Straight No Chaser: “Another Year’s” Arch Melancholia

One of the most essential lessons I’ve taken away from the work of veteran director Mike Leigh is that taking one’s time is of paramount importance, both in life and in cinema. In addition, learning about the way Leigh makes films has impressed on me that the word compromise – except between close collaborators – is not part of an artist’s vocabulary. The director, whose fabled six-month immersion method of production is equally renowned and scrutinized, is a master filmmaker who is both deliberate and uncompromising in his vision, and the proof, as they say, is onscreen in the proverbial pudding: Another Year reveals the filmmaker and his frequent collaborators – Oscar-winner Jim Broadbent (Iris, Topsy-Turvy), Lesely Manville (All or Nothing, Secrets & Lies), and Ruth Sheen (Vera Drake, High Hopes) – taking their work to new, daring directions. By illuminating the interiors of their middle- and working-class characters with a focused, powerful spotlight that exposes the flaws, the ugliness, and the complex beauty of their everyday lives.

Another Year ponders the point at which people realize that they have found contentment but still must deal with others who haven’t yet and who are far from realizing it. Even worse is that some of them, some of whom we know best and love the most, will never find it. Watching a person unravel can be like watching a train wreck. It can be infuriating. Sometimes it can be riotously funny. The universality of this theme will immediately draw in the viewer, because, hell, we’ve all been there: What do you do when one of your friends is lost, full of regret and wishes? What happens when as the giver, you’ve simply had enough of the takers? How much are we expected to take from those we love, who may be fundamentally damaged? At what point do you pull out of toxic relationships? Another Year is a film full of introspective questions such as these, a lean, delicious cinematic treat for those cinephiles who don’t like to have obvious, cliché answers shoved down their throats.

Leigh and co. thoughtfully examine the toll that giving takes on a good person, before the tenuous bonds snap like the thin black ice that coats a freshwater lake in early winter. They suggest that one must tread carefully in these kinds of relationships, which go through cycles very much like the motif of the four seasons, visually echoed in beautiful symmetry with the film’s four part narrative structure. In these thematic spaces, the director experiments with different rhythms within scenes that allow characters to behave in awkward, funny, tender, and natural ways that shed a warm light on all of the questions being asked, allowing countless interpretations to flourish alongside the full bloom of Tom and Gerri’s hearty, prized community garden.

As the key desperate character here, Manville, who recently was awarded the National Board of Review’s Best Actress citation, is in heavy contention for an Oscar nomination for her poignant performance as the drunk, addled, yet still-sweet Mary. Her name has been mentioned as frequently, deservedly, alongside as such heavy-hitting Hollywood movie stars as Annette Bening and Julianne Moore (The Kids are All Right), Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole), and Natalie Portman (Black Swan) in one of the most hotly-contested races the category has seen in many years. While Manville is indeed dynamic in the role of Mary, Broadbent and Sheen – as the lonely Mary’s frustrated defacto parental figures Tom and Gerri — equally deserve to be recognized by awards voting bodies and critics for their committed, full-bodied turns as a happily married middle class couple who provide a calm center of respite for the audience from the blowsy force of Hurricane Mary.

Leigh, who has been nominated for six Oscars to date (for writing and directing Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake, and for writing Topsy-Turvy and Happy-Go-Lucky), is also working at the top of his game with Another Year, masterfully blending pathos, humanity, and comedy with a bruising exactness that comes from forty years of refining his craft. There are few – if any — directors in the world that are afforded the artistic luxury of beginning a project sans script, but Leigh’s legend allows him complete artistic autonomy from beginning to end, allowing his cohort of actors and technicians (notably cinematographer Dick Pope) the freedom to make bold, inspiring artistic choices. Though he insisted the last time we talked that he didn’t feel destined to take home the Academy Award any time soon, two years and one masterpiece later, the time finally feels right to reward this consistently excellent director’s singular vision.

Tucked away in a bright booth in a posh hotel’s dining room, during the media blitz madness of the Toronto Film Festival in September, I was able to get a revealing, guided tour through the process of making Another Year from Leigh, Broadbent, Manville, and Sheen.

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The last time we spoke you were headed to the New York Film Critic’s Circle dinner to pick up your deserved Best Director award for Happy-Go-Lucky. Was Another Year gestating at that point?

Mike Leigh: Actually on that very day – literally – we got the green light for this film, which happened on quite short notice. We’d rather given up. Until a thing is green-lit – I’ve got ideas floating around.

When you begin writing, do you have specific actors in mind?

Mike Leigh: No I don’t, because I don’t write! We don’t have a script. We collaborate and make the film up as we go along. Obviously when the actors take part in it, I have vague notions of it, very vague, because it is in the nature of life. You’ve got these extraordinarily talented people sitting around the table. They’re all incredibly versatile. You just know that there is an infinite cornucopia of possibilities as to where you might go.

Where does the idea for the seasonal theme come from?

Mike Leigh: Well, actually, it’s the coming together of a whole lot of different things. I was trying to find a way of expressing that apart of being nurturing people – these two (gesturing towards Broadbent and Sheen) growing things and all of that, being sort of greenish, you know, you can’t dramatize an environmental film (laughs). That’s boring. So that was one thing, and another thing was that I had a kind of sense of the spirit of the film which I shared with Dick Pope, the cinematographer, who did what he always does, which is to shoot tests. There’s a certain kind of feeling, but we weren’t sure exactly what we were looking for, so he shot three different looks.

At the same time as all those things were going on, we got the idea of Mary coming around to visit these characters [Tom and Gerri]. Someone you wouldn’t normally tolerate. So the film couldn’t have been set in a short time span, plainly. When I sat down to watch this test that he’d shot, it suddenly occurred: “I know what this is! It’s the four seasons!” And so he said “which color, which of these possibilities, where should we go?” Once we got the idea of the four seasons, it really liberated the whole thing. It came out of all of those things together and it seemed to make absolute sense. I didn’t realize that thematically, the whole thing is about time passing and cycling around, the endless nature of things. They’re endless except there’s a limit in life. That’s the short answer!

Moving on to one of my favorite topics: research. (To Sheen and Broadbent…) How do you begin researching your character’s occupations since that is a substantial part of your preparation?

Ruth Sheen: Well, first of all, we decide what the character is going to do. We sort of talked about what sort of person Gerri was and what she would like to do, and we decided that she would go to university and study psychology and eventually become a counselor. So our research led to different therapies and lots of different psycho-dynamic therapies, person-centered therapy, Mike gave me this great big book on psychology. So I did lots of reading, lots of research. It was quite difficult because I have no idea…but eventually I started getting it. But we decided that she would, because of her nature, be more interested in people. So in some ways, the in-person counseling was her thing, but she did it in her own way, although she had three or four different therapies that she studied and knew about and was qualified in. She actually took it upon herself to use her own common sense, her own feelings, in with it, in with the therapy, and we discussed it quite a lot, where she would go.

(to Broadbent) And what about with geology?

Jim Broadbent: With Tom, it was initially building up the character, and building up what sort of boy he is, when he’s a little boy, when he’s a teenager, he lives in the industrial Derbyshire that also has the pig district, and a dramatic, rural side to it, with quite dramatic geology. So, a part of his youth would have been spent traveling in that area. It seemed a natural thing for him to pursue the idea of geology, but he does have a degree in geology and engineering. We pursued engineering for a while, but it didn’t quite sit easily with the character.

Mike Leigh: Actually, I got a kind of message – from wherever you get these kinds of messages from – to do with what would…actually, what I’ve just talked about, which is a certain environmental, planet aspect. Which helped me to help us to go to geology. (To Broadbent…) And I think made sense to you…

Jim Broadbent: Absolutely! Studying engineering…the more I got into it, the more it was going to be problematic for me to get my head around sophisticated engineering. Geology is something very exciting, particularly as it applied to people who were brought up adjacent to the Derbyshire pig district, you know? So it all made a great deal of sense. Then you go down the usual route: which A-levels did he take? Which year did he graduate in? Where the universities offering geology course are…So, you pursue that. We went up to Manchester, once we had established that [Tom and Gerri] had met at university. The two of us went up to Manchester and researched and went around and the university and imagined what they had done there and where they would have been…

Mike Leigh: (To Manville…) You had less scope, the more interesting kind of research, as dictated by the nature of the character…

Lesley Manville: Yes, I did on this particular project. The research into Mary’s job was not that complicated. She’s a secretary with some small leanings towards having a kind of medical sense, so that wasn’t a big deal.

Mike Leigh: (To Manville…) So you got the short straw!

Lesley Manville: (Laughing) I did research Pinot Grigio in depth.

The research lasts five months and then the shoot happens right after, which is highly atypical. So when you go into a film that is not a Mike Leigh production, how does that specific training inform your performances, when you don’t have as much time to research?

Jim Broadbent: On a bigger film, someone else has done that work, maybe not quite as thoroughly…

Lesley Manville: It makes you think about the script and the character you’re playing. It makes you think about it in different ways. You’ve got the equipment. We all know how to create a character’s back story and do all that. I don’t really like working on my own, you know? I think the problem with a lot of the work I do – regular work – is that directors sort of expect you to read the script, learn the lines, work out the crucial moments by yourself at home, and then come in and deliver. And there’s very little rehearsal. I mean, unbelievably, it does seem completely incredible that some major films are made, important films are made, and oddly enough the whole priority of giving the actors rehearsal time is overlooked. They can’t afford it. They just expect you to get your act together, and to go in and perform it. I need somebody to look at what I’m doing and make suggestions.

Mike Leigh: The fact is that a large portion of what happens in making films, the actors, on the whole, are not doing character acting, i.e. the actor just goes in and does what he or she is. That’s it. When you get a character actor, like you guys, you then devise your character, you may get some collaboration or you may not. I find, extraordinarily enough, that it’s not just a question of the collaboration. It’s just that to arrive at any of these main three characters, we have done some very complex work, and confronted all kinds of choices. All kinds of chemistry and salient elements have gone into creating these characters on all kinds of levels, and that’s the thing. That’s not just an idea, that’s the actual characterization, the substance of what the actor is actually doing. The idea that you could arrive at something round and relevant and real and three dimensional without any choices or process – I don’t really know how that happens. I have to accept that in some circumstances, it happens because of talented people who are able to do this.

Jim Broadbent: And a very good script might suggest it. Very often on films, they might do a week’s rehearsal, in which you might be involved with one and a half days. Some of them sort of read or do a bit of rehearsing of one or two of the major set pieces in the film. But its very sort of … I think it’s mainly for the director to get an idea of how he might save you! But actual character work is left to the actors.

Ruth, what was your most challenging scene to play once you got to shooting?

Ruth Sheen: Yeah, all of it! (Laughing) Different scenes demanded different….you know…In some respects the scenes with Mary were quite challenging, because of Mary’s character, especially towards the end when Mary was very upset. It was very emotional and very moving. That last scene in the kitchen where Mary is upset was very emotional. It comes not out of anger but from where they’ve been upset – when Joe [Oliver Maltman] gets upset with Mary – to see how upset Mary is. Gerri, her emotions are very compromised. It’s a bit complex, to have a friend whose damaged, who you’re very fond of, who you care about, yet she’s sort of intruding into your family’s life. So, some of that stuff was very difficult to sort of, I don’t know, make it good and still be true to the character. I enjoyed all of it; it was challenging; it was emotional; it was moving.

Jim Broadbent: You do, you have to identify. You get into character, and you have to identify with the character. The scene after the funeral where Carl [Martin Savage] is stomping around the place and being very threatening and angry? I completely identify with Tom’s tension and Gerri’s tension. There’s an electric charge there.

Mike Leigh: [At that point] We’d shot lots of the film, and we’d settled – (To Broadbent…) you’d settled – quite properly, into a clear, solid sense of Tom. Suddenly, there he is, which is why it is interesting dramatically, he’s confronted by stuff that he has to deal with. So that’s the first time you see Tom doing that. From your point of view, you opened up a sort of whole new antechamber. (To Manville…)What was your most challenging scene?

Lesley Manville: Well, I hadn’t played drunk before and we only talked about the degrees of it, really. We didn’t talk about, and I think that was correct that we didn’t, how you actually act it. We did sort of take it for granted that it would just be alright.

Mike Leigh: I did not come to you and say”’well, how are you going to do it?” It was always a surprise.

Lesley Manville: No, exactly! So we just talked about the degrees of drunkenness. Interestingly enough, the thing about playing drunk is that normally, working with Mike, we can do these big, emotional scenes, and we’ve got so adept at popping in and out of character that we can be in character through a big scene that might be tricky and emotional and difficult, and then we can come out of character and it’s a simple process. In and out of character. It’s a discipline, yes. The thing about being drunk was that, very quickly, I thought it was quite hard to stop it and then get into it again. So, I just kept quite quiet and private in between takes of that scene, and kept it on the go a little bit, and I found that helped.

Mike Leigh: Vodka helped!

Lesley Manville: (Laughing) It was a new area. We all usually just come out of character and you’re out. What you get is that: a) people think you’re in character all the time, when you’re not, and b) that the ability to come out of character is sort of a slow process, but it’s not the case.

Mike Leigh: I’ve had people come up to me and say ‘surely, she must have had a real drink.’ That’s not how it happens.

Lesley, I wanted to just talk a little about your theater work – including All About My Mother, Six Degrees of Separations, The Cherry Orchard, among many other greats – because Mary in Another Year reminded me so much of a distaff Blanche Dubois from A Streetcar Named Desire. How does this particular kind of variety of roles stretch you as an actor?

Lesely Manville: Well, I feel that if the work you do in any other territory is good work, you’re going to take from it. I really enjoy working on stage. I suppose my feelings are that I like it because it’s a complete evening, nobody’s going to stop you. You can’t make bad actors look good, you can’t edit around them. So, I like the pureness of it, the wholesomeness of it. But it’s different and I think that I don’t have any preference. I enjoy doing both, and I really like the technical challenges of filmmaking. Aside from creating the character, interacting with other characters in a scene, I also enjoy the knowledge that there’s the camera there and that the camera needs to be relating to me in a particular way. I like all of that. I like having all sorts of disciplines on-the-go.

I know we maybe shouldn’t talk about someone who isn’t here, but I was fascinated by Imelda Staunton’s role in the film…

Mike Leigh: (lifting the tablecloth, looking under the banquette, and wildly pointing) She is here, actually!

(Laughter all around)

Ruth Sheen: I’ve worked with Imelda before, on Vera Drake, in a very different combination, so it’s quite difficult to say how I felt about her because I just played the scene, you know? I didn’t sort of sit there and go…‘oh….!’ I just sort of go on with it and I did it. It was right in the beginning…I sort of just got on with it! She’s just Imelda to me…

There are so many stories about films losing funding, and the budget difficulties for filmmakers seem to be getting worse. The last time we talked, you mentioned how you thought it was a little crazy that people give you money to make a film without a script.

Mike Leigh: I must have been drunk! (Laughing) I think its remarkable. I think I’ve gotten away with a lot, had the most remarkable luck. I don’t know how I’ve gotten work! Nobody here knows! It’s remarkable

Lesley Manville: (Laughing) You’re such a charlatan!

(Laughter all around)

Mike Leigh: I’m joking, of course. It’s probably called ‘irony’ – you call it ‘irony’! The fact is that apart from anything else, Another Year had the smallest budget of any film I had worked on in a very long time. It only goes to show what you can do for five bob, really.

The reception out of Cannes was strong. I’m always curious to see what the relationship of actors and directors is to the world of film criticism is…Do you read film criticism or care about film critics at all?

Mike Leigh: Yeah. I mean, sure. We don’t make these films – as far as I’m concerned – for newspapers, but for audiences, and you want those films to get a sense of audience. People writing about them is part of the process, so it matters. And also, I’m interested, always interested, to know what people write. Sometimes it is a painful experience and sometimes it’s a joy.

Jim Broadbent: You dip into it a bit, occasionally, if it feels like there’s a good vibe, then you read a few more. But generally, I just keep my head to the ground to see if there’s a good feeling about it. I’m certainly not one of those who never ever reads [reviews]…

Lesley Manville: We’ve all three of us been actors for a really long time, so I think we’re all pretty level-headed about it, really.

Ruth Sheen: I think sometimes, talking about what someone says, if it’s personal, then perhaps you might take it more deeply than other times. I mean, I read all of it, good or bad, because I think it is important to accept that. I mean, it is one person’s opinion and also everyone is entitled to their opinion. Nobody’s going to like everything you do.

Mike Leigh: On Happy-Go-Lucky, we had a thing with the cast and crew and lots of people came, and one person, who’s a friend of mine, shocked me and said, at the screening, something that at that time no one had said at all: ‘I couldn’t stand her [Poppy – played by Sally Hawkins]. She really got on my nerves.’ And I was shocked. I didn’t know that it was going to be that a substantial number of people were going to say, including some critics. I mean there were so many British critics who absolutely said that and other people who thought she was wonderful. Personally, I don’t see how you can do anything other than fall in love with the character myself…

Nevertheless, the point is, in the context of the question, is that you kind of learn. You may reach that point where someone is completely off-beat or out of order, but in the end, the movie-going experience, when you’ve made a film, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a learning curve that goes on for a very long time. You learn from accepting audiences, how you do Q&As, you learn from the way people react to it, and the interesting thing is, I will get in the street, people saying ‘I loved your film. And it’s a film that people criticized to hell, or negatively. It’s an ongoing thing. Criticism is a part of it. Everybody, not least journalists — critics are in the end mostly journalists — come at things from all kinds of different angles, different kinds of backgrounds, different perspectives, different interiors, different objectives, tastes.

It seems like in the film you maybe say that people are either happy or not. Do you feel like it is that cut and dry?

Mike Leigh: Absolutely not! I think that’s twaddle. I never said that and the film doesn’t say that. The film is extremely complex and that’s the very thing the film doesn’t say, if you don’t mind me saying so! Are you happy?

(laughter all around, again)

Touche, Mr. Leigh.

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Another Year opens in limited release December 29th.