Leigh gets happy

In his latest film, the eccentric British director shows how much he prizes a great sense of humor

The writer-director Mike Leigh describes his latest film, "Happy-Go-Lucky," as "anti-miserabilist." It's a character study of Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a 30-year-old London elementary school teacher who's so vibrantly cheerful she could be Annie Hall on nitrous oxide.

Although "miserabilist" may be too strong a word for Leigh's previous films, which include "Bleak Moments," "Secrets & Lies," "Topsy-Turvy," and "Vera Drake," his distinctive brand of British social realism thrives on hard truths and powerful emotions.

Leigh, 65, has the compact build and rumpled appearance of a bearded middleweight fighter. He also has a boxer's pugnacious intensity, gentled by a sly wit and stem-winding intelligence. He has the patriarchal presence of someone used to being in charge of a movie set.

Last week the five-time Oscar nominee spoke with a group of Globe writers and editors about his work. Here are excerpts from the discussion.

Q. Poppy is so phenomenally upbeat.

A. The act of teaching kids, cherishing children, nourishing the future, is by definition an act of optimism. So we've tried to create a character who's positive, proactive, intelligent, responsible, grown-up, and is one of those persons who's rolling up her sleeves and getting down to it whilst the rest of us - legitimately - wring our hands in despondency at the mess we're making of the world in the 21st century.

She's all those things, but she's also got a great sense of humor and a great vitality and she bursts with life and has a healthy streak of anarchy.

Q. A major plotline is Poppy taking driving lessons from an instructor who's extremely different from her.

A. This guy is clinically devoid of a sense of humor. Completely. Like all of us with a highly developed sense of humor confronted by somebody with no sense of humor, it brings out the worst in her! What he sees is an irresponsible, dizzy, airheaded woman. Of course she's none of those things, for all that she's got a zany side to her.

I set them on a disaster course that the film investigates, let's say.

Q. Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan, who plays the driver instructor, had roles in your previous film, "Vera Drake," that were vastly different. Were you conscious of that casting in "Happy-Go-Lucky"?

A. As you know, I make films in an idiosyncratic and eccentric way, with no script. I don't cast actors in roles in the conventional sense. What I do is to collaborate with each actor to create the character. I work separately with each actor to do that. The kind of actors that I work with - indeed, the only kind of actors that I can work with, who can do the kind of thing I do - are what, strictly speaking, I would call character actors. By which, of course, I don't mean what they mean in Hollywood, which is old actors playing small parts. I mean people who are as versatile as you're talking about. So you see Sally being this very quiet, demure, frightened upper-middle-class girl who's raped and has a private abortion in "Vera Drake." Eddie Marsan you see playing this quiet, gentle, sweet guy next door who marries the daughter in "Vera Drake." Here he's playing a kind of fascist monster, a sad, lonely guy riddled with conspiracy theories and suffering from acute paranoia.

The truth is that these guys could do - and have done and will continue to do - a great range of characters. That's the joy for me. In fact, there are lots of actors you keep seeing popping up in my movies again and again being totally different.

Q. Can you talk more about this gestation process. Do you try to shoot in sequence, for example?

A. We try to shoot as much as possible of the beginning, middle, and end. But I often don't know what the end is going to be. I have a sense of it, but not in any detail. So the job in the six months [of rehearsal] is to establish the premise of the film, to bring the world of the film into existence with all its dynamic components and elements, out of which I will then distill and structure the film and fix it in very tight detail, sequence by sequence, scene by scene, and then shoot it.

The other thing is, during the development of the material, there's a moment on every film where, of necessity, it's important I sit down with the cinematographer and the designers and say - in the case of "Happy-Go-Lucky" - here's a film driven by this character, Poppy. This film needs to burst with color, to explode with energy. It's the palette of the film.

Q. Do you think the majority of actors can be successful with your method?

A. No, the majority can't be.

Q. Under your scheme, it would seem to require extraordinary intelligence.

A. You're absolutely right. The first thing needed is intelligence, and not all actors are intelligent. That's to start with. Sense of humor. Not all actors have a sense of humor. Sense of irony. Not all actors have got a sense of irony, though British actors are better qualified than most in that department. A sense of style and taste, all those things. But above all it's actors who are character actors, who are not only able but turned on by the prospect of doing real people, out there in the street. The only actors that work with me are those who have some kind of sense of commitment to work that reflects the world in a serious way.

Q. Poppy is the latest in a line of strong, life-affirming female characters in your films. Imelda Staunton's Vera Drake is another.

A. Yeah, they're life-affirming characters, and they're women because I deliberately go out of my way to write good parts for women.

Q. Why is that?

A. Because there's a dearth of them. And, on the whole, female characters in movies tend to be a function of men. The bottom line is I don't ultimately think in terms of strong women or weak men. It depends on the characters, really.

Q. In going from a film called "Bleak Moments" to a film called "Happy-Go-Lucky" should we be gleaning something about your state of mind changing over the years?

A. Well, nice try! [general sustained laugher]

"Bleak Moments" was made in 1971, when I was 28, and "Happy-Go-Lucky" was made in 2007, when I was 64. And I hope I've been through a few experiences in the meantime.

I can't vouch for the next film necessarily being a barrel of laughs. I don't know. Anything's possible. I think the real truth is every time I make a film I actively seek to do something different. [The director] Jean Renoir said every filmmaker, however hard he or she tries, actually always makes the same film. I think that is fundamentally true. I'm sure there's an imprimatur to these films that's unmistakable. But every time I invite you around for supper I don't want to serve up the same dish.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.