Mike Leigh

“Life is a sweet, magical thing, and I'm not a cynical man. But it's also a weird, corrupt and sordid place, and I'm not a naive man.”

“My whole career has been a process of trying to get the audience to care about characters and events that they would normally look down on.”

“A film is a collaborative art form. It's a team sport.”

“There's nothing more interesting than the landscape of the human face.”

“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

“Secrets and lies... we're all guilty, we've all got 'em. The question is, how do you deal with them?”

“I don't have a message. My films are about life, and they're about people. What I'm concerned with is the truth of the human condition.”

“I am interested in the non-dramatic moments in life. The moments that people don't write about.”

“Humour is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.”

“I don't start with a story. I start with a number of characters and a premise.”

“The process of rehearsal is the process of building the character, of discovering the character.”

“All my films are about the here and now, and they are all about real people.”