Ordinary people

Director Mike Leigh and actor Jim Broadbent talk about their moving new drama, Another Year

Last Updated: Friday, January 7, 2011 | 4:51 PM ET

By Martin Morrow, CBC News

Jim Broadbent, left, and Ruth Sheen star as a middle-age couple in Mike Leigh's latest drama, Another Year. (TIFF)

This story originally ran during the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.

Think of an eminent Jewish filmmaker whose comedy is often tinged with melancholy, who favours ensemble movies and who often uses the same actors. The description fits Woody Allen — and Mike Leigh.

Mike Leigh is legendary for his preparations, which include lengthy rehearsals with his actors as they improvise, explore and develop their characters.

The difference is that, while Allen now cranks out mostly mediocre comedies that get lots of media attention because of their Hollywood casts, the British-based Leigh continues to create small, sparkling gems. Case in point: his funny, heartbreaking Another Year, one of the standout movies at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.

Lob the Woody Allen comparison at Leigh and he swats it back tartly.

"I would be flattered to have my films compared to some of his earlier films," says the doleful-eyed director, perched restlessly on a desk chair in a Toronto hotel suite. "I would be insulted to have my work compared with his more recent films."

Leigh allows that he hasn't seen Allen's latest at TIFF, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, which shares some of its preoccupations — aging, mortality, the need for love — with Another Year. But he says any similarities with the prolific New Yorker are superficial.

"Apart from anything else, Woody Allen does not work with his actors at all in any way that relates to what I do. I get my sleeves rolled up and work very hard with each of them individually. I'm completely involved."

Leigh is legendary for his intensive methods when preparing a film, which include lengthy rehearsals with his actors as they improvise, explore and develop their characters. For Another Year, he and his cast spent six months rehearsing and another three months shooting the film. You don't have to ask if all that prep work is necessary. You only have to look at the performances that he extracts from his ensemble — rich, complex, often Dickensian in their eccentricities. Every character in Another Year is at once distinctive and as familiar as a next-door neighbour.

The film's story revolves around Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a long and happily married middle-class couple, their adult son Joe (Oliver Maltman) and their unhappy, lovelorn friends. These include Ken (Peter Wight), an old mate of Tom's who has turned into a sad, bitter glutton, and Gerri's work colleague Mary (an outstanding Lesley Manville), whose self-delusion and desperation for male companionship are both hilarious and pathetic. Over the course of a year — clocked via the changing seasons in Tom and Gerri's community garden — we see new love blossom, old hopes wither and a death occur in the family.

Leigh, 67, says the idea for Another Year grew out of his last film, Happy-Go-Lucky, a delightful ode to youthful optimism. "Happy-Go-Lucky focused on youngish people in their late 20s, early 30s," he says, "and I just thought, Well, I need to deal with life at this end of the journey, where I'm at."

Leigh never starts with a script. He gathers his cast first and the screenplay only emerges after they've decided on and developed their characters. The actors in Another Year include a higher-than-usual proportion of Leigh veterans, from Manville, who has appeared in a record seven pictures by the director, to Wight (five) and Broadbent (four). Leigh defends his use of the same people time and again. "If anybody's good, you want to go back to them, basically," he says. "And each time I work with the actor, we go deeper and further and push ourselves more."

Actors, in turn, are willing to devote the better part of a year to a Leigh project, knowing they're collaborating with one of contemporary cinema's great directors.

British director Mike Leigh. (TIFF)

"It's absolutely worth it," declares Broadbent, looking dapper in a dark suit and fresh from enduring a windy photo session in the hotel's courtyard. The Oscar-winning character actor, whose twinkling features have lately graced everything from Harry Potter and Narnia installments to The Young Victoria and Hot Fuzz, is ready to book off the better part of a year when Leigh comes calling. "It's a leap of faith," he admits. "You're trusting in him, because you don't know what you're going to be playing and what it's going to turn out to be. But we've done it together enough to know it will be worthwhile."

Soft-spoken and convivial, Broadbent seems the opposite of the brusque, fidgety Leigh, but the two obviously click. They first worked together in 1979, when Broadbent, then a young theatre actor, performed in Leigh's play Ecstasy. Broadbent later went on to roles in the Leigh films Life Is Sweet, Vera Drake and, most memorably, the Gilbert and Sullivan biopic Topsy-Turvy, in which he was brilliant as a bluff, acerbic W.S. Gilbert. Broadbent's part in Another Year is more genial. He and Sheen embody an ideal of domestic harmony to which their friends — if not the film's audience — can only aspire.

"There's obviously a lot of sadness in this film, but I think it's balanced by the contentment and calm at the centre of it, with Tom and Gerri, who are a happy and fulfilled couple," Broadbent says. "It's a nice thing to see on the screen and an unusual thing, too — a couple that isn't in conflict with each other but that has a good relationship." Of course, he adds with a chuckle, "a happy couple can be a bit sickening, too."

Leigh is famous for not always letting his actors know a film's story arc. Broadbent says that when he and other cast members sat down and watched Another Year for the first time, they weren't quite sure what to make of it. "We didn't know what it was, really. But you see it again, and you begin to look at it more objectively. Now it's something I'm very proud of. I find it very moving."

Leigh, however, denies having any kind of master plan. He describes making a movie as an ongoing process of discovery that doesn't end until it finally unspools in the cinema. "A film doesn't mean anything until it's been seen by audiences. It's in the feedback that you start to discover what you've done," he says. "That's really where I get the final major buzz. That's what it's all about."

Another Year opens Jan. 14.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.