| 
Compiled by: Jack Foley
Q. Can you tell us about the inspiration for Vera Drake.
Clearly it's a fascinating topic, and one that's not too well
appreciated by today's generations, but I can remember, for one,
just how appalling it was, at the time, that anyone should have
an abortion.
Mike Leigh: Well I think that's a very narrow view of
the issue, frankly. I think, universally, it's as much an issue
for today as at any other time. I mean, obviously what you're
saying is that in some places, including here, and although it's
a British film and that's our setting, plainly, so far as we're
concerned, we're dealing with a universal issue, that even though
it's trrue that someone that needs it can get an abortion, that
doesn't diminish the pain of the whole thing.
And there is a moral dilemma involved and what I've tried to do
with the film is to confront the audience in a subtle and gentle
way with the moral dilemma, and rather than to sort of bludgeon
anyone. In many countries, it's not easy and it is still illegal
and since, obviously, this film, as much as any that I've been
involved with, is a film for the international film audience,
it's very important.
As to your question, as to where it comes from, it is an ongoing
major issue. Obviously, I've set it in 1950, partly because obviously
it is set before the law changed in 1967, here, but also it feels
like a right period to set it, because there's a kind of wholesome
innocence in that immediate post-war period, which feels right
for what the film is about, and what happens in the film.
And really, it felt like a very good way to create a metaphor
through which to look at the moral dilemma, really. And also,
you've seen me consider matters to do with being parents, not
being parents, having children, having parents, families and indeed
unwanted pregnancies and abortions quite a number of times previously,
so the idea for the film has been with me for a very long time.
Q. There's a dedication in the production notes to your
parents, who were a doctor and a midwife, which suggests that
perhaps it's no accident that this is a subject you were familiar
with?
Mike Leigh: Well, that's true, but I mean the honest
truth is I put that at the end of the film, I would have loved
to have talked to my dad, who was a GP in a very working class
practice in Salford, for quite a lot of my childhood we lived
over the shop. I would have loved, last year, while we were doing
the picture, to have talked to him about it, about related matters
because there's no doubt he would have had to certainly deal with
pregnancies and, certainly, the aftermath of abortions that had
gone wrong. I would doubt that he would have performed abortions
himself - I actually don't know that - but I would have seriously
doubted that. Although I talked to him about other things, I never
was able to talk to him about that. He died nearly 20 years ago
and so I felt the need to put that.
And although my mother was a midwife, again I didn't really talk
to her about these things and so it doesn't come from any direct
experience of that and he certainly didn't come home at tea-time
and talk about it. Although he did talk about things that had
happened, I mean I remember, very distinctly, a story about a
chicken bone stuck up somebody's arse - a wishbone coming out
this way and getting stuck on the inside of somebody's bum! But
that's the kind of stuff... Abortions not; not in front of us.
Q. It's full of things that people can remember from
the 50s, such as a snatch of workers' playtime, the Dairy Box
chocolates, the ritual sharing of the beer. It looks as though
you spent, as usual, an enormous amount of time on researching?
Mike Leigh: Yeah, I mean the truth is, as I say, you
can research anything, and we did and, in fact, we give the researcher
a very, very prominent credit.
Q. Was the revelation of Vera's crime in any sense a
surprise in the way it was revealed to the other actors?
A. It's a standard procedure with making these films
that nobody knows anything, at any stage, other than what his
or her character would know. So when we reached the stage of rehearsals,
not to be confused with the filming some months later, where the
day when the cops came round to arrest her at the party, that
actually all happened and the other actors didn't know she was
an abortionist, even though we had done a lot of work with other
actresses for those abortions, and indeed, you didn't know the
cops were above you - you didn't even know that there were actors
playing police, let alone that they'd done all their research,
and they'd done their work with the hospital characters... And
so, it was a quite nailbiting and fantastic seven or eight hour
improvisation.
And she also didn't know that we'd rigged up a whole police station
down at the other end of this dis-used hospital where we were
rehearsing. So everybody... there were shocks all round, and that's
yielding up the raw material, with a considerable amount of careful
planning and structure to get it all in the right place to see
what happens, out of which a couple of months later we were able
to restructure the actual action in the actual locations, where
the actors - and not least Imelda - could draw on the emotional
recall of that event - and that's as much as we can say about
how we do these things.
|
 |
Q. How much did you wish
Vera's secret could also be kept from the audience in the way
that it's kept from her family?
Imelda: Well that's up to the press...
Mike Leigh: It's a nightmare. The truth is I've had the
privilege of showing it to people when it first saw the light
of day who absolutely did not know what it was, and occasionally,
I mean in the States, there was a journalist who had been away
and came back and hadn't had time to read the notes or anything,
and it's a great privilege to see this film not knowing anything
about it. But as you say, how can you possibly deal with that?
It's a shame, but I guess that's true of a lot of movies.
Q. Did you only ever envisage Phil Davis to play Stan?
Mike Leigh: Well the truth is I only really ever envisage
whoever you see doing whatever it is, for the most part, because
you get someone that feels right and I collaborate with them and
you then make the character. So, yeah, basically.
Q. Equally so, Adrian Scarborough, it's incredible how
much he actually looks like Stan, his brother?
Mike Leigh: Yes, I have to say it's not a complete fortuituous
coincidence. But once having had that idea, which was actually
crystalised by Nina Gold, who is a very brilliant casting director
that I work with, it seemed like a good wheeze. I've done it lots
of times. I mean the two fat kids in All or Nothing, and the two
brothers in Mean Time, and the twins, played by Jane Horrocks
and Claire Skinner in Life is Sweet, who aren't twins at all,
of course, I do think it's a good wheeze to be able to do that.
Once we'd got Adrian and Phil to shave the back of their heads
and to work on how they both walked the same way and that kind
of thing, and do a lot of real fraternal, emotional stuff, they
looked like each other.
Q. Was there any borrowing of characteristics from people
you grew up or lived with when it came to making the characters?
Mike Leigh: That's just part of all sorts of.. yes.
Q. Were there elements in different characters that had,
perhaps, an echo of people from your own recollection of the period?
Mike Leigh: Yes, absolutely.
Imelda: No because you're creating this character
that has nothing to do with you, or your family, or anything like
that, so it creates a distance. I can't look at it and say, oh
that was my auntie or anything like that. The look and those women
in those aprons and hairnets....
Mike Leigh: There is a moment when Vera is with
Lily and then Ethel comes in and Lily turns round... that moment,
to me, is the most evocative of the whole trunch of semi-identifiable
memories of adults who.... I came from a family where nearly everyone
wore specs and everyone smoked, and that sort of look. She reminds
me, somehow in a half-conscious, subliminal way, of all kinds
of grown-up moments when I was five, six or seven. So that does
happen.
Q. All the girls that Vera helps are helpless, lost souls,
but even more so with the girl from the West Indies - because
I'm sure at that time, this was fairly new, that people were coming
into Britain. They're in a strange country, their language is
very different, so were you making all those subtle points very
quickly in that one small scene?
Mike Leigh: Yes and of course there would only have been
two or three boat-loads of people at that time and there was no
West Indian support community to speak of for a girl like that.
So yeah, she's a very long way from home as they say. But they're
not all lost souls, I mean there's a couple of rather cynical
girls.
Q. Throught the film, there's no class barrier to this
situation, when you have the Nicky Henson character charging his
150 guineas... And the hypocrisy, that it would be alright if
you could prove there was some kind of mental illness going on.
Mike Leigh: That was enshrined in the law.
Q. Why do you think it's less of a political here than
in America?
Mike Leigh: I don't know the answer to that except for
the fact that, in a way this kind of lunactic, medieval, religious
fundamentalism that has gripped American right-wing politics plainly
has a great deal to do with it.
|
