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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.

Mike Leigh

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Mike Leigh
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 20
Actor
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Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Television Director
Theatrical Director
Writer
Actors
Running
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More quotes by 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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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
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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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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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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.
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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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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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.
Mike Leigh
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I am very happy to be part of European and world cinema as a British filmmaker.
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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There's a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one's awareness really and consciousness of things.
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.
Mike Leigh
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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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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 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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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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Independent filmmaking has always been there and it's not to be forgotten.
Mike Leigh
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Resolve was never stronger than in the morning, after the night, when it was never weaker
Mike Leigh
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The problem with the British film industry is the nervousness and insecurity about - and genuflection toward - Los Angeles.
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