The Mike Leigh movie nobody wanted to show: “They repeated that they didn’t want it”
In terms of directors who have made the leap from theatre to film, Mike Leigh is something of a trendsetter. Following multiple successful plays in the 1960s, he transitioned into cinema with his 1971 debut, Bleak Moments. This story of a woman caring for her sister while trying to make ends meet embodied many of the tropes Leigh would rely on across his entire career—social realism, the plight of the working classes, silent struggles, and so on.
While he wouldn’t fully leave the theatre behind—he devised and directed Abigail’s Party for the BBC in 1977—movies would become his home base. He’s been nominated for ‘Best Director’ twice at the Academy Awards, once for Secrets & Lies and once for Vera Drake. He’s won both the Palme d’Or and the Golden Lion, the top prizes of the Cannes and Venice film festivals, respectively, but things haven’t always run smoothly for the outspoken artist.
When making his most recent film, 2024’s Hard Truths, Leigh attempted to have the film accepted by one of the festivals that had been so kind to him in the past. “We finished the film November before last,” he told The Film Stage. “Immediately, the French distributors said, ‘Oh, this is a shoo-in for Cannes.’ So they made us finish the subtitles—I always work with this guy in Paris—by Christmas before last. Because they wanted to show it to Cannes before Christmas. They did; Cannes turned it down. Then they showed it to Cannes again, and they repeated that they didn’t want it. And the French distributors were outraged and shocked.”
Cannes is the premiere film festival in the world: a celebration of cinema as art, the annual gathering of the great and the good, and is viewed by many as the better alternative to the Oscars. There are crossovers sometimes—Anora won the Palme d’Or ahead of its big ‘Best Picture’ win—but top billing is usually preserved for international pictures and smaller projects that wouldn’t usually get a look-in by more mainstream outlets. Leigh’s oeuvre is the sort of thing people at Cannes usually go gaga for, but for some reason, they didn’t want Hard Truths.
“Then everybody said, ‘No, it’s okay, though. It’ll be in Venice.’” Leigh continued. “So they showed it to Venice, and Venice turned it down. And then, remarkably, Telluride turned it down. So by the end of half a year, we then started to think, ‘Maybe we made a shit film.’”
Hard Truths stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy, a woman living with depression in modern London. Her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), is the complete opposite—cheerful, optimistic, and full of lust for life. Despite their contrasting personalities, the sisters remain close, with the latter attempting to help the former navigate a world she is gradually slipping out of.
Cannes, Venice, and Telluride might have turned the film down, but it did eventually find a home. It played well at the Toronto International Film Festival, as well as in New York and San Sebastián. Despite being incredibly British, it was also released in the United States. Most people who saw Hard Truths admitted that it was great, so the question of why some of the biggest festivals in the world left it out in the cold remains a mystery.
