Follow Leigh
The summery opening night film for Sydney Film Festival, Happy-Go-Lucky, was directed by famous British auteur, Mike Leigh. Here, Time Out's Dave Calhoun chats with Leigh and his ebullient lead actress Sally Hawkins
Sally Hawkins
Leigh shot Happy-Go-Lucky, around London in April, May and June last year. Dick Pope, the film's cinematographer, opted early in the process to shoot the film with a new film stock that stresses the boldness of primary colours. Leigh says, "I didn't know what the story would be, but I knew I wanted the sun."
Leigh didn't know the story because, as is well known, he devises plots through improvisations over several months. But this time Leigh's impulse was to build a story around a character played by Sally Hawkins.?
Hawkins, 31, played a wealthy woman in Vera Drake and a council estate firebrand in All or Nothing. In Happy-Go-Lucky, she occupies almost every frame.?"It would have been scary to know from the beginning that Poppy would be such a large part," continues Hawkins. "It's probably good I didn't know. With the nature of Mike's work, you never know where it's going to end up. And nor does he."
The tag of improvisation is always attached to Leigh's work but, contrary to perception, no one improvises in front of his camera. He shoots from a script.
"There are times when I put together a scene on the spot, without any previous rehearsal," Leigh says, standing in Camden market, describing a scene he shot there. "It was a terrible, wet, cold day and the actors arrived in the morning having no idea what I was going to do. The crew were getting cameras out, and I constructed from scratch this complicated scene. I knew there would be a scene where Poppy would run into her sister with this guy but I didn't have the dialogue. I did the improvisations on the spot, stopped it and scripted it physically right here, with it pissing down.
"On those occasions, I'd be: You wish to Christ you'd never been born. The pressure is massive, but hey. I remember thinking: We're never going to use this. Actually it's a nice scene, an important scene."
This window on how Leigh works shows preparation is everything, but so is being prepared to alter things as you go. "That's what's so interesting about Mike's period dramas like Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake," the actress suggests. "When you make a film in contemporary London, you can't see the seams. But the detail is there, whether it's 1950 or 2008."
Happy-Go-Lucky, Screening Wed 4 June, 7.30pm & Thu 5 June, 10am at State Theatre
See Time Out's review and trailer of Happy-Go-Lucky