It’s very strange meeting an actor so soon after having watched them on screen. Having seen Another Year the day before, I had Lesley Manville’s character, Mary, fresh in my mind. Mary is lonely and lost. Lesley Manville is assured and graceful.
What’s striking isn’t that they are so different, but that they both seem equally real – such full characters. Maybe it is because I’ve spent more time with her in character than in person, but having chatted to Manville for half an hour in central London, I’m left feeling like I’ve met two real people with the same face in the space of twenty-four hours.
It’s testimony to her accessibility – as actress and interviewee – that she can so swiftly draw you in and communicate with such transparency. It is also a product of some very hard work. Mary appears fully fleshed-out to me because, for Manville, she has been. Having started with no script, no basis, “Nothing”, Mary has been built from scratch by Manville and director Mike Leigh. “We just talk and discuss, and I might talk about some people in my life and a character starts to emerge. And then we fill in their life, from when they were born and their family.”
Having worked on multiple films with the iconic director, including Secrets and Lies, Topsy Turvy, All or Nothing and Vera Drake, Lesley Manville is Mike Leigh’s longest-standing collaborator. I say collaborator rather than actor, because of the hand that she (like all cast members) has had in the authorship of her character. She appears regularly at the National Theatre and recently starred at the Old Vic Theatre in an adaptation of Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother. She clearly loves the work and talking about it, and perhaps now more than ever before, her contribution to a Mike Leigh film is attracting a publicity all of its own. Nominations – possibly more – await, and about time too.
She tells me about the work that goes into the creation of Mary, not just in terms of technique, but also in terms of time. “It can be exhausting. When we’re filming, we’re constructing the dialogue and the scenes as we go along, so we might shoot all day and then the crew will go home and we’ll stay there and absolutely pin down the dialogue for the next day. So it can be very long days, and we’re sometimes also doing that at the weekends. So there have been times I’ve been on a Mike Leigh film and I’ve worked something like twenty-two, twenty-three consecutive days – no breaks at all. And they’re long days – you’re up at 4.30-5.00 to get to the location for 6.00, to be in the make-up chair at 6.00, to be on set at 7.30, and then you shoot for twelve hours and then you maybe stay till 9.00 or 10.00 at night and construct stuff for the next day.”
The old adage about perspiration being the stock of genius is evident here. My sense of the fullness of Mary isn’t merely the product of a few moments of performative inspiration. Her building has been systematic, thorough and not to mention, brave. “In the beginning, you start and you think, ‘Christ, how is this ever going to become a film?'” she admits, “but it does after a very long time – eighteen weeks is a very long time.”
No “Making-Of” documentary or DVD extra can sufficiently encapsulate the sheer time and deliberation that goes into these films. And whilst many regard film acting as an exercise in glamour, the Mike Leigh process is closer to the rigours of the Brechtian stage. It requires great discipline, and as his stalwart performer, Manville exudes this professionalism alongside an earthy appreciation of the job. “Very, very long days”, she concludes, “but its above average exciting work. It’s unusual and certainly for an actor its very creative, because a lot is being asked of you, you really have to get your creative juices flowing. So in that way it’s very exciting.”
But does the responsibility of creating a character – and in Another Year Manville should be credited with having created a beautifully human one in Mary – add a daunting element? No she says. Instead it gives you job security – “You know that if you do the work and if you put in the time and you create the character and go from A to Z, then you’ll end up with a character and you do. Then you can put that character in any situation and you know how they’re going to behave. I know it sounds a bit precious, but I was just being Mary. Because you’ve created this character so fully, when you are in character, you kind of trust that what you do is organic and trustworthy.”
Her tea now arrives and as she pauses to pour it, I think about her fear that she might sound “a bit precious”. It’s a self-conscious defence of her art and if one chooses to take the view that all this improv stuff is a bit arty-farty, then I suppose it would sound precious. But she isn’t.
If people reveal things about themselves through their conjuntive idioms (i.e. how the young say ‘like’ a lot, or the Aussies say ‘look’) as I think they can, then Manville’s conjunctions speak to her accessibility. “You know” and “really” are the most common polyfillers in her speech, and actually it’s because I do know what she means, such is her sensible, calm, down to earth demeanor; and what she talks about is real, really.
It’s much the same with the film itself. For all its sophistication and artistic merit, it surest recommendation is its universality, as Manville points out. “My son [in his early-twenties] saw it for the second time last night and he absolutely loves it, and he probably wouldn’t be a natural candidate for it, I was really surprised by how much he liked it. Because its not just dealing with getting older, its dealing with universal stuff that’s across the age range: love; loneliness and lack of love is across the board isn’t it?”
“I think it’s quite bold to make a film that almost doesn’t really have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Because life is never tied up neatly and sorted out, and I like the way the film drifts away at the end. You’re left thinking what’s going to happen to these people? Of course, that is what happens, because that’s life. Nobody says, ‘Right, that’s where my story stops now’. It doesn’t, it just goes on. Its bold because it doesn’t have a great narrative and I think that that takes a lot to say ‘Right I’m going to make a film about the human condition and about the struggle in this time that we’re all living in, to find something to get us through it: a soul mate, love, passion, friendship – all of that.'”
“And [Mike] puts a happy couple at the centre of it – and of course happy couples don’t make good drama – but then he puts the drama in the less happy people that are coming in and out of their lives. Its good filmmaking because its not divisive, its just ‘Here it is, here’s these people’s lives’.”
The passage of these lives and the onset of age is probably Another Year’s most prominent universal preoccupation. “The film is so delicate, nuanced and insightful to people who are, not old, but looking at the rest of their lives and wondering where its going to take them and is it going to be like how her past has been.”
But isn’t there is also evidence to suggest that some things get better with age? Like Mike Leigh, for example. “The pair of us have been working together for 30 years or so, but I think he’s absolutely at the peak of his creativity at the moment Mike’s got better as he’s got older, and maturity like that can be celebrated”.
And Lesley Manville herself would seem to provide good evidence in the case of the defence of age. “I certainly feel that”, she agrees, “I feel utterly fantastic, I feel better know than I did, probably thirty years ago, I feel very at home with myself. I couldn’t have played this part five or ten years ago – you just get better in ways that you cant always define, because its about just having absorbed more of life and the world around you and having experienced more yourself, and it makes you able to tap into it.”
In which case we can only encourage time’s winged chariot to get a move on, as Leigh and Manville’s work shows no sign of abating, and every sign of approaching greatness. Bring on another year.