Mike Leigh has a reputation for grumpiness, I'm warned before going to meet him at a screening of his new film for Irish Times readers last week. But leaning heavily on a crutch (he has severe arthritis of the hip) in the foyer of the Screen cinema, he seems affable and relaxed enough, enjoying his tour of Britain and Ireland to talk with audiences about his new film, Topsy-Turvy. Introducing the film, he cracks a joke about popcorn eaters and how they should sit as far as possible away from everybody else. The audience (apart from those sitting with 10-gallon buckets of the stuff on their knees) laughs appreciatively, but as it happens, there's nowhere for them to move - the cinema is jam-packed, and there's not an empty seat in the house. Mike Leigh has many fans.
Some of those fans will be surprised to hear that this acute suburban miniaturist, chronicler of social embarrassment and connoisseur of small, disappointed lives, has made a costume drama. Not just any costume drama, mind you, but a sprawling, sumptuous portrait of those epitomes of Victorian middle-class entertainment, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, creators of such confections as The Gondoliers and The Pirates of Penzance. It seems like an odd choice of subject for a film-maker whose concerns have always seemed so resolutely contemporary, a long way from the bleak, brilliant power of, say, Naked, his memorable portrait of alienation and violence in modern Britain. But, as Leigh admits, he relishes contrariness and prefers to do the unexpected.
Having introduced the movie, we repair down the road for dinner, where he enjoys the fact that, every time I switch my tape recorder on, the restaurant's fire alarm starts screeching. It's one of those inexplicable, maddening things you might expect to happen in one of his films. "Part of what motivated me in doing this was the sheer unlikeliness of it," he tells me finally when the problem is solved. "I'm fascinated by Naked fans having to deal with this. So it's me saying to them: `Well, Naked - fine . . . now f*** off and watch this'. If you think of the trajectory from High Hopes to Life is Sweet to Naked to Secret and Lies to Career Girls, you'll see that's what I actually do every time. Although I'm sure that Jean Renoir was right about people making the same film over and over again. And if you look at Topsy-Turvy, it's full of the same old stuff, really - the tension between people trying to have a good time, trying to give other people a good time, and the pain of living . . . all those endless doomed celebrations I've dished up."
He got fed up, he says, with period films that he couldn't believe in. "They haven't got the texture of real life about them. I suppose, if I was going to do a costume drama, that I might have been expected to tackle a subject like poverty in the East End, but I thought it would be good to take what appeared to be a more decorative, chocolate box subject and invert it by getting under the surface and taking it seriously."
Like many people of his generation, he grew up with Gilbert and Sullivan's music in the background, and always found them "really interesting characters. It's not insignificant that they are celebrated as the gurus by all those responsible for the modern American musical. On one level, I think what they did was interesting, attractive, well-done but only very occasionally meaningful. So it's secondary art." Many people might also regard film as a secondary art, I suggest. There's no false modesty in the answer. "People have asked me do I have that problem with what I do and I don't. What I do is profound enough."
He admits to a fascination with the late Victorian world, "which may be a sad thing, or maybe not. Lately I've sort of twigged that it may be something to do with growing up in a Victorian environment, in Manchester, and going to a Victorian school."
Topsy-Turvy chronicles a key moment in the relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan in the months after the failure of Princess Ida, with Sullivan reluctant to begin another project and the irascible Gilbert becoming more and more frustrated with his prevarication. A chance visit to an exhibition sparks the idea for The Mikado, and the story follows the production of that show up until its triumphant opening night.
Like all of Leigh's films, Topsy-Turvy grew out of a long, intensive process of exploration and improvisation with his cast, starting off without a script and gradually shaping the film from research, discussion and rehearsal. I suggest that it's one thing to create contemporary characters through this process, but another to build an accurate historical portrait. "Well, it was an extra dimension and an extra challenge. But not a burden - it was actually invigorating. What happens in creative terms is that it gets into your bloodstream and the inner reality of it, the part that makes it seem alive and modern, then looks after itself.
"I also wanted to do something about us, entertainers and artists and all that. After all, I've been living and working with the buggers all my life. My assumption was that you could actually forget that there was this cultural gap between now and then, and create a real world which was just as solid as the contemporary one."
He agrees with the criticism of what is pejoratively known as "British Heritage Cinema", that all those fine costumes and finicky design touches mask a conservative agenda and shallow nostalgia. "Absolutely, but it derives from the same tendency towards superficiality that you'll find in many a movie, whether it's in a period setting or not."
The London of the 1880s which Leigh shows in Topsy-Turvy is a self-consciously brash, modern place, whose inhabitants enthusiastically embrace the latest technological gizmos - the telephone and the fountain pen are objects of wonder; electricity is a marvellous new invention. In many ways it's not that different from metropolitan life now. People catch cabs, rush from place to place, gossip over lunch, worry about their careers and their health . . . The film is crammed with little details and beautifully observed vignettes of everyday life - just like Leigh's previous work.
"The minute you get in and explore the social, economic, religious, imperial, gastronomic, medical and all the other things, you bring that world to light," he says. "People making period films are usually concerned with creating a superficial picture of that world, and monkeying around with it in the wrong way. Of course, Topsy-Turvy is not a documentary, nor is it a biopic, but there's a certain integrity to the way it approaches that world, and the way people in it think, so it becomes interesting and compelling and ineluctable in its own right."
But isn't it true that historical films usually tell us more about the time in which they're made than the time they depict? "Yes of course. For example, we deal with Gilbert's relationship with his wife, about whom very little is actually known. In creating a life for her within the shell of what history tells us we've hopefully brought alive a woman who is passionate and intelligent. But we create an idea she suggests for a play, which plainly owes more to Freud and Fellini than to the world of Gilbert. Although the Gilbert portrayed by Jim Broadbent is historically accurate, he is still recognisably a descendant of other characters in my films. But at the same time we were deadly serious about getting all sorts of details right. I think it's quite a useful and interesting thing to have done, although I'm not going to make a habit of it. I'm looking forward to getting back to the early 21st century with my next film."
Topsy-Turvy is now showing at selected cinemas.
An audio version of a recent Irish Times public interview with Mike Leigh is available at: www.ireland.com/dublin/
