Mike Leigh famous quotes

04-17-2025

Film-makers should remain true to their principles and never compromise, there is a real revival in the British film industry but there is a danger that we will become colonial servants of Hollywood. We need to maintain our own integrity.
-- Mike Leigh

#Integrity #Real #Needs
I'm developing the stuff all the time. There's a film in my head. I'm imagining a film.
-- Mike Leigh

#Stuff #Film
I've walked out of films. But for every film I've ever walked out of, I've probably walked out of 500 plays.
-- Mike Leigh

#Play #Film
It's an unhealthy habit to say that life is what you make of it, and if you want to be happy, then you can be happy. That's just rubbish, basically.
-- Mike Leigh

#Want #Rubbish #Life Is
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.
-- Mike Leigh

#Lucky #Our Relationship
I mean, artistic processes are all about making choices all the time, and the very act of making a choice is the distilling down and the getting to the core of what it is that you care about and what you want to say, really.
-- Mike Leigh

#Mean #Choices #Care
I think it's important that nobody forgets that although Hollywood commercially dominates the world cinema, in fact what comes out of the filmmaking here is only a tiny slice out of the massive amount of operation that goes on around the world.
-- Mike Leigh

#Thinking #Important #Goes On
I've long since stopped worrying about how I'm portrayed in the press because ultimately it's not that important. Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity.
-- Mike Leigh

#Integrity #Worry #Long
Life is about luck and it's about circumstances and socioeconomic conditions and all the rest of it, but you know, you can also make choices. It's about spirit and generosity and all the other things, too.
-- Mike Leigh

#Generosity #Choices #Luck
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.
-- Mike Leigh

#Selfish #Resilience #Acting
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.
-- Mike Leigh

#Character #Location #Spirit
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.
-- Mike Leigh

#Actors #Directors #Cry
I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.
-- Mike Leigh

#Real #Trying #Life Experience
I think Michael Caine is a perfectly good actor but it's obvious he's not going to be in one of my films.
-- Mike Leigh

#Thinking #Actors #Film
I feel very much ideologically, politically if you like, and emotionally part of the European cinema.
-- Mike Leigh

#Cinema #Feels
Resolve was never stronger than in the morning, after the night, when it was never weaker
-- Mike Leigh

#Funny #Morning #Night
Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins,
-- Mike Leigh

#Eye #Choices #Steel
I hope I make films where you walk away . . . with work to do, arguments to have, things to worry about, things to care about. In that sense, I would regard what I do as political.
-- Mike Leigh

#Worry #Political #Care
There's a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one's awareness really and consciousness of things.
-- Mike Leigh

#Consciousness #Awareness #Constant
The good thing from my perspective is that nobody puts any pressure on me to say what it's going to be. The backers accept that they don't know what they are going to get.
-- Mike Leigh

#Perspective #Pressure #Accepting
It creeps up on you and becomes an obsession. It comes out of watching a million movies.
-- Mike Leigh

#Obsession #Creeps
I do not make films which are prescriptive, and I do not make films that are conclusive. You do not walk out of my films with a clear feeling about what is right and wrong. They're ambivalent. You walk away with work to do. My films are a sort of investigation. They ask questions . . .. Sometimes I hear that some [Hollywood] studio is interested in me. Then they discover that this is the guy who works with no script, that there is no casting discussion, no interference, that I have the final cut, and that does it.
-- Mike Leigh

#Cutting #Guy #Feelings
I'm old enough to have friends and contemporaries who have long since retired, and that's their prerogative - enough is enough; it doesn't mean a thing to me. But I haven't got any money, so, you know, I just keep on working.
-- Mike Leigh

#Mean #Long #Enough
But actually I make films that I think are extremely sophisticated and cinematic.
-- Mike Leigh

#Thinking #Film #Sophisticated
But films should be voyeuristic. What else is a film if you're not snooping into somebody else's lives?
-- Mike Leigh

#Film #Snooping #Should
Given the events of even the 19th century, Zionism was inevitable. Given the events of the 20th century, Israel was inevitable.
-- Mike Leigh

#Israel #Events #Given
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.
-- Mike Leigh

#Long #Cameras #Film

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