Words by Ann Lee

When it comes to music in Mike Leigh’s films, less is definitely more. The British director is known for his gritty and emotionally rich dramas about everyday life that are firmly rooted in social realism. The score is used economically, no note is superfluous, and it’s only introduced in scenes where it serves its own purpose. It’s not there to artificially manipulate emotions, it comes in naturally. Just as the filmmaker wants the action to unravel at its own pace, his soundtracks also work in the same way. 

“The important thing for me is that music has to be organic,” Leigh says over Zoom. “I'm not really interested in movie music that sounds like bog-standard wall-to-wall film music. I like to work with composers who start from their emotional response to the film. Who know when to underpin or enhance what's going on. Not to illustrate it or pull the audience artificially into feeling or thinking things. And above all, who know when we should have no music.”

Leigh is considered a cornerstone of the British film industry along with the likes of Ken Loach, Alan Clarke and Shane Meadows. Apart from a few period dramas - Topsy-Turvy, Mr Turner and Peterloo - his work has mainly explored working-class struggles. His kitchen sink dramas offer up an uncompromising and searingly honest portrayal of contemporary society.

His ethos when it comes to his films has always been for everything to look and feel as real and authentic as possible. Leigh works intensively with his actors ahead of shooting. During the rehearsal process, which usually takes months, they participate in improvised exercises to develop the characters. Leigh only starts working with a composer when he has a rough cut of the film - he wants the music to be a pure and instinctive reaction to the footage.

“Conventionally, composers will receive a script long before anybody shoots anything and will have all sorts of ideas on the go based on that. With my films, not only is that not possible or feasible, but it also wouldn't be desirable, because there isn't a script. The composer has to wait until there's a rough cut of the film so that he or she can sit down, have a look, have thoughts, have feelings, and start to figure out all the things you would expect like what sort of music, what instruments, what kind of spirit, when we should have music and when not.”

Leigh is speaking ahead of a massive retrospective of his work at the British Film Institute (BFI) from October 18, which includes his shorts, TV films and the 4K remastering of his seminal classic Naked. The director has collaborated with a diverse range of composers throughout his career, several of whom came from a musical background but had no experience of film scoring before they worked with him. Just as he has discovered stars like Gary Oldman, ex-wife Alison Steadman and David Thewlis, Leigh has an eye (and ear) for musical talent too. These include Rachel Portman, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (who also starred in Secrets & Lies), Tony Remy and Carl Davis but his longest-serving collaborations have been with Andrew Dickson and Gary Yershon. 

The director first met Andrew Dickson after watching a performance of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, for which the former actor and theatre composer was providing the music for. “He's a very unique guy and a very unique composer,” says Leigh. “He enjoys a raw way of working, he's not into fancy technology. He really knows how to compose and it's very emotional.”

Dickson worked with Leigh on six films including Meantime, High Hopes, All or Nothing, Naked, Vera Drake and Secrets & Lies, with their collaboration spanning some of the director’s most emotionally devastating work. When they worked together, Leigh would travel to the composer’s home in Bridport, Dorset, and stay for several days each time so they could discuss the score as it evolved.

“I would watch the rough cut and just play tunes,” says Dickson. “Usually, when I sat down at the piano, the first thing that I played ended up as the theme tune. I would write half a dozen tunes. Then Mike would come, we'd go through the tunes, he'd choose one of them and then eventually go off again. Then I would write 10 variations on that tune, he'd come down again and choose one of those variations. Then I'd work on that. It's a bit like the way that he works with actors, it's a case of whittling down, taking things away so that you expose the best one.”

Dickson would then look at which instruments to use. “I'm not keen on the big orchestral wash that covers a lot of films. I like to be able to hear what's going on. Twelve was probably the most number of instruments I used. I quite liked the idea of the instruments somehow representing the characters - it was a cast of instruments!" The pair then worked on the spotting, which involved going through the film and deciding where the music would go. “Usually, our ideas were identical. It was a collaborative process and Mike was always sitting on my shoulder even when he wasn't here to help.”

Leigh’s earliest features - his directorial debut Bleak Moments along with TV dramas Hard Labour and Nuts in May - notably had no scores although the first featured characters, trapped in suburban isolation, playing music. “I mean, it seems a very natural thing to have a score,” explains Leigh. “But there are plenty of movies in the canon that don’t. You know, one experiments in all kinds of ways. Apart from anything else, I very deliberately try to do something quite different from one film to the next.”

Music isn’t used in an obvious way in Leigh’s films. It’s absent from scenes where we’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to expect it. Scenes of high emotion, for instance, give space for the dialogue and the characters to breathe instead of adding in the score. “I suppose the general rule is if it's on-screen if the actors are doing it if the cinematography is doing it, if the production design, the costumes and makeup are doing it, I really don't need to do it,” says Yershon, who has composed the music for all of Leigh’s films since 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky. “I can do something else. What's on the screen will tell the audience 98 per cent of what they need to know and I can layer in my contribution. I don't need to do what the screen is doing.”

“The audience’s experience is to take the film as a whole,” says Leigh as he discusses the dissonance between Meantime’s mood and score. “Then the flavour that the music brings out isn't necessarily achieved by being literally on the same page as the film. That principle, I would say this cautiously, probably applies to all of the scores for my films. There are plenty of films where the music, good as it might be, is perfectly predictable for what you'd expect for the film in question.”

Dickson initially wanted to use a cimbalom, a type of chordophone, which sounds like a cross between a piano and harp, for the score. But they struggled to find a musician who knew who to play the instrument. In the end, the composer decided to make some changes to an old piano that had belonged to his mother. “I put drawing pins in the end of the hammers to create a metallic sound. I didn't want it to sound like a proper piano because that would be far too classical. It had a rough edge to it and the film is about the rough edges of people's lives - the poverty and getting by. It just seemed to suit it. Then sticking the saxophone on top of that seemed to work quite well.”

Naked, Leigh’s most controversial film, starring Thewlis as an aimless drifter on a destructive rampage, won him the best director prize at 1993’s Cannes Film Festival. Dickson plumped for the harp on his score. “I thought it was an inspired choice,” says the filmmaker. “It's an extraordinarily unpredictable idea because lots of instruments come with assumptions.” The pair spent the day with renowned harpist Skaila Kanga, who performed the soundtrack. “She's actually got two houses. One she lives in and the other one's full of harps. We listened to all kinds of harp sounds. It was brilliant.”

Dickson wanted the score to reflect the relentless nature of Thewlis’ character, Johnny, a man who crashes into other people’s lives, leaving a trail of destruction in his path without a backwards glance. Although he was unaware of Philip Glass’ work when he wrote the music, the sparse riffs he created for the soundtrack earned him comparisons to the minimalist composer. “Being quite a naive writer, I use my naivety to break the rules, because I don't actually know what the rules are,” he says. “With that one, I wrote quite a lot of it too fast. Because of the nature of the harp, it couldn't play the chromatic notes that I wanted. But Skaila managed to do it. She just stuck at it. Some we had to do a few takes and merge them together. But she was amazing.”

Another inspired choice Dickson made was on Vera Drake, a period drama set in 1950s London about a kind-hearted cleaning lady, played by Imelda Staunton, who performs illegal abortions to help out desperate women. The composer wanted to use a children’s choir as part of the score. “We did a test,” says Leigh. “We recorded lots of kids together in Bridport but Andrew realised that to get the right effect, you needed adult women doing it, sounding as if they were children, but not actually children. Mature voices are more flexible.”

As Dickson recalls, both him and Leigh came up independently with the idea of using children’s voices. They finally settled on hiring six female high soprano singers with the aim of making their voices sound discordant. “The singers that we got, managed to sing these notes that were all incredibly close together and it sounded horrible.” He staged a trial in the studio before the recording to see if it would work. “Most of it was far too discordant. It was just too horrid. But some of it worked. It worked well when it started in a discordant way but then got more harmonious. Or vice versa.”

After Vera Drake, Leigh started working with Yershon, who lived just a few roads down from him in London, and had previously acted as the musical director for Topsy-Turvy, which was scored by Davies. While he had a lot of experience as a theatre composer, Happy-Go-Lucky marked his debut as a film composer at the age of 54. “Gary is a consummate composer, who is brilliant with actors and with research,” says Leigh. 

“It's not the conventional service provider role,” says Yershon of his work on the director’s films. “It's a dialogue. It's a bit like tennis. There’s a shot. There's another shot. I have never felt that I've been pushed in any particular direction. He can say yes or no, of course he does. But it's always in the context of having thoroughly discussed everything so I'm not left confused or unsure. We don't move on to the next step until we're sure about the steps we've taken. It's quite slow and organic.”

Happy-Go-Lucky is Leigh at his upbeat best. Sally Hawkins gives a phenomenal performance as Poppy, a sunny and optimistic teacher who refuses to let anything or anyone get her down. “It’s a beautiful score and it really captures the spirit of Poppy,” says Leigh. Yershon wanted to encapsulate her energy and sense of buoyancy in the music. “I tried to do it by means of a melody that had a very wide range as she does. You first hear the tune on the euphonium, which was a bit unexpected. She's not going to be obvious. I don’t think the melody is predictable.”

The composer earned an Oscar nomination for his work on Mr Turner. Yershon and Leigh were adamant that they did not want the orchestral score to follow any period drama conventions in the director’s biopic of the famous Romantic painter. “Other people making the same film might have thought to have music of the period of Turner or music that sounded lighter,” says Leigh. “The music, if anything, as is the cinematography, is inspired more by the feeling of his paintings, the spirit of Turner, than it is by any literal sense of pastiche.”

Yershon’s determination to avoid any musical cliches is apparent in his choice of instrumentation. “If you’re looking at a film that is set in the first half of the 19th century, a saxophone present in the score, let alone four, which is what we had, does the job for you. As soon as you have the saxophone sound, you're telling an audience that the music is not in the same world as the pictures that they're seeing. I started giving the saxophones things to do - glissandi, sliding - and the clarinet and the strings, which do that naturally anyway.” He used modern techniques to establish a contemporary harmonic language. “It’s certainly not 19th century. It’s full of strange clashes.”

The pair worked hard to come up with the right tone for Peterloo, Leigh’s historical epic about the 1819 massacre of peaceful demonstrators in St Peter's Fields, Manchester, as they were campaigning for parliamentary reform. The tragic scenes where the cavalry charge at the crowd of 60,000 people features no score. 

“The cinematographer, Dick Pope, and I decided that sequence would have no aerial shots,” says Leigh. “You'd be in there amongst it. You've had a huge buildup in all these different elements. When it gets to that, we thought it must be as real as possible. We don't want to lead the audience in any way. It just has to be organic and raw. Not having a score would help that considerably. On top of which, there are a number of musical elements in that sequence because there are bands playing and people playing instruments.”

Yershon, who has also worked on Another Year with Leigh, wanted to give the music for Peterloo a contemporary feel. “That came via a vibraphone. A lot of the cues are unisons between a high bassoon and an alto flute. That particular combination, that's the sound of the film. It took a while to get that.”

For Leigh, one of his favourite moments in the filmmaking process is watching the music being recorded in the studio. “We always get the best people around from the orchestras. They arrive. They received the score maybe the night before. They sit down and they play it as if they’ve known it all their lives. Then they all pile into the control room because they're all fascinated to know what it is that they're participating in. As it plays back, it’s the first time you hear the action with the music. It's very exciting. I love it!”

*Celebrating Mike Leigh alongside the BFI, find out more info about their season here.