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yes, do you need to...? take your jacket off. hello, im john wilson, welcome to this cultural life, the radio four podcast, in which i ask leading creative figures to reveal the key moments in their life, and the most important cultural works that fired their own artistic imagination. my guest is director, screenwriter and playwright mike leigh. hes known for gritty social dramas, including vera drake and secrets and lies. domestic comedies, like life is sweet and happy—go—lucky, a...

hello, im john wilson, welcome to this cultural life, the radio four podcast, in which i ask leading creative figures to reveal the key moments in their life, and the most important cultural works that fired their own artistic imagination. my guest is director, screenwriter and playwright mike leigh. hes known for gritty social dramas, including vera drake and secrets and lies. domestic comedies like life is sweet and happy—go—lucky, and historical stories, including mr turner and ...

this cultural life. lets take you to the beginning. whats your earliest cultural memory? as a kid, we had, iwas exposed to pantomime, live theatre of various thoughts, circus, the circus was a big deal, variety, live variety, descendants of the music hall, including at the age of nine a trip to the ardwick hippodrome to see laurel and hardy live on stage on the famous tour, which i later realised was the famous tour, and the two important things about that were one, two extraordinary t...

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With us, but he wrote the play so he could play the main character, malcolm scrawdyke. and to cut a long story short, he was impossible to direct. hed say, "oh, a directors just a chairman." id say, "why dont you move over there on that...?" hed say, "why? "i could move there, i could move anywhere." and so... at this point, id already... and weve talked about this, id already formulated notions about... because i wanted to write and direct and id formulated notions about other collaborative way...

The students looking at the subject, at the model in the life drawing class, the actor has got, you know, he or she is going to start to stand up and play this person they actually know, and then that person they know, and then we meld them together and the character is created. but, of course, the two famous myths about what i do with actors is, one is that the actors come with ideas, and the committee is formed as to what the subject... thats not the case at all. in fact, its very — its esse...

You know, about how we live, relationships, work, responsibility, surviving, secrets and lies, you know, the stuff of living really. class ? and class, yes. its funny, its interesting, i didnt put that instinctively at the top of the list, but fair do�*s, you know. could you characterise a typical mike leigh film? what sort of films does mike leigh make? no, i couldnt do that and im not going to try. youve chosen as your next cultural moment an experience from 1965. you directed the original p...

..and had a nude model, and everybody was quietly drawing away, and i looked around the room, and i thought, academy of dramatic art. really creative work is happening, everybody in the room is looking at something thats real and finding an organic, truthful way of expressing it, which we didnt do as student actors. it was all mechanical and superficial and inorganic, and therefore, dull. and that revelation, in that moment, in the life drawing class — that, you know, absolutely resonated with...

I used to watch westerns from the earliest age. i remember there were two things that — one major thing that i always thought about films was, wouldnt it be great if you could have a film where the characters in the film were like real people, not like actors? and the other thing, which is of far, far less significance, or of no importance at all, is that watching westerns, you know, because of the nature of the number of frames on a length of film, the wheels on the, on a vehicle or a stageco...