Mike Leigh on ‘Hard Truths’ and his moviemaking struggles

AP Film Writer

TORONTO (AP) — When the British filmmaker Mike Leigh was 6, his father, a doctor who opposed his son becoming an artist, told him to quit drawing pictures of people. In a way, Leigh never stopped. In his six decades making movies, the 81-year-old Leigh has made some of the most humanistic movies in cinema, many of them character studies of ordinary, working-class people — though the films, from “Secret & Lies” to “Mr. Turner,” run the whole gamut. Leigh’s latest, his first film in six years, reunites him with Marielle Jean-Baptiste, an Oscar-nominee for her role in 1996’s “Secrets & Lies.” She plays a rageful woman whose unexplained internal suffering spews out in venom at those around her.