The World According to Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh is widely recognised as one of the great mavericks and creative geniuses of British stage, cinema and television. Since his first film, Bleak Moments, burst on an unsuspecting public in 1971, he has produced a body of work that is idiosyncratic, controversial, often hilarious and always acutely sensitive to the human condition.
Films like Nuts in May, Meantime, Life is Sweet, High Hopes and Naked have entered the collective consciousness (everyone knows - or thinks they know - what is meant by 'a Mike Leigh situation'), and many of Britain's finest actors, including Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Jim Broadbent, Julie Walters, Antony Sher, Timothy Spall, David Thewlis and Jane Horrocks, are unforgettably associated with Leigh's work. One of his longest and most fruitful collaborations, though, has been with his wife Alison Steadman, whose Beverly in Abigail's Party has become a byword for comic grotesquerie. Yet for much of his career Leigh has had to struggle for recognition in the face of establishment hostility and suspicion, and allegations of condescension and caricature have frequently been levelled at his work.
Above all, Mike Leigh is famous throughout the world for his unique method of working with actors to produce characters and a script which emerge from months of improvisations and rehearsals. Every project starts from absolute scratch. The results are often extraordinary: comic, poignant, above all totally individual.