Leigh Way
An exchange with the great filmmaker before the 1999 release of Topsy-Turvy
A version of this conversation was published in Cinema Scope.
Mike Leigh as artist may not be entirely raw nerve, but he often is as interviewee. I've talked to the veteran filmmaker a few times, and know that the subject of his working methods is one about which he doesn't care to go beyond practiced boilerplate.
And while the secrets of "What we do as actors and directors" is the meat of Topsy-Turvy, one query of mine, based on a wonderfully dense anecdote told to me by Jim Broadbent, led to a brusque and smiling reply of "I don't know about that. Sorry. Can't help." A few choice opinions from a December 1999 conversation follow.
Let's talk about master shots. You have a marvelous one when the battling composer Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) and librettist W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) finally face each other. They can't look each other in the eye, but they review their differences while sucking on candies.
[Owing to the period setting], we struggled because we did more than we normally do. It wasn't just a kind of distillation of improvisation. We [worked with what we learned from the extant] correspondence as well. The thing with the sugar kind of crept in just a joke, really. I said, well, actually it's great, why don't you just do it? They were sort of slightly sending it up. I said, play the scene with that and it liberated it completely. Because what's fascinating about the whole thing, which I'm just doing sort of a quasi-biopic, it's not really a biopic at all, where you make famous people behave like for real. So we retrospectively invented the Swiss sugar, which is completely not a piece of research.
It's interesting because it's one of the scenes that seems ripely actor-ey at first, filled with actor's business, yet it neatly fits the tale. Like some of Timothy Spall's scenes, such as his Richard Temple and the other actors speaking in that cracked continental polyglot and that unlikely reflection of his, "Laughter. Tears. Curtain." You could see an actor doing a botch of that, but you see ego love and hurt there. It's almost Beckett.
And of course he and I share this particular predilection for Dickens. In fact, he'd been very ill, he'd had cancer between Secrets and Lies and this. Then he was better. I said, whatever happens, you have to be in this next film. I'm not making a Victorian film unless you're there. He has this great presence and he knows quite a lot about [the era]. The great and fortunate thing about Richard Temple is there's not very much known about him. Where there was a lot known, such as about Gilbert and Sullivan, we tried to use that and activate these guys as we researched them. But that left Spall and me free to create this Victorian "Ac-Tor," y'know, which seemed very appropriate. When Gilbert cut [Temple's big] song , which he did [in real life], and when the chorus went to [Gilbert] in a posse, in reality, we had no idea whether Temple cared or was relieved in reality. but certainly it was very useful to make him this guy [care].
I was at the New York Film Festival press conference—
Oh, so you've heard me say that before!
Leigh laughs.
No, I've heard most of the basics you rehearse with familiar questions, such as the idea that you're subverting a "chocolate-box" story. It certainly went over well in the screenings there and in the press afterward.
I don't really know anybody's reaction to it. I know that Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard actually hates the film.
Was the idea of demonstrating what actors and directors do an overriding concern as you assembled the story?
Yes. It was a given, yeah. I sort of felt, in the way that I suppose everybody does, a lot of artists do, at a certain stage, you do a kind of self-portraiture. But it isn't in any literal sense, that. But I just felt it would be good to look at what we do, really. And y'know, as you know, I always shy away from or I'm more naturally gravitate towards ordinary lives, lives like lots of other people, really, the unextraordinary. I just thought, y'know, these guys are, let's, as I say, subvert that. Let's look at, these are real people, then. But yeah, the assumption was let's do a theater... film.
I used the phrase in my review, "Life as it is lived and lunch as it is eaten."
Did I say that?
I said that.
Oh. That's good if I say so!
Japanese design is classical and contemporary. Even the Kabuki play… Those images, the Japanese graphic images remain contemporary. The people in the black hats do not.
But going to the scene at the start, where Broadbent brays out the information with the review of "Queen Ida," it's a model of narrative economy. All that information is gotten out of the way, and you establish Gilbert's blustery wit. It's acting and text. And the film is similarly precise and economically throughout. But nowadays, writers with nothing else to say complain when a film is almost three hours. But Topsy-Turvy, despite its length, is such a taut film.
I think that's right. In fact, of course, it won't surprise you I've had to put up with a lot of nonsense about length in this last year. The fact is, it is one minute short of two hours forty and I don't think there's a spare moment in it, really. I think it's absolutely all there. Nobody is more critical of long, boring films that don't say anything than I am. But I don't think it's that. It needs all that time. I mean, obviously, you do a scene where they're rehearsing, y'know, yes, he makes them go over and over it, and yes, they go through a whole scene, and yes, y'know, the point is made if it's just about making the point, kind of sooner. But actually, to make the audience enjoy and indeed be confronted by the gruel of doing this is important, really, y'know. It's the repetitious nature of it all.
We've talked before, yet this is one of those rare films I find difficult to talk about. It speaks for itself, fluently, confidently, quietly. Questions and interviews seem superfluous. Are you getting interesting questions?
That's an occupational hazard, this whole process! I dunno. It's quite interesting. Obviously, it has its detractors, but on the whole, its detractors tend to be... All the negatives are about something else, why is he— Why are you doing this, what is the point? I haven't really gotten the hang of it yet, because it hasn't been screened publicly in moe than a few places. There's not been very much press yet, but on the whole, the response is positive. The things that are interesting, I dunno, every time I get asked about the improvisational stuff, I dutifully reply, but I don't do much more. Aside from the fact, that yes, I usually do that, and yet we've still done it with this even though it's in [period]. But if I were to put myself in the critical world, to me I would have thought that what is interesting is the whole, what the film is interesting about on the level of reality and theatricality and life and art and y'know, um, deception and self-deception. Which works on all kinds of levels in the film. That's what's interesting.
I'm fascinated by the scene where you propose how Gilbert discovered the Japanese influences for "The Mikado." It's the most overtly cinematic, bowing toward some of the Asian masters you've esteemed, yet it's the most modern of the scenes: not the straightforward camera style so much as the fact that the Asians seem utterly of today and tomorrow and the bowler-hatted Victorians seem otherworldly antiquated, the art exhibit.
I know! Um… It's very interesting, that. There is something so resonant about the way Japanese design is [both] classical and contemporary. Even the Kabuki play, which is pretty accurate, although a distillation, it seems very, as you say, contemporary. I think it's just that, really, isn't it? Those images, the Japanese graphic images remain contemporary. The people in the black hats do not.
You use very simple cinematic strokes. Many people dwell on performance when writing about your work. But one of my favorite shots this year is in the shot where Broadbent watches the sword fight, whooshing between his face and the camera, blades across his face as he's filled up with inspiration.
I mean, the fact is I get pretty depressed when people go on and on about it as if it were just a film about acting. I mean, these films are very cinematic. I have worked for a very long time with Dick Pope, who is a great cinematographer, and we push ourselves and we push each other to the limits. We do very sophisticated cinematic things. We don't just point the camera at the actors in a kind of naive way. I think it's both cinematographically and photographically, I think it's a major achievement, this Topsy-Turvy, it really is, y'know. And the design is also an achievement, given the budget.