Film and TV drama is booming, with the streaming services Netflix, Hulu and Amazon offering audiences hit after hit on demand. But, according to the acclaimed director Mike Leigh, this comes with an unfortunate side effect: that young British film-makers are being held back by a powerful “new breed of executive”.

“It is just not on,” said Leigh, 75. “The next lot of young directors face such a long wait to get any project off the ground. That’s my biggest worry. I’ve talked to two of them in the last few weeks and one said she expected it to take six years to get her first feature together. That’s terrible, and it is because you have got this whole new breed or culture of executives and producers who will not simply press the button, and say ‘go for it and see what happens’.”

Leigh, speaking to the Observer before the launch of the DVD of his latest film, Peterloo, laments the arrival of a complex commissioning hierarchy, although it does not affect his own work. A veteran of 21 films, Leigh is renowned for brooking no creative interference and is keen to champion creative freedom for those who follow him.

“I’m not talking about my own experience with Amazon, who backed Peterloo and who behaved impeccably: the problem really exists for younger film makers,” he said.

It is, he claims, inexperienced, untested directors who are expected to cater to commissioning editors’ whims.

“The new streaming services all like to say they don’t work like Hollywood. But, actually, by suggesting a director works with a particular team, or asking why you are not using a female cinematographer, or wondering whether the film should have an upbeat ending, they are behaving in a traditional Hollywood, Louis B Mayer-way and it is totally unacceptable,” he said.

Salford-raised Leigh, who made Abigail’s Party and Nuts in May for television in the 1970s and whose many cinematic hits include the Palme d’Or winner Secrets & Lies, Vera Drake and 2014’s Mr Turner, said he welcomes the push for greater diversity both on screen and behind the camera.

“Historically and socially it is absolutely the right thing,” he said. “I only have a problem if it becomes over-prescriptive and starts to inhibit natural organic work. Then it is dangerous. Like everybody else, I am listening, but I do not want to be dictated to about casting.”

‘Amazon backed Peterloo and behaved impeccably,’ said Mike Leigh. Photograph: Simon Mein

Film-streaming services have brought with them a healthy injection of funds, but with that money has come a tier of creative bureaucracy. “It is complicated, because there was a time in my memory when it was impossible to make a feature film in this country and that isn’t true any more. You can,” said Leigh. “But there are preconceptions about what should and shouldn’t be made and what is commercial. It really isn’t good enough.”

Leigh’s film Peterloo is about the cavalry’s massacre of 15 protesters in Manchester in 1819 after a crowd of 60,000 had gathered to call for wider democratic representation. The incident led to the founding of the Manchester Guardian, now the Guardian, in 1821, and was dubbed Peterloo in reference to the recent battle of Waterloo. “Peterloo certainly needn’t have happened. It was chaos because the magistrates lost their nerve and it all kicked off in the wrong order,” said Leigh.

Two centuries after these killings, the director, a Remainer, believes his epic treatment of social unrest and protest in Britain is especially timely.

“We decided to make the film before the word Brexit had even been coined. Gradually we started to think this is really prescient. And now, of course, the touch paper is all but lit,” he saidBut the director does not see this latest film as his first screen foray into politics. “I don’t know a film I have made that isn’t about politics. If Nuts in May isn’t a political film, I don’t know what is. But this film is unusual for me, because it is actually about politics.”

But Leigh does not see it as a polemical work: in contrast to his contemporary Ken Loach, whom he admires, Leigh said he does not worry about making his own beliefs clear to an audience. “That is something, as far as I am concerned, that I have never done. I’ve always made films that are properly unresolved,” he said.

“I hope what people expect from me is a sense of humanity and a way of reflecting about themselves in films that are about ‘us’, not ‘them’. I’m not in the business of wanting people to be just angry. I think that is reductionist.” And will his next film project tackle Britain’s current social discord head-on? With characteristic reticence, Leigh will not say. “I’ll be making it up as I go along, so I can’t tell you.”

Peterloo is available on Digital Download and on Blu-ray and DVD from 11 March

• The headline of this article was amended on 12 March 2019 to accurately summarise Leigh’s views set out in the article.



