The John Cassavetes movie that greatly inspired Mike Leigh: “Made me start thinking”
While we associate westerns with America, martial arts movies with China, and erotic arthouse movies with France, Britain is perhaps most renowned for its gritty kitchen sink and social realist dramas. Of course, these kinds of films aren’t exclusive to the country, but since the 1950s, social realism has become a significant export, championed by British filmmakers including Tony Richardson, Ken Loach, Alan Clarke, Andrea Arnold, and Mike Leigh.
The latter has been working as a director since the 1970s and is still actively making acclaimed movies, with his most recent being Hard Truths, starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste. He rose to prominence making television plays, including the highly praised Abigail’s Party and Grown-Ups. Establishing himself as a strong writer and director, Leigh’s early work expressed his interest in social class, gender, and everyday life from the get-go.
He made his first feature film, Bleak Moments, in 1971, although he then focused on television plays for another decade before making more films, such as Meantime, High Hopes and Life Is Sweet. His family-centric comedy-dramas were received well, but in 1993 he focused on the nihilistic Johnny in Naked, moving away from the typical family set-up that defined much of his previous output.
Leigh’s work between social realist family dramas, gritty tales of characters searching for connection, and period dramas has made him one of the most acclaimed British filmmakers of all time. One of his special secrets to producing incredible movies, all equipped with fantastic performances, is improvisation. He likes his actors to really workshop their characters and come to know them like they truly are real people while also letting his ideas mould and change as the production goes along.
Aided by his experience in theatre, Leigh’s movies are all incredible character studies – he doesn’t rely on dramatic action sequences or flashy montages. Instead, his movies champion dialogue and complex studies of individuals and how they interact with one another. Not only has Leigh been greatly influenced by theatre when it comes to improvisation, but he has also taken inspiration from a great American master of independent cinema – John Cassavetes.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a filmmaker or actor who doesn’t cite a Cassavetes project as one of their biggest inspirations, oftentimes that film being A Woman Under the Influence. Yet it was Cassavetes’ first feature, Shadows, which impacted Leigh significantly due to its use of improvisational techniques and realistic focus.
The movie centres on the relationship between three siblings, one of which is a white-passing woman, Leila, whose dalliance with a white man comes to an end when he realises she is Black. The various issues that define each sibling’s life and how this affects each other play out alongside handheld camerawork and free jazz.
Leigh revealed his admiration for the movie during his time in the Criterion closet, stating, “It was a great influence, in the sense that it made me start thinking about improvisation and stuff, although when you look at it now, it’s not his greatest film at all. But it’s interesting.”
Certainly, Shadows is not Cassavetes’ finest work because, at the time, he had yet to fully find his feet in the industry. Still, for an independent movie made in 1959, it had a huge impact on cinema, suggesting that you could make compelling films on a shoestring budget without the showiness of a Hollywood studio behind you.
