Zitat des Tages von Mike Leigh:
My work requires acting at its most committed - it demands actors of enormous resilience, but also intelligence and wit. It doesn't work for narcissistic or selfish actors.
I've long since stopped worrying about how I'm portrayed in the press because ultimately it's not that important. Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity.
Film-makers should remain true to their principles and never compromise, there is a real revival in the British film industry but there is a danger that we will become colonial servants of Hollywood. We need to maintain our own integrity.
It's an unhealthy habit to say that life is what you make of it, and if you want to be happy, then you can be happy. That's just rubbish, basically.
I think Michael Caine is a perfectly good actor but it's obvious he's not going to be in one of my films.
I'm developing the stuff all the time. There's a film in my head. I'm imagining a film.
It creeps up on you and becomes an obsession. It comes out of watching a million movies.
The good thing from my perspective is that nobody puts any pressure on me to say what it's going to be. The backers accept that they don't know what they are going to get.
I feel very much ideologically, politically if you like, and emotionally part of the European cinema.
There are plenty of bad actors and there are plenty of bad directors. There are actors who will always be bad and there are good actors who you cry for because they're being badly directed or the material isn't good enough.
But films should be voyeuristic. What else is a film if you're not snooping into somebody else's lives?
I mean, artistic processes are all about making choices all the time, and the very act of making a choice is the distilling down and the getting to the core of what it is that you care about and what you want to say, really.
My work is about life as you and I experience it. You're either lucky or you're not lucky; either your relationship works or it doesn't.
The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.
There's a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one's awareness really and consciousness of things.
