Mike Leigh on 'Hard Truths' and his moviemaking struggles

TORONTO — When the British filmmaker Mike Leigh was 6, his father, a doctor who would oppose his son becoming an artist, told him to quit drawing pictures of people.

In a way, Leigh never stopped. In his six decades making movies, the 81-year-old Leigh has made some of the most humanistic movies in cinema, many of them character studies of ordinary, working-class people — though the films, from “Secret & Lies” to “Mr. Turner,” run the whole gamut.

“I walk down the street and I see characters,” Leigh says. “Looking at people is what it’s about.”

Leigh is sitting in a Toronto restaurant the morning after the premiere of his latest film and first in six years, “Hard Truths.” It reunites him with Marielle Jean-Baptiste, who was Oscar-nominated for her role in 1996's “Secrets & Lies.”

In “Hard Truths,” which will open for a qualifying release Dec. 6 and nationwide Jan. 10, Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a bitter and rageful woman whose unexplained internal suffering spews out in venom directed at her husband, son and most anyone she encounters in her few, anxious trips out of their London home.

The film was made in Leigh's trademark way. He sets without a script and instead builds the character and story through months of rehearsal with his actors. It's an approach that Leigh says has gotten increasingly difficult to pull off in today's movie industry. He spoke about that struggle and others in an interview.