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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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Mike Leigh
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 20
Actor
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Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Television Director
Theatrical Director
Writer
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More quotes by 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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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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Resolve was never stronger than in the morning, after the night, when it was never weaker
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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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.
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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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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It creeps up on you and becomes an obsession. It comes out of watching a million movies.
Mike Leigh
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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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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 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.
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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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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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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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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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'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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But actually I make films that I think are extremely sophisticated and cinematic.
Mike Leigh
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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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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