Theater News

The Perfect Year

Mike Leigh, Lesley Manville, Jim Broadbent, and Ruth Sheen discuss their new film Another Year.

Mike Leigh
(© Tristan Fuge)
Mike Leigh
(© Tristan Fuge)

The holiday film grab bag contains many things this year — including a prototypical little gem from stage and screen veteran Mike Leigh: Another Year. The film, which opens officially on December 29, follows all the tenets of Leigh’s usual methodology: get an idea, create an outline, gather actors you know and trust, improvise for a few months, and then make a movie! A written screenplay comes only after the film is already finished.

The new film is simplicity itself as it follows a year in the life of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a happily married older couple. (He’s a geologist and she’s a counselor.) Among their friends and acquaintances is Mary (Lesley Manville), a chronic misfit from Gerri’s office. We become flies on the wall watching the delusional Mary spend as much time as she can with Tom and Gerri, desperate for the warmth and affection they show each other and their friends.

“It’s about a lot of things this film, and it’s very hard to talk about in a simple way,” says Leigh, who spoke about the film earlier this year at the New York Film Festival. “But it comes from the joy and pain of life as one has experienced it really. Mary’s relationship with Tom and Gerri is obviously something that’s happened much later in their history. In fact, the chronology is always logical.”

Lesley Manville and Ruth Sheen in Another Year
(© Focus Features)
Lesley Manville and Ruth Sheen in Another Year
(© Focus Features)

As is often the case, Leigh recruited many of his former collaborators for this film.
Manville and Leigh first met in 1978 on Leigh’s TV series, Grown-Ups (she was 22 and he was 35) and they have made seven films together. “Working with Mike was a great discovery for me because I think the crucial thing that happened for me through him is that it determined what kind of actor I wanted to be,” says Manville. “The big thing was I realized I could play people who weren’t like me, and that’s been such a liberating thing for my career, not just in the work I’ve done with Mike but across my career.”

Sheen also loves Leigh’s singular process. “When you first go into a film with Mike you don’t know what it’s going to be,” she says. “You don’t know what it’s going to be about, you don’t know what your part’s going to be. I never knew that I would play a character that then was going to be married to Jim’s character. I never knew what she was going to work at or what sort of person she’d be.”

Broadbent also enjoyed the journey, even if it might frustrate other actors. “Mike would send me off to do research, having established that Tom was going to be a geologist,” he says. “I’d go off and find out which universities do geology and come back and tell him that there’s Manchester, there’s Leeds, there’s Southampton, and there’s Cardiff. And he says, ‘Will you settle for Manchester?’ So you were always presenting him with choices and then he’s taking those choices and guiding people together or taking them apart in his god-like way.”

In the end, though, all the actors believe the finished project speaks for itself. “The thing is we’re making films about real, fully rounded people that are nuanced and subtle,” says Manville. “There’s just no question about it. We wouldn’t be working with Mike in the way that we do if we weren’t comfortable in our own private skins.”

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