The Guardian interview

Mike Leigh

MB: Welcome to Mike Leigh, though as he told me, I think he's now done five appearances on this stage during these talks. You hardly need a welcome, you're obviously an old hand at this.

ML: But when I told you, I didn't think you would kick off by saying that!

MB: Oh well, I'm full of surprises. What I would like to do is to start off by talking about Topsy Turvy since I guess a large proportion of the audience will have seen it in the last couple of days. And I suppose there will be some surprise that a director who has spent most of his time dealing with contemporary Britain has made a film about Gilbert and Sullivan. Why this particular subject?

ML: It's the coming together of a number of things. I felt it would be a good thing to make a film about us, what we do, we who suffer and go to hell and back taking very seriously the job of making other people laugh. And indeed it's not just those of us who are artists or in show business, I mean people who make chocolate and beer who do take it very seriously. I just felt I wanted to turn the camera around on us and our problems. Though part of that are the creative problems of creative people.

For some reason which I don't think I can define, I'm more attracted to that in the context of artists making popular art than esoteric art really. I very much wanted to do a period film, partly because everybody else does, so why shouldn't I, and I was particularly drawn to the nineteenth century and my last theatre piece in 1993 was It's a Great Big Shame at Stratford East and that in fact, apart from being what it was for its own sake, was also discretely an experiment - for anyone who didn't see it, the first act was set in 1893 and the second act in 1993 - and that was an experiment to see what would happen if we tried to create a period piece.

As to the Gilbert and Sullivan aspect side to thing, having been born in 1943 and grown up in the 40s and 50s when Victorian people were still around and having grown up in a great Victorian city - Victorian architecture, Victorian school, Victorian teachers, we lived in a Victorian and of course any amount of Victorian art, culture and everything from Dickens and Hardy to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear and Gilbert and Sullivan. And I'm always amused by the fact that for a fair number of people, including myself, this is part of our popular culture, and it becomes fascinatingly closet and repressed And it's fantastically, wonderfully un-PC.

MB: That's what I wanted to get at: nothing divides people more than Gilbert and Sullivan. It seems to be either aficionados or detesters. I randomly picked up a quote from Peter Hall who says he can't stand them because they are "sexless and camp". What do you say to that view of Gilbert and Sullivan?

ML: Well I think Peter Hall would know what sexless and camp was! (Laughter)

MB: You didn't know he was coming tonight!

ML: I think that's true, but the interesting thing about doing this film and the practical project of making it happen is that a huge number of people got together last year and worked on it, and what we tackled was a work of 100 years ago which has its own kind of real, organic spontaneous freshness and came out of a culture and spoke to an audience in its own way, within its own context. And by looking at it, [we] very quickly realised that this work is not inherently sexless and camp. What Peter is referring to, and I think he's right actually, is a kind of tradition, an approach to Gilbert and Sullivan which has grown up over the last 75 or 80 years

MB: You mean the rather ossified way of staging it?

ML: Indeed, which is indeed highly sexless and deeply camp. But to be honest, this aspect to things, in other words, the thing that offends people most about the mention of Gilbert and Sullivan because they had some horrible uncle who used to whistle it in the bath, I think that is kind of irrelevant to what we tried to do with Topsy Turvy, which was to get to the roots of what was happening to popular theatre in that period. But with particular focus on these guys who were interesting and with who I certainly identified in various ways, and that is one of the other reasons to do a kind of film where one could look at oneself and one's creative activity.

MB: Staying with this "sexless and camp" quote, it's very interesting because a moment ago you mentioned some of the great Victorian figures - Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Watching your film its strikes me that there is a certain affinity between Gilbert, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, not obviously great Victorian humorists delighting in the absurd, but is there not something odd about their sexuality. There is either a kind of sexual reticence or a neutral quality about all three of them. Is there any importance in that fact? Was this Victorian delight in the absurd a reflection of a fear of sexuality?

ML: Could be. It's a hard one, because having paid close attention to particularly Gilbert in the work that Jim Broadbent and I did in preparation for this, the interesting conclusion we came to was compared to Lewis Carroll and certainly compared to Edward Lear, whose writing is extremely limited and genuine nonsense in that it isn't about anything, it's simply about itself - there are more resonances and concerns in the broader span of his work with aspects of life.

MB: You're into different territory with the research here, aren't you? You're dealing with historical characters, with recorded fact, the commercial failure of Princess Aida, the discovery of the source of The Mikado, etc How did the fact that you were dealing with known incidents and known historical characters, how did that affect your working methods - because in the normal course of events actors come to you and characters are discovered, here the characters pre-existed?

ML: Whereas normally with all the other films it's about creating a world, here the vast majority of events are more or less based on what happened. It is improvised and the whole film comes out of improvisation, apart from the musical extracts; what I've done really is after making lots of films and plays in this way I've simply applied all those processes and techniques to this particular problem. The truth is that whether or not you start with a completely blank canvas or whether you start off by breathing life into a character who you can read about copiously in books, the actor still has to be the character in the flesh anyhow.

What we simply did was to research all these people and assimilate as much as we could, but it varies from character to character because there are characters like Gilbert and Sullivan who we can read a great deal about and put together a fairly full assumed portrait. There are other people, like Richard Temple, who Tim Spall plays, about whom there are certain facts known but nothing is really known about what he was like.

That allowed Spall and myself to indulge ourselves, picking up where we experimented previously, not least in a play at Hampstead called Smelling a Rat, which was a modern contemporary character who spoke a kind of Dickensian language, and to create this Victorian "actooor" character which we very much enjoyed for Richard Temple. But even in the case of Gilbert or Allan Corduner's Sullivan, however much you read, you always have to make an organic characterisation happen and that is not merely the embodiment of a collection of ideas; it's got to have a consistent behavioural wholeness and logic, and so far from being constrained by the history, in a way it was part of the motivating process.

I never really got into a situation where I thought: "Well it's a shame that happened, it would have been much better if something else had happened." I mean there are instances in the film where I have in the dramatic structure of the film made very definite and deliberate departures from historical fact.

The most important one is that Gilbert thought of the Mikado - which solved the problem of their impasse - before the Japanese exhibition came to London. But when it came he was immediately attracted by it and indeed did, as we have in the film, have Japanese folk from the exhibition come to the Savoy theatre to show the actors how to be Japanese. But the order is different. I just thought dramatically it was more interesting for him to get the inspiration by going to it and indeed be reluctant to go to it in the first place and have to be persuaded by his wife.

MB: One of things I love about the film is the atmosphere of Victorian theatre. I think my favourite scene is the rehearsal scene which is conducted by Gilbert with four or five actors. I should imagine that is built out of your actors' imagination of what a Victorian rehearsal was like. It was full of that insecurity, jokiness that rehearsals always have.

ML: As a number of actors have said, whilst we always research pretty copiously for all these films, normally the first thing that people research is the job their characters do. Now we rehearsed very copiously for this film, but nobody had to find out what being an actor was about. We did research what the Victorian theatre was like pretty thoroughly.

MB: Another point that comes across very strongly was that Victorian England was a place of novelty. It was full of new inventions. It was a society that was changing. There is a wonderful scene with a telephone, it's a strange instrument which they have to learn how to use. Self-filling pens, even the Japanese exhibition becomes a sign of novelty. Was that part of your interest in the subject, a society in transition?

ML: Yes, I think it was very much the way the western world was. Another thing which is interesting, which I hope we've brought out in the film, is the fact that middle-class society was quite outward-looking, it was quite Europe-orientated and indeed, to some extent, America-orientated. But certainly the feeling that this was at the end of a century and moving into a new age is something implicitly there and again that's interesting to where we are really.

MB: This film was very popular at the Venice Film Festival, it won Best Actor for Jim Broadbent. Are you confident this film is going to reach out into societies where Gilbert and Sullivan are not known?

ML: I don't think the film is "about" Gilbert and Sullivan. What it is actually about and what I hope we really tackle and deal with is things to do with creative process, with theatre, with relationships - between men and women and working relationships. All of those things. Hopefully those are the things that will talk to people.

Having said that, I see absolutely no reason why the actual musical aspect of the thing - and the film is, on another level, an unashamed celebration of Sullivan's music. It is, as far as I'm concerned, very accessible, sexy music and I can't see why anybody in the world shouldn't be able to tap their foot to it, unless they've got some terrible hang-up about it, which apparently some people have. We've already talked about that. Peter Hall will no doubt enjoy the film. I don't see why it shouldn't travel provided it's distributed with enthusiasm.

MB: I also got the impression, because a large proportion of the film is a recreation of the staged production, that you were really a very frustrated Gilbert and Sullivan director.

ML: Not at all, there's nothing I'd like to do less. It was very interesting to reconstruct those pieces of action in the same way it was interesting that the people with the telephone was interesting, or the people with the fountain pen was, but to me the fact that some of the events of film are people on a stage doing things, it is in the same territory as what you find in many of my films where we're looking at people working. It's a human activity.

We had a lot of fun putting those extracts together, but I'll be honest about this, the groundwork wasn't done by me it was done by Gary Yershon, the musical director, who got actors singing and kept an eye on all matters musical from every point of view, and by Francesca Jaynes, who was the choreographer, and we worked from the original prompt copies and they got together the main shape of it and I dealt with it in some detail and worked out how to shoot it.

I really have no interest in directing such things at all because they don't really come up under the heading of what really motivates me as a director, which is depicting the real world, and whatever these comic operas do, they don't do that.

Sound clips

Is there a central motivating force in his work?
The vision behind Topsy-Turvy
Cumulative narrative
Film vs theatre
Using improvisation

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