‘Hard Truths’ director Mike Leigh on reuniting with Marianne Jean-Baptiste after almost 30 years: ‘It was overdue’
It has been 28 years since Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste worked together on a project, the pair’s breakout 1996 drama “Secrets & Lies,” which earned both Leigh and Jean-Baptiste their first-ever Oscar nominations. But their long-awaited follow-up project, this year’s acclaimed drama “Hard Truths,” wasn’t held up for a lack of trying. Leigh and Jean-Baptiste started talking about the new movie in 2020 but were forced to stop any notion of working together then because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“It was overdue,” Leigh, a seven-time Oscar nominee as a director and writer, tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Film Directors panel about their reunion. “She’s a great actress. She’s a great friend. She’s a consummate character actor. She’s got a great sense of humor. She’s got a great compassion. I needed to finally get around to working with her again, and she needed it too. We agreed. So there we go.” Watch the video interview above.
Set in present-day London, “Hard Truths” is a family drama focused primarily on Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy, an unhappy and unpleasant woman who takes issue with everyone from her husband and adult son to random people at the grocery store. Whether Pansy has some undiagnosed mental health issues is never explicitly stated, but as played by Jean-Baptiste, the character often feels like a raw nerve. The actress gives a performance that has been hailed as one of the year’s best and the film could return Jean-Baptiste and Leigh to the Oscars next year as nominees.
Leigh’s process of making films is legendary and unique. He doesn’t start with a script but instead, just a premise. He then works with his actors to create characters that populate the situations – usually with the actors using real people in their lives as inspiration.
“We discover what the film is during the process of making it,” Leigh says. With Pansy, whose self-awareness about her impact on people is gradually revealed during the film, Leigh says that wasn’t necessarily an end goal for the character when they started.
“I have a sense of what needs to be going on, and how the audience will or won’t go with it, or sympathize with it, or reject it, and all of those things. but it wasn’t a prerequisite,” Leigh says of the way his film eventually humanizes Pansy. “It came out organically of the process of discovering the film, discovering the growth of the character, the characters, their interrelationships, and therefore the substance, the crisis, and the argument of the film.”
Leigh’s style is a great match for Jean-Baptiste as evidenced by “Secrets & Lies” and “Hard Truths.” But the filmmaker acknowledges not every actor can hang with his approach.
“There are very good actors who can’t do this sort of thing,” he says. “First and foremost, I have to work with character actors, which is to say people who don’t play themselves, but are good at and want to play real people out there in the street, and are versatile and can do that. Secondly, I can only work with intelligent actors – and not all actors are intelligent. And thirdly, they have to have access to a sense of humor because if they haven’t got a sense of humor, forget it. So those are the three criteria. I conduct quite rigorous auditions to make sure we don’t make any mistakes.”
“Hard Truths” enjoyed a strong festival run this fall and will get a platform release in December from Bleecker Street before a wider rollout in January.