The title of Mike Leigh’s latest movie, “Hard Truths,” suggests a remarkable, career-spanning consistency, tracing back to the stage and screen director’s 1971 big-screen debut, “Bleak Moments.”
For more than half a century, Leigh has been bringing audiences into the lives and homes of British citizens of various backgrounds and classes, developing original projects through a unique workshopping process whereby the actors have a hand in creating the characters they play.
“Hard Truths” builds upon the humanistic director’s signature method, reuniting him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin. The pair first played sisters in Leigh’s 1993 play “It’s a Great Big Shame” and close friends in his Palme d’Or-winning feature “Secrets & Lies” (1996). Their work on this film has been earning them acting kudos far and wide, with Jean-Baptiste scoring top honors from the New York, Los Angeles and Chicago critics groups.
As Leigh told Variety at the Palm Springs Film Festival, he has little interest in working with stars — that is, egocentric actors who bend their roles to a well-established public persona — but thrives in collaboration with character actors, “which is to say, actors who don’t play themselves but can do real people,” he explained. Leigh insists upon performers who “can act in a versatile way, doing lots of sorts of characters, and they are like the real people out there in the street.”
On “Hard Truths,” he was keen to team again with Jean-Baptiste and Austin, who effectively began their professional careers with Leigh. Originally hired straight out of drama school, the pair look back on those ’90s projects as formative experiences.
“Working with him and learning his process set up the way that I worked from then on,” Jean-Baptiste said. “Even when I was working on conventional jobs, I would try and use what I’ve learnt from working with him to create characters or to make the characters that were on paper feel more real.”
In inviting Jean-Baptiste to participate in what would come to be called “Hard Truths,” Leigh knew he wanted her to play a lead character. According to the actor, who was Oscar nominated for her role as a young optometrist who seeks to locate her birth mother in “Secrets & Lies,” part of the bargain in working with Leigh is that the process is organic and nothing is certain from the outset.
“If something else started to happen with the other characters, my character could have been diminished somewhat,” said Jean-Baptiste, who claimed she was prepared for that possibility.
“I have to take that with a pinch of salt,” Leigh told Jean-Baptiste during our interview, “because the idea that we would lug you all the way across the Atlantic and then have you do a minor role is eccentric.” To put it more accurately, Leigh said, “We embark on a journey of discovering what the film is by the process of doing it, but I do make a number of provisional or potential decisions.”
In this case, Leigh wanted Jean-Baptiste and Austin to play sisters. He brought them both in from the very beginning of what turned out to be a 14-week process, during which they developed the backstory and characters, who would come to be named Pansy and Chantelle.
“The job is to start to create characters, and as soon as we’re at it, we start to get a sense of who we’re talking about,” Leigh said. “At that stage, I always say, ‘Let’s call her call her X, because we don’t who she is yet,’” explained Leigh, who asks his collaborators to describe a handful of real people, from which they start to create the character.
“The source of Pansy was about five people, none of which would ever recognize her and say, ‘Oh, that’s me,’” Jean-Baptiste recalled. “What happens is, that’s the starting point. It’s just something that roots the character in reality. And then when we have a sense of a character that we’ve built out of those people, we start from scratch, from their first memory, and we start building a completely new person.”
According to Leigh, “It goes without saying that I’ve made a significant choice in a decision about the potential difference between these two sisters. There’s nothing random about that.”
Only after all of that work has done, though extensive acting exercises and rehearsal, does Leigh write out the scenes. He famously uses improvisation during the exploratory early stage — not in the hammy, make-it-up-on-camera way associated with Hollywood comedies — but insists that his actors stick to the script, once written.
“It’s about the motivation,” explained Austin. “That’s the thing that a lot of actors probably get wrong in the improvisation, that if you’re actually drawing from life, you’re not thinking, ‘I’ve got to be clever or say something funny now,’ and that’s the difference.”
So many of Leigh’s scenes are about subtext, conveying things the characters don’t explicitly put into words. Looking back to “Secrets & Lies,” Leigh recalled how the French producers felt the 142-minute film was running long. They asked him to cut two scenes, including an interaction between Jean-Baptiste and Austin’s characters, Hortense and Dionne.
“That scene tells you a great deal about Hortense that I wouldn’t otherwise know how to express,” Leigh said. “Hard Truths” is written in a similar way: Each interaction reveals another facet of Pansy’s character.
In the first scene (not counting a tranquil opening credits sequence that observes the family’s middle-class home from across the street), Pansy wakes up gasping in fear. She then goes about her day terrorizing her husband Curtley (David Webber), son Moses (Tuwainne Barrett) and various strangers out in the world, turning every encounter into an almost-nuclear confrontation.
While Pansy’s hypercritical diatribes can be hilarious at times, the emotional pain that clearly underlies her behavior is heartbreaking. As a point of contrast, whereas cantankerous Pansy has the capacity to ruin other folks’ day, Chantelle is radiant and quick to laugh. She loves people, spreading joy wherever she goes.
For audiences, the film poses the question: How could two sisters, of similar genes and raised under the same circumstances, turn out so different? What makes Pansy so miserable?
“That is the tension between them, that they’ve had exactly the same experience,” said Austin, explaining that in most families, there’s somebody who feels that they’re sort of on the outside of it or there are those people who are perceived to be the favorite.”
Toward the end, in a scene shot in the same cemetery where “Secrets & Lies” began, the sisters intimately discuss how their upbringing impacted them differently.
“I knew this has to be fundamental and significant,” Leigh said of a moment that proves revelatory, even as it leaves quite a bit open to interpretation by the audience. “We spent a day building that scene, focusing on what gets brought to the surface. We can only arrive at that moment because we know who those characters are, because everything has been created. By then, the whole iceberg exists. We’re just dealing with the tip.”
As a whole, “Hard Truths” further expands Leigh’s career-long interest in British society in all its dimensions, with this one specifically focusing on a family of Jamaican descent.
“I’ve had Black characters popping up here and there, and I just thought now is the time to do this,” Leigh said, expressing his desire to work with Jean-Baptiste and Austin. “The only deliberate thing which I was very conscious that I would absolutely not do is deal in stereotypes and tropes.”
What makes Leigh’s approach so satisfying, according to Jean-Baptiste, is to participate in a film that eschews clichés and instead concentrates on the frustrations and challenges of everyday life for Pansy and her family.
“You have Black characters in a film whereby there is not an explanation as to why they’re in the film. It’s not because Moses is going to get arrested or the police are going to beat him up or there’s been some miscarriage of justice or something like that,” she said. “They are just living, and the issues that they’re dealing with are connection or lack of it, of fear, of pain.”
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