Considerado uno de los diez directores británicos vivos más importantes, Mike Leigh está preparando un nuevo proyecto del que nada se ha anunciado, será su úndecimo largometraje, el que suceda a la exitosa "Happy, un cuento de la felicidad". De Leigh, además, se editará en nuestro país por primera vez algunas de sus obras más importantes en DVD ("Indefenso", "La vida es dulce" y "Dos chicas de hoy"). Pero Leigh no es noticia, hoy, por ninguno de esos asuntos, lo es por la aparición de un artículo suyo coescrito con Trevor Johnston, en el que el director y guionista habla de su experiencia como espectador del movimiento encabezado por Truffaut, Godard y Rohmer, la Nouvelle Vague. Leigh destaca algunos de sus films favoritos así como las consecuencias que estos tuvieron en otros directores británicos como Ken Loach o Terence Young.‘Before I arrived down here, I’d never seen a subtitled film,’ Leigh recalls of the period when he left Salford to attend Rada and pursue acting in the capital, ‘so suddenly I had this massive discovery of what we now call “world cinema”. With Godard’s “À Bout de Souffle” in particular, it was the real, fundamental, anarchic, status quo-challenging, breathing-real-air aspect of it which resonated with me. It keyed into an aspiration I’d had for some time – seeing Jack Clayton’s “Room at The Top”, stagey though it now seems, certainly fed into this – that you could have a film where the people were real and the film was like real life…’

For Leigh, Truffaut’s ‘Jules et Jim’ also represents the quintessence of the Nouvelle Vague. ‘That moment where Jeanne Moreau’s character does her musical number, just allowing the reality of that actress singing the song to become the reality of the film… Just a few minutes later there’s an incredible helicopter shot, so you have this chemistry between things that breathe in the moment and elements that are more classically cinematic. What Truffaut’s brilliant at is tapping into a nostalgia, in the true sense of the word, for life, even if he did once say that British cinema was a contradiction in terms – for which he would probably deserve to get his legs broken.’

Leigh refers to Godard’s ‘Vivre Sa Vie’ (with his muse Anna Karina as a Parisian call-girl) as ‘one of my all-time greats’, and commends Agnès Varda’s ‘Cléo de 5 à 7’ (two hours in the life of a pop singer awaiting crucial medical results) ‘for showing me just how little you needed to leap in time just to deal with something’. Varda’s name comes up in the context of another moment underlining the gulf between British and French standards of celluloid achievement. ‘For three days I was in a Michael Winner film, in this non-part which ended up on the cutting-room floor. Every day at the end of the shoot, I’d race down to the NFT for their season “Left Bank, Right Bank” and see these wonderful Varda shorts. To me, it encapsulated what cinema was and wasn’t’.