102 Quotes by Mike Leigh

My work requires acting at its most committed – it demands actors of enormous resilience, but also intelligence and wit. It doesn’t work for narcissistic or selfish actors.

There’s a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one’s awareness really and consciousness of things.

My work is about life as you and I experience it. You’re either lucky or you’re not lucky; either your relationship works or it doesn’t.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it’s not all about characters, relationships and themes, it’s also about place and the poetry of place. It’s about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.

There are plenty of bad actors and there are plenty of bad directors. There are actors who will always be bad and there are good actors who you cry for because they’re being badly directed or the material isn’t good enough.

You will find hardly any improvising on camera anywhere in my films. It’s very structured, but it’s all worked out from elaborate improvisations over a long period, as you know.

When I was young I used to sit in the cinema thinking wouldn’t it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real people instead of being like actors.

The notion that acting is simply about intuitively responding to situations the way you feel couldn’t be farther away from how I ask actors to work.

It’s important to be true to the events, but the most important thing is to get to the essence of the experience. Not to be bogged down in an academic way by a notion of the truth. First of all, the truth is an illusive and spurious concept.