Mike Leigh OBE

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 1997

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

The castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is the filmmaker and director Mike Leigh. He first came to public attention on a dark and stormy evening when 16 million people tuned to BBC1 to watch his film Abigail's Party. It was also the night that ITV was blacked out by a strike, there was a highbrow documentary on BBC2, and Channel 4 didn't exist. His recent films Secrets and Lies and Naked won top awards at Cannes, building on the recognition he received for his earlier, more gentle portrait of working-class life - Life is Sweet. He explains to Sue Lawley how his early films were inspired by the work of Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and Francois Truffaut.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Clarinet Concerto in A Clarinet Concerto in A Major K622 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Luxury: Lavatory and lavatory paper

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a filmmaker. His work is unique. It's built on a system of improvisation in which the characters are developed separately within the framework of a story he's devised. It's a method that's brought him great success from his first
0:44.8	feature film bleak moments made 25 years ago through his famous BBC productions of
0:49.4	the 80s, Nuts in May and Abigail's party, to last year's triumph at the Cannes Film Festival where his
0:54.9	film Secrets and Lies won the palm door for best film.
0:59.1	The author of all this was brought up in a Jewish family in Salford. I don't think I've ever made a pessimistic
1:05.0	film, he says. What motivates all of my films is a strong feeling of hope. He is Mike Lee.
1:12.1	Not pessimistic, Mike Mike but pretty bleak in places really.
1:17.0	Well my films are bleak my first film was indeed called bleak moments and they're also joyous and life is bleak and
1:25.1	joyous life is comic and tragic and full of despair and full of
1:30.3	wonderful ecstatic moments.
1:32.8	But not much joyous about the monstrous Beverly in Abigail's party
1:35.8	or the miserable, vulnerable Cynthia in Secrets and Lies.
1:40.2	I think Cynthia has more joy finally in Secrets and Lies than Beverly has in Abigail's party.
1:47.6	I mean I've done a huge number of things and they've spanned quite a spectrum of different sorts of ways of looking at life, which is my main job.
1:58.4	I've done pieces like Abigail's party, if you like, like Nuts in May, where I've sort of worked in a broad comic slightly
2:07.7	satirical sort of vain in order to kind of make us look at the ludicrousness of some of the ways that we live,
2:17.6	but other times I mean I've been far more concerned to really plumb the emotional depths.
2:23.0	You've also, in many of these pieces, plumbed pretentiousness, haven't you?
2:28.0	That seems to be a theme that comes up.
2:29.0	You know, whether it's, again, in secrets and lies, you know, Sunday lunch barbecues on the new patio or
	...

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