Tag: Mike Leigh

Oliver White (Editor) – His Unreliable Memoirs – ‘The Kiss of Death’

Kiss of Death by Mike Leigh

Far more interesting than ‘Nuts in May’, because it wasn’t a natural winner.  The performances are stunning.  It introduced David Threlfall to the world.  The leading lady, Mike said, left the profession after this.  A great shame, if so.  It has my favourite sequence of any film I’ve ever cut.  This is when our hero goes to the girl’s home after dealing with the dead baby.  She greets him with, ‘ Yer can’t come in, me mam ain’t in’.  So begins a perfect section of sexual tension.  Fantastic!  At one stage of working on it, apparently he DID say ‘yes’ to going upstairs.  Half way up, our heroine cried, ‘I am coming out of character!!’  The dead baby is awful.  David Rose and I tried hard to get him to drop it.  Is it necessary?  Looking at a bit 10 years ago, I thought it looked rather too tightly cut.  I could be wrong.

Almost forgot!  A very clever music score by Carl Davis a la Hindemith Wry – tongue in cheek, splendid!

Oliver White (Editor) – His Unreliable Memoirs – ‘Nuts in May’

Nuts in May by Mike Leigh

Did Mike Leigh know this was going to be a knock-out success umpteen years later??  I didn’t!   ‘The famous CHEWING sequence!  We tried several lengths.  I now think it would be even funnier 4-5 seconds longer.  I’ve always been a great believer in the ‘perfect stranger’.  You grab someone passing the door, show them a one minute section and say, ‘Does it work?’  Yes, a fresh pair of eyes!  The chap who played the quarry man did it for a MONTH, with Mike’s P.A. making notes!  Then Alison and Roger turned up, and it lasted say an hour.  And finally whittled down to what you now see.  The chap loved doing it so much, he gave up acting and became a palaeontologist.

Two or three years later Alison was doing something that required her to walk across a ‘real’ school playground.  ‘It won’t work’, she said, ‘They’ll recognise me’.  ‘Go on’, said the director, ‘Give it a try.’  Well, all the kids rushed at her calling, ‘Candice-Marie, Candice-Marie!!’  (Mike heard the name on a bus).

I believe ‘Nuts in May’ had a remote genesis in a little two-hander upstairs at the Royal Court, called something like ‘Holy Glory’, about veggies.