When I was four, my darling older brother was left to mind me one evening as my parents threw a dinner party. He, in his infinite 11 year old wisdom, decided to show me his new favorite film; Stephen King’s It. To this day, the mere mention of clowns rattles me.

On route to interview Mike Leigh, I started to feel the familiar nausea and fidgety nerves usually reserved for when I drive by a circus: I was scared. At the Cannes Film Festival in May, Leigh publically eviscerated Sunday Times arts editor Richard Brooks at a press conference for his new film, Another Year. As Brooks, who admitted that he and Leigh have “had our differences in the past”, expressed his admiration for the film, Leigh immediately cut him off, snarling ““I refuse to answer a question from you. On to the next question. I don’t want to answer any questions from you, and you know why.”
Luckily, the warmth and patience possessed by the characters of Another Year seems to have rubbed off on the director, who was happy to talk about his critically acclaimed new film. Addressing the love, loneliness and desperation of a group of middle-aged characters, Another Year is a complex and often heartbreaking reflection on aging, marking a clear departure from the celebration of youthful exuberance seen in Leigh’s last film, Happy-Go-Lucky.
“This is a film that I decided to start from where we are, people who were born in the 1940s,” he says. “But it wasn’t necessarily easier to write than my films about younger generations such as Happy-Go-Lucky. Actually, it was a hard film to make, because it’s about so many things and there are a lot of elements to juggle.”
And due to Leigh’s trademark approach to directing, which involves months of improvisation workshops and rehearsals, the age of the characters in Another Year served to create a highly intense schedule for Leigh and the actors. “If a character is 30, it takes half the length of time to work out the character than if they are 60, like here. But with this film we actually had less time to rehearse than Happy-Go-Lucky because the budget was smaller. We only had five months, so it was a very demanding process for the cast. These actors are very intelligent, very creative, serious people who are utterly committed to putting real life on the screen and playing characters that exist out there on the street, and have a great sophistication.
“And I say this,” he adds, “knowing, as you know, that there are a lot of thick actors who would be no more able to do this than they would be able to walk to the moon.”
Leigh’s respected, not-thick cast includes many actors he has worked with before, including Lesley Manville, Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen and Vera Drake star Imelda Staunton, who makes a brief but heartbreaking cameo at the beginning of the film. But the director stresses that working with familiar faces isn’t necessarily beneficial to the process.
“It makes no difference whether I’m working with a known cast,” he says. “I had never worked with David Bradley who plays Ronnie before, and he is fantastic. But with actors who have been part of my films before and have played different characters alongside each other, it simply forces us to dig deeper and deeper. Lesley Manville, for example, has worked with me nine times, and has always played a completely different character, so it’s not that you’re working with inherent character dynamics or relationships because the films, and thus the actors, are always completely different. So what they’re doing is enormously creative, imaginative and resourceful.”
Eager to keep things varied, Leigh’s future plans include a revival of his 1979 play Ecstasy and a period biopic about English artist JMW Turner. However, his current schedule may be freer than usual, as this month Leigh dramatically withdraw from a scheduled teaching trip to the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School in Jerusalem, due to recent political developments in Israel. Though his visit had been planned long ago, the attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla by Israeli commandoes in May of this year gave Leigh serious misgivings about lending his support to the programme. Writing to the film school’s director Renan Schorr, Leigh admitted that “as I watched the world very properly condemn this atrocity, I almost cancelled. I now wish I had, and blame my cowardice for not having done so.” What proved to be the final straw for Leigh was the newly reinstated Loyalty Oath, which demands that Israeli citizens declare their loyalty to a discriminatory ideology, specifically designed to exclude Palestinians.
“I decided it was inappropriate to lend my support, because I think it’s important that everyone makes it very clear that the Israeli government has to change its tune,” he explained. “It was a difficult decision, but one that needed to be made. Predictably, I’ve had extreme reactions from both sides and have been lauded and applauded, but at the end of the day it’s not about me. It’s about the situation, and we have to pay attention to what it’s about.”

Another Year goes on release on November 5