102 Quotes by Mike Leigh

Some deeply untrusting actors – the kind that need to know exactly what’s what and are completely insecure – might be quite good within the parameters of a certain sort of acting.

I think Michael Caine is a perfectly good actor but it’s obvious he’s not going to be in one of my films.

I’m old enough to have friends and contemporaries who have long since retired, and that’s their prerogative – enough is enough; it doesn’t mean a thing to me. But I haven’t got any money, so, you know, I just keep on working.

I wonder if I would have been capable of producing anything if I worked in a more conventional way with a prewritten script, because I’m of the procrastinator class.

The good thing from my perspective is that nobody puts any pressure on me to say what it’s going to be. The backers accept that they don’t know what they are going to get.

If a film or any piece of work doesn’t entertain, it fails – and that is using the word entertain literally, meaning it holds you there and you become absorbed by it so that you don’t walk away and get bored and so on.

The kind of acting that’s wholly literary or cerebral is wrong. It’s useless for me to have actors so much in their heads that they can’t be organic.

I’ve long since stopped worrying about how I’m portrayed in the press because ultimately it’s not that important. Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity.

In the first place, I’m pretty thorough about whom I choose. I instinctively look for the kind of actor who is going to be trusting. There are all kinds of insecure people out there called actors.