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7. ART & INDUSTRY
by Amy Taubin
An interview with Mike Leigh
Imelda Staunton in
Vera Drake
This interview took place in New York in August 2004. It is entirely focused on Vera Drake. I doubt that even Leigh, who felt very confident about the film, realized how successful it would be, or indeed how contentious the issue of abortion would have become in the United States by the time the film was released.
Vera Drake is your second period film. The first, Topsy-Turvy, was set in the late 19th century, but Vera Drake seems almost as remote-as if it's taking place in another world.
For me, it is and it isn't. We weren't there in the 1880s. The period of Topsy-Turvy hangs on as received memory. But for some of us making Vera Drake-granted a minority of us-we experienced that time. I did.
Why is it set precisely in the year 1950?
I was going to set it during the Fifties. But then I realized that the year 1950 was still in the postwar period but you also get just a whiff of the spirit of the Fifties to come in the son and also in Joyce, the upwardly mobile sister-in-law. But, really, it's about the postwar period, and it does feel like another planet, although the issues at the center of that time are just as relevant today.
So was the issue of abortion the starting point for the film?
Yes, of course.
I think what I'm asking is if the film started with the issue or with the character of Vera Drake. The kind of character who's disassociated in a way that suggests both saints and crazy people could exist in relation to many different issues.
I had a long time plan to make a film about the issue of abortion. But I'm interested in what you say about her being a crazy person. Is that the way you see her?
I see her as profoundly disassociated or compartmentalized. It's almost like a person on an assembly line making potentially lethal weapons who never thinks past the one widget she's responsible for. She never goes back the next day to see if perhaps something has gone wrong and woman she's "helped out" is all right.
I see the analogy, but it isn't the right one. It's more complicated. She knows what she's doing, and when the cops show up she knows the game is up and all the rest of it. But her understanding and her attitude until that point is that it's practical and necessary and that if you do it right, it doesn't go wrong. From my research, it seems it's what a lot of women did. The objective fact is that infections and other complications could happen. But infections happen in modern hospitals. It's not so much that she's disassociated as that she has undoubtedly rationalized what she does. She's not in complete denial. She deals with it so she can do what she does for girls that need it. But plainly, it is dangerous.
What got you interested in the subject of abortion?
It has cropped up quite a lot in my films. It's part of my on-going preoccupation with life and death and relationships and children and babies and parents. This isn't the first time abortion has come up. I don't know if you noticed, but at the end of the film, at the end of the credits, there is this little memorial to my parents. My father was a doctor and my mother was a midwife. He died only last year and I wish I could have talked to him about it. He had a working class practice. The issue must have come up a lot. So I wanted to look at a back street abortionist in the period before the law was changed in 1967. In Japan, it was changed in around 1948.
I thought of Claude Chabrol's The Story of Women with Isabelle Huppert. That's a melodrama in the grand sense. What's different in Vera Drake is that everything is very small. Abortion is treated more matter-of-factly than in most films that deal with life or death issues.
As always, in my films it's about people doing jobs. Look at Topsy-Turvy - what jobs were they doing? And Vera, she's someone doing what she has to do. All the epic meanings and implications look after themselves. There's a man who's married to a woman for many years and he doesn't know what she's up to. Not only that he doesn't know she's doing 'that', but the fact that there's anything he doesn't know is traumatic and remarkable and frightening. But to make melodrama of it is to throw out the baby with the bath water - perhaps an unfortunate figure of speech in this context.
But since abortion has come out of the back streets, it has been this contentious, blown-up issue - the flash point in the battle between feminism and the patriarchal order. And therefore to make a film where abortion is both a matter of life or death for the women who need to have one, and also a matter-of-fact occurrence in the lives of perfectly ordinary people - that's a very different treatment of this material.
It would be inconceivable for me to deal with it any other way.
I was aware that the people who are upper-middle class or who have aspirations of upward mobility are the villains, or, at least, the unpleasant people in the film.
It's very interesting that you say that. The sister-in-law obviously is concerned with her own upward mobility and is lacking compassion. But Susan, the daughter of the woman Vera works for - I didn't see her as an unpleasant character. I'm not concerned, as I am in other films, with a satirical critique of the upper-middle class. I'm merely reporting that for wealthy and posh people, there were ways of dealing with this problem that were not available to people without money. But I found Susan a rather sympathetic character. Her mother is entirely self-absorbed. Her boyfriend is obviously disgusting. But the friend she goes to is cynical but helpful, and then she goes to posh doctors who do what they do, and everyone gets on with it.
I thought the way Vera used "dear" as a way of addressing almost everybody including the police inspector was interesting. I think that's something that's lost on American audiences. Americans don't say 'dear' to people they don't know. But I suspect Vera says "dear" a bit more than other English women in that period and of the same age and class.
At a baseline level, it is ordinary vernacular for such a woman.
Even to address a policeman as dear?
That's the interesting thing. That's the character point. We debated that carefully, when we constructed the dialogue. She naturally saw the police as doing what they had to do. For Vera, people in the Metropolitan Police could not be anything but good guys. These are the nice guys you go to when you're in trouble. So she talks to them in that way. She in no way sees them as hostile. So it seemed natural for her to say 'dear' in that way. But it certainly has a resonance.
Is the usage different for women than for men?
It sort of is, although it's dangerous to set that generalization in stone. And the convention has sort of died out. It's an old-fashion use. It would have been usual for a woman of 50 in 1950, but not so much any more. But usages of affection are part of her currency. It's part of what she's about.
Imelda Staunton is an amazing actress. My favorite of the roles she played before this is in Chicken Run.
She walked away with Shakespeare in Love. She's tremendous. She's the most natural choice, and she delivered the goods. She's also very pleasant to have around. She's a team player. And she approached it with no sentimentality, no squeamishness. She's absolutely great, and I hope she gets rewarded.
Did you work on this film with the actors as you have all the others?
Yes. And as with Topsy-Turvy, we had a researcher. There's a very good museum in London called the Imperial War Museum. Why they don't change its name I don't know, but apparently they can't. But the guys there were immensely helpful to all the actors. Everybody went there to plot their journeys through World War II.
I was an actor, so I think I'm aware of certain things that actors do more than people without a direct experience of that process. When you get to the moment where Vera is confronted by the policeman and she has to admit that, yes, she did it, you frame her in close-up and you hold the close-up for a long time. And her face just falls apart. I thought, what a responsibility. The whole film rests on that moment. It's make or break not only for the performance, but for the film. And I was aware not only of what the character is going through but the enormous courage of the actor. You see the form of what's she's doing, and at the same time you're devastated by what's going on.
That's great. You know the way we work is such that it is rock solid and you don't have to do a lot of takes. But Imelda is always there. She's always there emotionally and psychologically in the moment and it's also impeccably worked out. She is also extremely professional. She gets into it and comes out of it. But that said, all the actors in that room were just as focused. I have to say it was an immensely difficult film to make. Because its predecessor, All or Nothing, was a commercial failure, our backers were not very enthusiastic about doing anything. So money was very tight for a period film. We did crazy things like shooting in super-16 and blowing it up to 35mm. We've cut digitally since Topsy-Turvy, but here we went to 35mm from a digital intermediate - all these things to save money. If it works, and it obviously does, it's the actors and the production designer, Eve Stewart, who did an amazing job. We shot a great deal of it in one location - an old hospital. We built all the bed-sits there.
When I saw the film the first time, I didn't know what it was gong to be about. I must have read somewhere that it was about abortion, but I had repressed it. But when she walked into that flat where she does the first abortion, I had this sense of dread, and for the rest of the film, my stomach was in knots. Did you want to instill that kind of feeling in the audience?
I'll say the obvious - that anything you experience is my intention. But it's the least elliptical film I've made - the least concerned with coming at you from an unpredictable angle. It would be a bonus if everybody who came to see it didn't know what it's about. That said, that moment when she does that first girl, you have to be shaken from the reasonably comfortable place you've been. And it's completely straightforward. There are no subtle, unpredictable juxtapositions. It is what it is. It's very usual for me to start a film in such a direct manner. Quite often, I start with one thing and it turns out to be something else. But the minute she comes around the corner in the first shot, you know it's going to be about her. And it's the first film I've done that has an eponymous title. It's her case, and you go on a journey to experience the inevitable, ineluctable pain of it.
I've seen it twice, and the emotional experience was the same the second time. It wasn't lessened by knowing what was going to happen. But I did become aware of certain subtle expressive choices, like the sequence of the daughter and the very shy neighbor sitting side by side on the couch when he proposes to her. The scene is covered in one small tracking shot. And I wondered how you make that choice. I mean it could have been static or it could have been a series of reverse angles?
It's difficult to articulate. Somehow it feels right to have that move. It is very subliminal and it would be disastrous if the audience ever thought this way - but it's as if the camera is eavesdropping. Obviously, at every moment in every film the camera is eavesdropping because that's what a camera does. But what happens in that scene is a huge shift. It starts with them just sitting there and then by the end of it, they're going to get hitched. That's a massive, massive journey. But there is no tension separating them. It's a coming together. And so it made sense to go with that one tracking movement. The truth of the matter is that when you try to put it into words and rationalize it, as I sometimes do when I'm teaching, you simplify it so much it loses its meaning.
So do you make these choices intuitively?
Yes. But Dick Pope [Leigh's longtime cinematographer] and I discuss everything. In my early films, I was very reluctant to move the camera. But gradually, I got the hang of the rich texture of camera movement. In the opening shot of Naked, I said to Dick, 'you should put the camera on your shoulder and run straight toward them.' And he said you're crazy. But it worked. The whole thing is to be restrained within complete freedom of what the camera can do. I think [Vera Drake] is shot in just the right way and it's edited by an extremely interesting editor, Jim Clark, who cut a lot of Schlesinger's films in the Seventies.
Are you planning a new film?
The next thing I'm going to do is a play, which I haven't done for a long time. It will be at the National Theater in September 2005.
© 2004 by Amy Taubin
