When the British filmmaker Mike Leigh was six, his father, a doctor who would oppose his son becoming an artist, told him to quit drawing pictures of people.
In a way, Leigh never stopped. In his six decades making movies, the 81-year-old has made some of the most humanistic movies in cinema, many of them character studies of ordinary, working-class people – although the films, from Secret & Lies to Mr. Turner, run the whole gamut.
“I walk down the street and I see characters,” Leigh says. “Looking at people is what it’s about.”
Leigh is sitting in a Toronto restaurant the morning after the premiere of his latest film and first in six years, Hard Truths. It reunites him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who was Oscar-nominated for her role in 1996’s Secrets & Lies.
In Hard Truths, Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a bitter and rageful woman whose unexplained internal suffering spews out in venom directed at her husband, son and most anyone she encounters in her few, anxious trips out of their London home.
