Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Mike Leigh on the Facts Behind Their New Film Hard Truths

A hotel room at Walt Disney World is the most ironic place to do an interview with the legendary writer and director Mike Leigh and Oscar-nominated actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste. But there I was when I connected with Leigh and Jean-Baptiste on Zoom to discuss a film about the most miserable person on earth.

In Hard Truths, hitting cinemas on January 10, Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a chronically venomous wife, mother, and grieving daughter, whose self-inflicted wounds are even more legion than her imaginary adversaries in the outside world. Her 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) has no ambition, she hates her husband Curtley (David Webber), and her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) is too cheery. The movie follows the two siblings’ contrasting lives and families as they grapple with middle age and the recent passing of their mother, Pearl.

Hard Truths marks Jean-Baptiste’s third collaboration with Leigh; their most notable to date is the film Secrets & Lies, which earned them both Oscar nominations. The awards buzz is strong with this one, too, and when you see it, there’s no question why. Here, they discuss their long-running artistic partnership, and how freeing it is to build a piece from the ground up.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Marianne’s character, Pansy, could have easily been a one-note, relentlessly miserable person, and yet she’s so extremely recognizable.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste: It’s been shocking, the amount of people who have a Pansy in their families.

Mike Leigh: Shocking, but great.

Marianne: It’s reassuring that we’ve created something that is reaching people, moving people.

Mike: When you’re making a film, you don’t think about this sort of thing one way or another. I believe in Pansy, you believe in Pansy, we believe in these characters, they’re real to us, blah, blah, blah, and all that. If a clairvoyant had said “The disastrous thing will be that everybody will say Pansy’s too over the top,” I would have thought “Well, I suppose that could happen.” The fact that the opposite is happening is fantastic. People resonate with it.

Mike, take me back to the first time you worked with Marianne, which was in your play It’s a Great Big Shame! in 1993. What was it about her as an actor that made you want to cast her back then?
Mike: What it was then is what it is now, that she’s a consummate character actor, with a great sense of humor and a great sense of life. I mean, she’s a pain in the arse. I can’t stand her. [Laughs] We clicked straight away. She’s very funny, very real, and quite terrifying. It’s great to come back together again, bringing with us all the experience we’ve had in the meantime, and push the limits even more.

Marianne: If you’re working with Mike, you’re not going to be doing the same thing. You’re just like “Where is this going to go this time?”

Mike: If I work with somebody for the second time, the first thing we agree on is that whatever we do, we’re not going to repeat ourselves. If you look at the various people that have played several parts in my films, they’re very different characters always.

Marianne: He’ll say “I’m doing another film. I’d like you to be in it. I don’t know what it’s about. I don’t know what you’ll be playing in it. But we’ll have a good time.”

Mike: The deal is, you never know anything except what your character knows, so that it can be absolutely truthful. We’re very disciplined about that throughout the entire process, including the shoot.

Marianne: And after.

Mike: Even the crew know to keep quiet in front of the actors.

Do you know knowing in what the film is going to be about, or do you devise it in the room?
Mike: I always have some notions, because otherwise I couldn’t make any decisions. But there’s a difference between knowing what it really is about and having a notion as to the potential character dynamics. Like, there’s a couple, maybe that’s a son, there’s a sister. Sometimes, I have no idea. Take a film like Happy-Go-Lucky, for example. Eddie Marsan, who plays the fascist driving instructor, he assumed for quite a long time that it was going to be a film about a driving instructor with all his different pupils. Eventually it dawned on him, way into the process, that she was the main character, and whatever was going on was about her. It does change and grow organically as we embark on the journey.

What was your way into Pansy?
Marianne: Well, Pansy comes from the collaboration between me and Mike, creating the character from scratch and peppering in experiences. Mike would make decisions for the character that one can’t make for themselves; all the other decisions — “What does she like?” — I could make for her. The stuff that he was peppering in would change the course of her life and character, giving her enough bad experiences.

Mike: Nobody played Pearl, the mother. We talked her into existence on four dimensions. And then we talked Pansy into existence. Pansy’s in the habit, albeit reluctantly, of taking turns with her sister to visit her now quite elderly mother. One day, we said “Ok, Pansy parks the car, she goes in, Pearl’s not around, she goes upstairs,” and then Marianne said, more or less, “She’d go into the room,” and I said “Pearl is dead in the bed.” That’s my authorial decision, which is referred to in the film. For you and Pansy, that was a real experience.

Marianne: It was very real, and it was cruel.

Mike: But it’s what happened, and I knew instinctively that that was going to be integral to whatever was going to happen, because it was part of the dynamics and the conflict of Pansy’s relationship with Chantal.

Marianne, how does this experience compare to the experience you had making Secrets & Lies?
Marianne: I think what was interesting for me was letting go and reminding myself that I could completely trust the process. You learn to self-direct to a certain extent in other things because some directors are more focused on where the camera’s going to be, and they just hire you to do your thing. Whereas when you’re working with Mike, you’ve got so much more agency. It’s so much more collaborative. There’s the thing of, I don’t know what this is going to be about. I might be in half of it, I might be in all of it, I might just be Eddie giving driving lessons. It’s just jumping in again, and it took an adjustment, a quick reminder that this is what it feels like to be free and creative.

Will we ever get another theatrical collaboration from the two of you?
Marianne: I sincerely hope so.

Mike: Time is running out.

Marianne: Well, hurry up then.