Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Hard Truths’: Read The Screenplay That Returns Seven-Time Oscar Nominee Mike Leigh To Modern London
Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scrips behind the buzziest awards-season movies continues with Hard Truths, the newest film from seven-time Oscar-nominated writer-director Mike Leigh that reunited him with his Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste.
After its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Bleecker Street gave Hard Truths a New York qualifying run in early December and sends it out wide in theaters Friday. The release comes after the pic scored nominations from the Gotham Awards and the Independent Spirit Awards, and Jean-Baptiste winning Best Actress prizes from the Los Angeles and New York film critics and landing a Critics Choice Awards nom.
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After a span of period films including Peterloo (2018) and the JMW Turner biopic Mr. Turner (2014), Leigh returns to contemporary London with the dark but often comical Hard Truths. It centers on Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy, a woman wracked by fear, tormented by afflictions and prone to tirades against her husband, son and anyone who looks her way, and her younger sister (Michele Austin, from Leigh’s Another Year), a single mother with a life as different from Pansy’s as their temperaments. As Pansy increasingly nears a her snapping point, the film explores how even through lifetimes of hurt and hardship, families still find ways to love one another.
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Jean-Baptiste, who was nominated for a Supporting Actress Oscar for 1996’s Secrets & Lies, said her latest reunion with Leigh (the longtime collaboration included her starring in his play A Great Big Shame and writing the score for his 1997 pic Career Girls) involved starting with only an idea.
“The initial conversation is usually ‘Should we work together again? I don’t know what it’s going to be about. I don’t know what you’ll be playing in it, but we’ll have a great time,’” Jean-Baptiste said at the recent Contenders Film: Los Angeles of her first chat with Leigh.
What formed among Leigh, Jean-Baptiste and Austin was teaming to create stories pulled from real-life interactions with people in their lives, creating the world of the film along the way; Jean Baptiste says Pansy was an amalgam of at least five people, “all of whom “had the “all of whom had the milk of human kindness removed from them.” The approach was so immersive that filming could begin without a final script.
“It’s almost like programming a robot to behave in a particular way,” Jean-Baptiste said. “And depending on what you put in or take out, you know there’s a 99.9% chance that they’re going to act in that way. But that’s mainly Mike’s job: to manage the performances, in a way. But all that’s going on in Pansy’s head when she’s doing things are her thoughts. I think the clever stuff comes with Mike having worked with all the other characters, knowing what’s going to set her off or what’s not. But I mean just life sets Pansy off.”
Check out the script, which won the Best Screenplay prize from the National Board of Review, below.
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