Like the action in his widely acclaimed new film "Hard Truths", veteran British director Mike Leigh swings between gratitude and despair as he reflects on his life and career. The 82-year-old is aware of the great fortune he has had to make more than a dozen films over a glittering five-decade run, including "Secrets and Lies" and "Vera Drake".
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00:30There is no political message that you can put down in black and white, but it is a reflection,
00:38an exploration on how we live.
00:53In making the decision to centre on black characters, one of the deliberate things that
00:59I've very consciously done is to say, okay, this is not going to be a film that deals
01:05in tropes and stereotypes and troubles with the law and drug issues and all gang stuff
01:12and all of that, other than maybe implicitly at one moment or another.
01:21But actually says, okay, these are people and actually the main issues in the film are
01:27of course universal and are not endemic or exclusive to black people.
01:48The problem is that getting films made, getting independent films made, which is to say the
01:54kind of films you're implicitly talking about, is increasingly difficult.
01:59It's difficult to find the funding without getting that funding from people who will
02:05interfere with what you do and try to make it into something else of a commercial nature.
02:22It's profoundly worrying.
02:25Again, you know, when you've got grandkids who are going to be the citizens of this century
02:34and possibly they're going to live into the next century, you can only worry what the
02:40hell their life's going to be like, basically, like for everybody.
02:46And you know, we're having this conversation right at the end of March, 2025, and we know
02:53that in the last week, few weeks, couple of months, the world has lurched in an even more
02:59desperate direction than it was at the turn of the year, basically, for reasons we know.