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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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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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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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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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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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It creeps up on you and becomes an obsession. It comes out of watching a million movies.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins.
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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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I am very happy to be part of European and world cinema as a British filmmaker.
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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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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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