"Secrets and Lies is also about goodness"

Mike Leigh talks about his 1996 American breakthrough

It’s December 2024 and Mike Leigh’s first feature in six years—delayed in part by the pandemic, when his rehearsal-intensive form of filmmaking would simply have been impossible—the great Hard Truths, features an impeccable turn Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who first worked with Leigh on Secrets and Lies in 1996. At the New York Film Festival that, Leigh and I talked about the film as he was packing to get out of town, T-shirts and swag tossed aside to make the suitcases just so.

(October Films majordomo Bingham Ray brought the film to America, and Leigh remembers Bingham here; there’s a wild 1997 profile of the veteran executive and his purchase of Mike Leigh’s film and Breaking the Waves at Cannes 1997 here.)

A version of my conversation with Leigh was published in “Mike Leigh: Interviews” (Conversations with Filmmakers Series)” (2000). We explicitly discuss a key element of the film.

WITH NAKED, A BRILLIANT THUNDERCRACK OF A MOVIE, A GOOD FILMMAKER REVEALED HIMSELF AS A GREAT ONE. But like another important voice in international cinema, Robert Altman, Mike Leigh's accomplishments are often clouded by false assumptions about his idiosyncratic work methods. Down-in-the-dumps playwrights and screenwriters like to repeat the ontological fairytale to one another that many audiences believe the actors make up their dialogue as they go along. In fact, Leigh and his actors do make it up as they go along, but they go along for a very long time. In the case of his largest-budgeted film to date, the $5 million Secrets and Lies, the cast spent eighteen weeks rehearsing starting in November 1994, followed by thirteen weeks of shooting, ending in July of last year.

The result of this arduous process—which Leigh admits often leaves him bone-tired on the first day of actual shooting—is an exuberant, beautifully structured and acted story of an adopted young professional woman's search for her biological mother after the death of her adoptive mom. It's a Cinderella story, but with a twist. Leigh's films always work against expectations from scene to scene, and with Secrets and Lies, he counters a number of them. After the familial chaos of Life is Sweet and Naked's beautifully mounted howl of despair, Leigh has made a movie that's pure soap opera on its face. The young woman, Hortense, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, is a black woman refined in both speech and manner; but Cynthia, the mother (the magnificent Brenda Blethyn, swooping from laughter to tears with both precision and naked self-exposure), works in a cardboard-box factory, slangs away at the language while calling everyone "sweetheart" or "darlin'."

Hortense comes from a well-adjusted background, but Cynthia is desperate for the affection that's been denied her all her life after raising another daughter ( a resentful Claire Rushbrook, clad in a perpetual scowl) as a single mother. She's also estranged from her equally long-suffering younger brother, Maurice (an understated Timothy Spall, whose rumpled, bearded photographer, a not-quite-ringer for Leigh himself, reveals depths of compassion and concern in his every scene). Adding another narrative layer, Maurice's wife (Phyllis Logan), has her own issues about childbearing.

Leigh's concern with class is less overt than usual, and, purposely, according to the filmmaker, the issues of race never come to bear on the conflict—there is too much pain and too much thwarted love already.

It's an extraordinary film, and while it never hits the brute highs of Naked, in which David Thewlis' perplexed, perplexing polymath spewed the alpha and omega of the universe to all who would listen and some who would not, Secrets and Lies holds up on multiple viewings. The third time I saw the film, with a young, chicly turned-out downtown New York bunch, the audience reaction was astonishing. Certain moments, certain lines of dialogue would elicit whoops of strangled laughter from several viewers and gasps of pain from others—equal and opposite reactions to a dazzlingly well-made film that toys with the tenuous boundaries of pathos and comedy from second to second.

Secrets and Lies is the forty-sixth stage or film production Leigh has assembled in his painstaking fashion. Leigh's technique, put in a reductive way that he would surely resent, is to begin with a few themes and ideas, then branch out during lengthy rehearsals with his actors—singly and together, in real-life situations and in rehearsal halls, each knowing only as much as their character would know—into investigations of possible directions each character's life could take. (The process can go wrong. Leigh once abandoned a play, as well a television film in 1986, when the pieces did not crystallize after seven weeks.) The distillation process results in a discomfiting intimacy that may be what some critics resent. As the actors work with Leigh, they delve further into what they hide beneath their own daily carapace, managing to suggest worlds beyond the two hours we're watching.

In the biography "The World According to Mike Leigh,” Michael Coveney describes watching an early hour of scenes from Secrets and Lies that gave little indication of the important characters and themes found in the finished work. The emphasis shifts as Leigh rehearses and shoots and, especially, edits. From the set of Secrets and Lies, Coveney described Leigh's shooting script as a list of seventy or so scenes marked up on a double-sided, five-by-four-inch piece of foamboard that fit snugly in the filmmaker's shirt pocket.

On an award application in 1970, Leigh offered a rationale for his method-in-the-making: "I saw that we must start off with a collection of totally unrelated characters (each one the specific creation of its actor), and then go through a process in which I must cause them to meet each other, and build a network of real relationships; the play would be drawn from the results." He also took solace in the wisdom of theater pioneer Peter Brook, who said that each new task of directing is like starting out blind on an unknown journey.

"The work “was rehearsed and rehearsed until it achieved the required quality of 'finish,’” writes Coveney. “There was, Leigh now knew, no such thing as an aimless direction. It was always a question of the end product, the final fiction, the story, the lives and the characters. And the supply of material was both unquantifiable and endless." (Still, Leigh once told a questioner at a post-play discussion, "I'm not interested in anything as much as the end product; I don't give a fuck about the processes.")

Leigh's work has always been composed of wicked-yet-poignant lampoon. He celebrates the peculiar, the idiosyncratic, the unique that sets a character apart from the fray. Some writers mistake his approach as caricature, but in virtually all of his work, a love for his wounded world shines through. It's difficult to see how critics can mistake Leigh's artful arraying of archetypes for anything but compassion. Leigh seems in the tradition of Dickens as a writer, but as a filmmaker, he falls in line with Renoir, Ozu, Satyajit Ray, depicting ordinary lives with elegance and economy. His is a gourmand's appreciation, always showing a willingness to pause, to savor.

While the collaboration with his actors seems to take the collegial ideal of theater to a radical extreme, Leigh's understated visual gift often goes unappreciated. Similarly, his classically structured works are filled with juxtapositions that seem obvious but deepen as the narrative progresses. With its sharp, linear progression of tension, complication and payoff, Secrets and Lies is constructed with the kind of craft that is much taught but seldom achieved.

Secrets And Lies.

Leigh is known to be a prickly interview. I learned this in 1992, when I talked to him about Life is Sweet. A question then about his working methods and how long it would take to arrive at a shooting agenda elicited the cryptic dismissal, "Well, a piece of string is as long as a piece of string."

We talk again on a Sunday afternoon, two days after the New York Film Festival premiere of Secrets and Lies. As I arrive at his hotel room, Leigh scrambles to pack, hustling to make a plane that will jet him to yet another première. Leigh's droopy, sad-eyed face, large eyes peering from above a full salt-and-pepper beard, is preamble to the way he drapes himself over a chair and assumes a comfortable slouch.

Naked seems like a cathartic experience, a kind of scorched-earth event, I venture. Informed viewers could almost see the familial concerns of Secrets and Lies as something wholly other—until they consider that, in all of his films, the characters yearn for some identity beyond themselves and their thwarted ideals. "Yeah. It's an interesting way of putting the question," Leigh says, laughing, sorting himself on the chair. "To put it slightly more elliptically, Naked was a hard act to follow. If you make a film where it seems like you deal with everything, what do you deal with next?"

Leigh begins the first of many backtracks and evolving definitions that mark his speaking style: "Obviously, A, Secrets and Lies deals with a whole load of stuff that's new to me, not least the stuff to do with the adoption. But, B, it is an ongoing preoccupation. Naked is not either the conclusive or deviant piece that some people suggest. I mean, it is about family, in the sense it is about people who need to belong, who are disconnected and alienated."

One particularly admirable aspect of Leigh's storytelling is that the wants of the characters, their disappointments, are exposed through the course of the story without ever being portrayed as pathetic. "As a matter of first principle when I create these characters, I do actually like them," he says. "I don't just see them as ciphers. I do believe in them as people. And I deal with what happens in that spirit."

When those characters interact in rehearsal, Naked star Thewlis once told me, they go over scenes again and again until they can perform it flawlessly in front of the camera—but in fact the written text never exists until it comes out as transcript. Each scene is learned through building it.

Leigh recounts addressing the ever-present question—How do you arrive at a script?—at a recent Lincoln Center appearance. "In a blinding, clairvoyant flash which I've never actually got together, I said, 'We didn't make a script, we made a film.' And that is the truth of it. In a way, the text is a red herring. My writing is part of filmmaking. I am fussy and particular and relentless about every comma, rhythm of sentence, opposition of words, balance of structure, paragraphs—y'know, tempo, you name it, alliteration, repetition, every literary consideration you an think of. But I remain entirely visual in the way that I operate as a filmmaker."

Silent-film historians contend that movies went downhill when the script was invented. Before that, comedians like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd could reshoot endlessly. The script was an instrument of finance, so the producers would know how much money they were on the hook for. But Leigh's style harks back to the silent era. As he says of French filmmaker Louis Feuillade's 1914 serial Les Vampires, "He just got out in the street and made it up."

There are pair of superlative long takes in Secrets and Lies I'm curious about: the major scene in a deserted café when biological mother and daughter speak for the first time, with Blethyn moving astonishingly from tears to laughter to tears over eight minutes of screen time; and a barbecue before Cynthia feels compelled to reveal her lost daughter's identity to her family. I wonder when the camera enters the equation.

Secrets and Lies.

In the café scene, Leigh says, "We did shoot mid-shot singles and close-ups, but when we looked at the dallies the following day—and we only did two takes—the second take was so totally, utterly perfect that we knew straightaway without a shadow of a doubt that this was it. But sometimes I shoot close-ups because, not so much you don't think it's going to work, but because you don't know how you'll want the rhythm to go within the overall structure of the film at that point. "

The barbecue, then, is portrayed in a sustained take that mingles the strengths of theater and cinema, with immaculate timing of physical farce and an overlap of the characters sniping at one another. It doesn't literally have plates spinning in the air, but it keeps topping itself, in the style of silent comedy. You think, "How can it keep going? Can it keep going?"

"Well, there was no cover on that shot," Leigh says, chuckling. "That is the shot. Partly for technical reasons. We had terrible sound problems, very noisy. As it happens in the end, the scene was mostly post-synced anyway. The light was rushing about. English filming can be desperate because from one moment to the next the light changes. So this made me think, 'There's all this stuff going on, on a domestic level, with the meal, the comings and goings. There's a huge network of relationships and on top of that, the audience is waiting for the shit to hit the fan.' I knew that in the next scene, when the bomb does goes off, I was going to want to cut a lot. So that dictated, 'Let's just do it in one shot.'

"In the end," Leigh says, "there's a level at which you want film to aspire to the condition of documentary—you want the event to feel like it really is happening whether you're filming or not. But you also want the film to aspire to the condition of theater, or circus. Is he or she going to fall off the tightrope? The only way to get that to happen is just to be very, very thorough. [The key to] both scenes, and most of the film, really, is just rehearsing it all very thoroughly so that the only things that can go wrong—as was the case with the barbecue scene—are those things you can't control. You turn on the camera and a steak suddenly decides that it's a mobile, moving item that jumps off plates. Cans of beer refuse to open. But the human element is under control!"

"This remarkable and wonderful film, which I love deeply, is one of the few true epics,” Leigh wrote in an essay about Ermanno Olmi's 1978 The Tree of Wooden Clogs. “For although it offers neither great romance, nor lengthy voices, nor wars, nor even death, this masterpiece succeeds effortlessly and with monumental simplicity in getting to the essence of the human experience. Directly, objectively, yet compassionately, it puts on the screen the great, hard, real experience of living and surviving from day to day, and from year to year, the experience of ordinary people everywhere." (It's often said that the best criticism is, in its own way, autobiography.)

The ending of Secrets and Lies is a quietus, hopeful, more hopeful than the similar ending to Life is Sweet. In stark sunlight failing in a boxy English yard, cramped with sheds and chairs, in a moment of calm, of idealized domesticity, we can discern the patterns of need and support we have seen for more than two hours in only the most contentious form. There is a moment of calm and Cynthia coos, "Oh, this is the life, ain't it?"

Our time runs out. Leigh takes a last look around the room, apologetic, then says, "I'm sorry to be in such a rush, but I've got to get to Canada and that's that."