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Mike Leigh Knows Someone Like Pansy in Real Life, Too
The Hard Truths director on “growing” his films in collaboration with his actors, and why he’s not going to explain the ending to you.
Leigh is standing near the elevator bank in a hotel lobby in the Flatiron district, doing one last round of pre-Oscar promotion in Manhattan for his latest movie, the domestic drama Hard Truths. It’s a very emotional scene, and at the end of it, Chantelle says, “I don’t understand you, but I love you.” I wonder if that’s any sort of guiding principle for you, in terms of presenting a best-case scenario of how humans might live together. On this film, for example, we had 14-week session of creating the characters and investigating and building their relationships and doing research and working with the production designer and the costumer to plan how things will look, and at the end of all that, I then sit down and write a sort of three-page potential structure.
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