ARENA: MIKE LEIGH - MAKING PLAYS, 1982

(BBC VIDEO, 1hr 18 min)

First broadcast in 1982, Mike Leigh - Making Plays is an Arena profile of Mike Leigh
the writer and director of plays and films such as Abigail’s Party, Nuts In May and
Bleak Moments.

​

“Plays are about people inter-reacting, and all this is about is inventing those people, making them inter-react and discovering the plays by doing so. That's what its about. It seems to be perfectly natural that in order to discover what should be in a play, that the most important craftsman or artist involved should be the actor” (Mike Leigh)

​

The Arena profile covers Leigh's formative years as a student at RADA and later Camberwell School of Art, interwoven with extracts from some of his major works. Where this film becomes significant and inspiring to those that watch it, however, is in the workshop that Leigh runs especially for Arena. Like one of Leigh's plays, the viewer is invited into the heart of an intimate relationship where they can witness the process he uses to devise his work in terms of constructing narratives with the actors based on their own unique history and relationships. Leigh is so often blunt and candid in his description of his methods that you begin to think he is perplexed that someone needed him to explain their simplicity in the first place. This is the strength of Leigh. His methodology is quite simple but it is highly rigorous and minutely controlled. After nearly one hour and twenty minutes of peering into Leigh's world and philosophy you are left, as Leigh himself says he wants you to feel after witnessing his work, “caring about those involved”. You are left caring so much about Mike Leigh and his work that you want to make everyone in the world sit down and experience Bleak Moments right there and then before the day is out.