A conversation with Mike Leigh, director of "Naked,"
"Life is Sweet" and the new film, "Secrets and Lies."

By LAURA MILLER IKE LEIGH used to be one of a kind, famous for creating movies through an unusual process that involves extensive rehearsals and improvisations with his actors, a process that begins weeks before anyone picks up a camera. Through eight full-length television films (produced in his native Britain, where major directoral talents often work on the small screen), and a handful of internationally acclaimed features, including "Naked," "Life is Sweet" and his latest, "Secrets and Lies," he has depicted the often (superficially) uneventful lives of ordinary people. The results are always far from ordinary. Leigh's movies have a startling richness, the product of a ruthless eye working in concert with an expansive heart, an all-too-rare combination of biting satire and deep humanism. His forlorn, stubborn, deluded and occasionally radiant characters, each miraculously acted, could suspend the disbelief of the flintiest critic; these people are real, heartbreakingly so. Leigh's artistic success has spawned some imitators, and he's not the only director trying to capture the texture of everyday life. Some well-intentioned filmmakers are even experimenting with his rehearsal techniques (c.f. Jim McKay's "Girls Town"). Apparently, it takes more than extended improvisations to conjure such a degree of verisimilitude, so much sure-footed charm. It turns out that Mike Leigh is still one of a kind. "Secrets and Lies," the story of a bemused young black woman who, seeking her birth mother, finds herself involved with a muddled, unhappy white family, manages to be bleak, hilarious, horrifying, surpassingly sweet, strangely inspiring, and quite probably the best movie of the year. At Cannes, you won Best Director laurels for "Naked" in 1992, and now you've won the Palm D'Or for "Secrets and Lies." Does this increase in recognition surprise you? On the one hand I've been making films -- proper professional films that people have seen in quite reasonable numbers -- for a very long time, so it seems quite natural that there is a possibility that that would get me somewhere. It confirms an old horticultural principle that if you water it long enough it might grow. On the other hand, everything is a surprise, I am the sort of person who inevitably assumes that it's other kinds of films or filmmakers or people who will get the prizes. A "not just ordinary people like us" type of thing. So it is and it isn't a surprise but it's very nice, that's for sure. The main reason it's good news, apart from the fact that it gives my mother something to be pleased about at the age of 80, is that it's a film about ordinary people and deals with real things in an unsentimental, non- sensationalized way -- which is code for an un-Hollywood way. And for it to be honored by a group of one's peers is very good news for international cinema generally. And then of course Brenda Blethyn got the best actress award, a nice follow up to David Thewlis winning it for "Naked." These are the good things, and you feel that's just desserts, because I think we do manage to achieve a certain kind of acting in these films, and it's nice for people not to take that for granted. It seems to me that more and more highly-touted young directors are working in a more cinematic, visceral, myth-focused, violent, overtly stylish manner, rather than what you call a "humanist" vein, especially in American independent cinema. How do you feel about that? The only way to approach thinking about this is to look at where various kinds of cinema come from, what are the motivating forces and the prevailing conditions. The fact is that there is a great tradition, which exists in Europe and plenty of other places, not least Japan, of making films about real life, uncluttered and unfettered and uninterfered with by the kind of disease that you can -- broadly speaking -- diagnose as Hollywood. Next: What Leigh's characters have for breakfast.