Mike Leigh - Bibliography

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All or Nothing

Mike Leigh

After his critically acclaimed departure to period drama with TOSPY-TURVY, Mike Leigh returns to the more intimate explorations of working-class life that marked his early career with ALL OR NOTHING. Set in a London housing project over one long weekend, Leigh's masterful and moving new film tells the story of Penny and Phil--a long-estranged couple brought together again after their son becomes suddenly and violently ill. An unflinching look at the often harsh realities of London's down-and-out, ALL OR NOTHING is also Mike Leigh's most nuanced and heartfelt film to date.

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Mike Leigh: Interviews

Mike Leigh; Howie Movshovitz

Mike Leigh: Interviews collects published conversations from the past seven years. This close-up encounter with Leigh expresses both his unusual work style and the emotional and intellectual toughness that characterizes his distinct approach to filmmaking. As Leigh speaks in these interviews, he reveals what is unique in his work, particularly that his films do not begin with a script. Explaining this approach, he discusses how he begins by assembling a few actors who talk, improvise, create characters, and gradually develop a story that contains their actions. Before the camera rolls, a tentative script is set, but many months may pass before the script is finished and the shooting begins. Among those he talks with in these interviews are Jay Carr of the Boston Globe, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, and Judy Stone, the longtime critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. Leigh is asked to discuss politics, social attitudes, and religion-all of which give his films a unique signature.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 2000

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Conversations With Screenwriters

Mike Leigh; Susan Bullington Katz; Sherman Alexie; Richard Curtis; Anthony Minghella; Horton Foote; Callie Khouri; Atom Egoyan; Frank Darabont; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Susan Bullington Katz, in conversation with some of the top screenwriters working today, gives us an insider's look into the art, craft, and business of screenwriting.

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Topsy-Turvy

Mike Leigh

W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were the most astonishing partnership in the history of musical entertainment, and in Mike Leigh's first historical film -- as well as his first film to use famous characters from an earlier era -- their lives and times are fully, richly explored. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, all things Japanese enjoyed an unexpected vogue in London society. This was not lost on the celebrated duo of Gilbert and Sullivan, who promptly set to work on The Mikado. Leigh's film presents the trials and tribulations they encountered in bringing their best-loved operetta to the London stage. It re-creates the lost grandeur of Victorian London and its great palaces of entertainment: a city of swirling fog and sputtering gaslights, of horsedrawn carriages and their irascible cabbies, of the newly rich, the nobility, the clubmen and courtiers, the Gaiety Girls and their stage-door Johnnies. Known not only for his acclaimed films, including Secrets and Lies, Naked, and High Hopes, but also for his unusual working method whereby his films are created through improvisation with the actors, Leigh has extended his considerable range still further in this extraordinarily vibrant new work.

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Smelling a Rat

Mike Leigh

Returning home unexpectedly from holiday, Rex Weasel, owner of the Vermination Pest Control Company, hides in a wardrobe when he hears intruders. It's his employee Vic Maggot with his wife out on a spree, but they also have to hide when Weasel's gormless son turns up with his garrulous girlfriend.

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Ecstasy

Mike Leigh

Jean works in a garage and consoles herself with drink and perfunctory sex. Jean's insistent neighbour, Dawn, and Dawn's Irish labourer husband, Mick, and Mick's spineless mucker, Len, all join her in a funny, drunken, sad celebration of their mutual affection and bleak lives.

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Secrets and Lies

Mike Leigh

Secrets & Lies tells the story of Hortense, a young black Londoner who goes in search of her birth mother. Hortense's voyage of discovery leads her to Cynthia--a depressed, unmarried, white woman who has uneasy relationships with both her second daughter and her brother. Hortense's attempt to uncover the hidden, almost forgotten, world of her parents fundamentally affects each of the characters.

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Career Girls

Mike Leigh

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Naked and Other Screenplays

Mike Leigh

Gathered in this collection of the most recent works of controversial director Mike Leigh are 'Naked', 'Life is Sweet', and 'High Hopes'.

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Smelling a Rat and Ecstasy

Mike Leigh

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Goose-Pimples: A Play

Mike Leigh

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