Most days, Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste are divided by an ocean. The 81-year-old director has a home in Cornwall, while the 57-year-old actor moved to Los Angeles more than two decades ago in frustration at the dearth of roles available to her in the UK. This was even after she had been Oscar-nominated for Leigh’s 1996 masterpiece Secrets & Lies, in which she played an optometrist tracking down her biological mother.
Drinking tea today in a London hotel room, with Jean-Baptiste wearing circular black designer frames and Leigh resembling an off-duty farmer in his blue gilet, it is only a table that divides them. As they chat, one of them will occasionally reach across the gap in affection or solidarity. They can’t quite touch – their chairs are a shade too far apart – but the gesture is as fond as a squeeze of the hand.
“If I’m over here, I’ll drop him a line and say: ‘How about a cuppa?’” says Jean-Baptiste. Does he ever visit her in Los Angeles? “Listen,” says Leigh, licking his lips in a way that lets you know a barb is coming, “when I get to LA, my main objective is to get out again as quickly as possible.” But they keep up with each other’s work, which means he must have seen her in Peter Strickland’s 2018 high-street horror, In Fabric, where she was menaced by a killer dress. What did he make of it? “I thought it was a very nice film,” he says diplomatically.
When she and Leigh began work on Hard Truths, their second film together (or third, if you count Career Girls, for which Jean-Baptiste co-composed the score), it was the 30th anniversary of their first meeting. “Years ago, I was bathing naked in the Nile when Mike rode by on a camel and said: ‘Who is this rare beauty?’” Hearing this, Leigh laughs as if he is being tickled. The truth is more prosaic: Jean-Baptiste, not long out of Rada, auditioned for him. “Obviously,” he says, “I thought she was good news.”
It was a bit more complicated than that. He neglected to cast her in Naked, the film he was making at the time, which starred David Thewlis as an itinerant Mancunian doomsayer scything his way through women. Although the director won’t discuss the oversight today (“Not important”), he told Amy Raphael, in her book Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, that he had a “retrograde” notion that “if one of the women was black, it would in some way detract from the real issue”. He called it “one of the only things in any of my films that I’ve regretted”. But he put her straight into his next project, the 1993 play It’s a Great Big Shame!, as a busybody yuppie who believes that “what really counts in life is how much megabyte you’ve got as a person”. They both howl at that line.
Jean-Baptiste’s performance in Hard Truths, a dead cert for a best actress Oscar nomination next year, throws up no shortage of quotable moments. She plays Pansy, a lonely, dyspeptic wife and mother who rails at the world and everyone in it. As its title suggests, the film is cut from the same cloth as Bleak Moments and Hard Labour (a 1973 Play for Today) rather than Happy-Go-Lucky. Nevertheless, some of Pansy’s monologues resemble glinting comic arias. The more footling her concerns, the funnier. Why do people insist on dressing dogs in little coats? Why are supermarket cashiers so miserable? Why do baby clothes have pockets? It’s not as if babies have anything to put in them!
To Jean-Baptiste’s delight, audiences seem to be warming to Pansy. “People have compassion for her,” she says. “People relate to her. I’m like: ‘Yesss!’” She pumps her fist. Pansy is angry at the world and terrified of it. But in the way of a stopped clock telling the right time twice a day, she talks sense now and then. Actor and director share her impatience with charity tin-rattlers, for example. “People want all your information,” says Jean-Baptiste. “They do! They want your email address. How many times have you pretended you didn’t speak English when somebody shook one of those in your face and asked you to feed the children?” Leigh has a different tactic: “My way of dealing with them is to say: ‘Wrong man, wrong time, wrong place. Sorry.’ By the time they’ve digested that, I’ve disappeared.”
Although Leigh argues that Hard Truths could have been set at any point in the last few decades, Jean-Baptiste believes Pansy’s behaviour is very 2024. “People have asked: ‘Is it because of the pandemic? What is it?’ I think it’s something in the air. There’s a general intolerance and impatience in society now, with everyone ranting and having their say. So it’s interesting to have people recognising the character’s pain rather than dismissing it.”
God help Pansy if she ever discovers social media, which is a repository and a breeding ground for the sort of fear on which she thrives. “It’s a good point,” says Leigh, comically begrudging. “And I’m glad you weren’t around to introduce it when we were putting the film together because then we’d have had to embrace it.”
Pansy’s rage may be corrosive but she is also at her most alive when she is angry. Take her contretemps with a fellow motorist in a supermarket car park. A brief set-to over a parking space soon escalates into a slanging match, with the pair trading sexualised insults. Pansy even accuses him of being backed-up with sperm. She’s livid – but she’s enjoying herself, right? “Yeah! Mike always checks in with you after you’ve done a scene. After that one he asked: ‘How was that?’ I said, ‘I think she’s in love.’” She reaches out a hand to Leigh, not quite making contact. “I’m always joking with him. But it was like somebody had fought back, which is so different from anyone else in her life.”
It’s also the only scene in the film that hints at Pansy’s sexual dimension. Could it be … “Come on, yes!” says Jean-Baptiste encouragingly, circling a hand in the air like a teacher coaxing a reluctant student. Well, I continue, there’s clearly a dormant part of her that is not being … “Serviced,” she says. “That’s right. He does call her a ‘barren bitch’, doesn’t he? That’s what sets her off.” Leigh is nodding along. She continues: “It’s like, ‘My sexuality? My bits and pieces? I’m gonna come after your bits and pieces!’”
The enthusiastic response to Hard Truths feels that much sweeter after all the knockbacks it encountered along the way. Aside from the 17 years between Leigh’s first two cinema films (Bleak Moments in 1971 and High Hopes in 1988), during which he worked instead in TV and theatre, the gap between his 2018 historical drama Peterloo and Hard Truths is the longest of his career. The pandemic is partly to blame – he and Jean-Baptiste were all set to reunite just before it struck – but there has also been a palpable lack of interest. Amazon Studios distributed Peterloo, but passed on Hard Truths. As for Netflix, Leigh says: “It took them less than a minute to say no.” It’s well known that he and his actors generate the films during many months of intensive improvisation, long before they get anywhere near a camera. “Netflix don’t do anything where there’s no script and they’re not involved in casting and they can’t interfere,” he says. “And that’s their prerogative.”
In the end, a large chunk of change came from Spain. But even once Hard Truths was finished, it was rejected by the Cannes and Venice film festivals, which had been the sites of former glories: Leigh won the top prizes there for Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake respectively. During a recent interview at the BFI, he admitted: “We really started to think we’d made a shit film.”
With the wind in his sails now, there is another movie on the cards for next year. “We’re looking for the money right now.” With Marianne? “Sorry, who?” She rocks in her seat, her laugh ringing out. Then he declares the matter closed: “I never discuss casting.”
Perhaps it could be Hard Truths 2: Pansy’s Revenge. After all, Leigh will know that some of cinema’s greatest directors, ones he might even consider soulmates, have brought characters back repeatedly: Truffaut with the Antoine Doinel series, Lindsay Anderson with three Mick Travis films, Richard Linklater in the Before trilogy. Given the comprehensive life histories already mapped out for Leigh’s characters in improvisations, it seems as if he is looking a rather large gift horse in the mouth by not revisiting figures from his earlier films. Why not drop in again on Poppy (Sally Hawkins) from Happy-Go-Lucky, or catch up on the brothers played by Tim Roth and Phil Daniels in Meantime?
“It’s never occurred to me,” he says. “The films are of a family, of course, but they are all different and separate. They are standalone artefacts.” I tell him I’d love to see some of the characters again. “Well, that’s good news,” he responds. “Just watch the films.” Don’t they all exist in the same world? Another Year and Secrets & Lies, for instance, were shot less than 10 miles from one another, so couldn’t those fictional families theoretically cross paths in a new project? “Of course they’re in the same world!” he huffs, losing patience with my nonsense. “That’s not rocket science.”
The reason I ask is that I was wondering who might win in a fight between two of his most formidable characters: Pansy from Hard Truths and Johnny from Naked. It could be like one of those Japanese monster movies, with Godzilla squaring up to Mothra.
Jean-Baptiste sits up in her seat, all but rubbing her hands. “It’s an interesting question,” she says. Then she announces decisively: “They’d get married.”
What a scoop! Leigh, though, is having none of it. “The only way I could find out is to get David and Marianne in to investigate it in an improvisation as Johnny and Pansy. And that ain’t gonna happen.” But then he budges, just an inch. “Actually, I think they’d both walk away,” he says.
• Hard Truths is in US cinemas now, and UK and Irish cinemas from 31 January
