Not financiers, not distributors, not even Netflix, which he says could fund him “without batting an eyelid” but never has. At 83, Leigh is exactly the man he has always been: an artist with integrity. He’s telling this story to prove it.
At the Savoy Hotel in London, a year or so after the 1997 Academy Awards, Harvey Weinstein received Leigh in his room in a bathrobe, a young woman seated in the corner. Weinstein offered the director a line he has never forgotten: “I could have gotten you those Oscars.” Leigh had come to the Savoy to talk about financing a film he had in the hopper — “Topsy-Turvy,” about the 15-month period leading up to the 1885 premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera “The Mikado”; he had not come to relitigate the night Miramax’s “The English Patient” won nine Oscars and Leigh’s British independent drama “Secrets & Lies,” nominated for five awards, went home empty-handed. This was back when Weinstein ruled independent film, and here he was, the most powerful man in that business, boasting that his awards machine could have delivered the statuettes.
Leigh made “Topsy-Turvy” without him. That refusal is the through line in one of the most distinctive bodies of work in modern cinema. Across more than 50 years and some 20 features, Leigh has been called the poet laureate of British working- and middle-class life.
His subjects are deceptively ordinary: A lonely factory worker meets the daughter she gave up for adoption (“Secrets & Lies”); a kindly backstreet abortionist is arrested in 1950s London (“Vera Drake”); an irrepressibly cheerful schoolteacher refuses to be ground down (“Happy-Go-Lucky”). His career is built on a single nonnegotiable principle: Leigh walks into meetings with no script, no plot, no cast list — only his word — and for decades, first at the BBC and later across the independent world, someone says yes, they’ll put up the money. Now someone has said yes one more time, and it may be the last.
Bleecker Street is funding “Tender Loving Care,” Leigh’s sweet, funny study of two social workers, their family and the people they look after. It’s the lowest-budgeted feature of Leigh’s career, and, he says with some reluctance, almost certainly his final film. On a Zoom from his home in London, he leans into the webcam.
He nearly fills the frame — a shock of white beard, tortoiseshell glasses, a checked shirt under a soft gray vest, a sunlit sage green room with a wall of bright pictures behind his shoulder. He is warm, funny and still gloriously spicy: happy to curse, to needle his interviewer, to wave off a question he finds “daft.” Contending with myosotis — a muscle-wasting condition that has left him unsteady on his feet and will keep him from the film’s Telluride premiere — he is clear-eyed about the math. In terms of energy and ideas, the work “wouldn’t be a problem,” he says; the body is another matter.
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