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Leigh has done this by developing a technique of creating characters through in-depth research with carefully selected casts. For three decades, his work for British stage and television carried the credit "devised and directed by Mike Leigh," because his dramatic situations and his story lines were so indebted to the intense talk and organic interplay between him and his ensembles.

Now, in "Topsy-Turvy," he has gone back to the London of the Dickens era (the movie begins in 1884, 14 years after Dickens' death). Leigh has taken his cutting-edge methodology with him and emerged with his most seductive and outlandishly successful picture yet. A few days after we spoke over lunch in San Francisco, Leigh's film won 1999 best picture honors from the New York Film Critics Circle -- and the group named Leigh best director.

On the "Topsy-Turvy" CD (just released on Sony Classical), Leigh writes in a short essay:

The popular musical theater of the English-speaking world of a hundred years ago was dominated by Gilbert & Sullivan, two Londoners of contrasting temperament, whose battles gave us fourteen delicious, bittersweet comic operas. The impresario who presented these shows and built the Savoy Theatre for them was Richard D'Oyly Carte, and for thousands of British children in the 1950s our annual treat was the visit of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. We queued for tickets, we clapped the encores, we bought the long-playing records, we memorised Gilbert's hilarious words, and of course we embarked on the journey through our teens and into our adult lives humming and whistling Sullivan's infectious tunes.

"Topsy-Turvy" is Leigh's grand display of gratitude. It takes up Gilbert and Sullivan's career at a volatile time. Sullivan (Allan Corduner) is impatient with Gilbert's penchant for suggesting scenarios "rich in human emotion and probability" only to turn them topsy-turvy with magic pills and potions. And Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) views Sullivan's reluctance to continue on this path as an insult. It's Mrs. Gilbert (Lesley Manville) who comes to the rescue when she drags her husband to an indoor re-creation of a Japanese village, including imported Japanese people. The pleasurable jolt of this exotica stimulates Gilbert to cook up "The Mikado" -- and though it's hardly richer "in human emotion and probability" than, say, "Princess Ida," it amuses Sullivan immensely and ends up salvaging the partnership.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

Leigh's liner notes say he aimed to fashion "a film about all of us who strain and struggle to make other people laugh" that would also be "a celebration of Gilbert's wit and a feast of Sullivan's music." But with rounded depictions of performers as different as the droll, neurotic George Grossmith (Martin Savage) and the tremendously humorous Richard Temple (Timothy Spall), he also achieves a portrait of the actor's craft as inspiring and poetic as Jean Renoir's "The Golden Coach." And Leigh does it his own way -- from the ground, and greasepaint, up.

Leigh's theater world mirrors the real world's density and conflict. When Gilbert cuts Temple's solo from "The Mikado," the chorus protests in a dazzling display of what Leigh terms "grass-roots politics." Gilbert and Sullivan's conventions echo and challenge Victorian mores: Gilbert must reassure leading man Durward Lely (Kevin McKidd) that he isn't being lewd when his wandering-minstrel outfit shows his calf. At times, Leigh points up the fragile insularity of theater. His camera eavesdrops on Grossmith as the actor and two colleagues smugly expatiate on the Empire-shaking catastrophe of the massacre of General "Chinese" Gordon and the defenders of Khartoum. (Grossmith sniffs that Gordon shouldn't have expected natives to play by the rules.) Later, Gilbert runs into a madwoman from London's lower depths while pacing through the streets on his "Mikado" opening night.

During lunch with me last week, Leigh confessed: "I love those sorts of juxtapositions. Part of it is, I don't have the passion for theater that I have for film; one of the things I hate is that theater has a claustrophobic nature, whereas filmmaking lets you out into the world. So at certain points, I felt the need to let the air in. It's just wonderful, halfway through, to suddenly proclaim, in a caption, that news reaches London of Gordon's death. It makes you feel like you're opening a music box."

Yet even more unexpected than these signature moments are this film's lyrical flights, which reveal how much Leigh does instinctively adore the theater. "I had to have a narrative, dramatic or faux-dramatic reason for each musical number," Leigh said. But he ends the film, stunningly, with a number that here makes only poetic sense. D'Oyly Carte actress Leonora Braham (Shirley Henderson), a melancholy widowed mother, once more takes on the role of Yum-Yum from "The Mikado" and sings the gorgeous "The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze."

"We're very wide awake/The moon and I!" Yum Yum announces in the heart-stopping last lines. In "Topsy-Turvy" no one is more magically moonstruck than Mike Leigh.

Of course "Topsy-Turvy" will be treated as a radical departure for you, and in some ways it is. But I settled into it happily as a Mike Leigh film.

I think that's dead right. The suggestion that it's in a different genre from my other films is preposterous. It's exactly in the mode of its predecessors. Not only do I deal with character and stuff in the same way, but with the exception of the use of flash-forwards, it's shot consistently in the same sort of style and it has the same approach to film narrative. The surface differences are that it's period, and it's not, in the usual way, about ordinary people. But people are people.

And when you see how this enormous group enterprise operates, you do get a sense -- which you usually don't get with theater films -- of actual work getting done.

Well, I hope so, yeah. This film is about an industrial process. When you reach the stage where you understand the politics and economics of the theater and Sullivan's creative crisis, and it's really about time you saw the work, you get this healthy chunk of "The Sorcerer," which is obviously useful here because it has a topsy-turvy magic-lozenge plot. And the way I filmed that sequence, you are looking at the industrial process -- you see the conductor directing the band and the chorus in the wings, and you see the guys with the props and sound effects and the guys with electric wires.

It makes Gilbert and Sullivan immediately accessible. When I was a kid watching their operettas on Sunday-afternoon TV shows, done in a period style, the performances always seemed distant and fake to me. What struck me as a touchstone in your movie is that when you see your players in makeup, close-up, with their obvious head pieces and so on, you completely forget about the artificiality, or you see it and you go with it.

I think that's true. Although to be fair to the people that inevitably are being criticized in what you say: If you actually made a film, say, of "The Mikado," and you saw all the wigs and stuff like that, you would simply find it illogical. You wouldn't believe in it, if you can believe in that theatrical sort of story anyhow. But if you know that what you're looking at is real people who are doing something which happens to be play-acting but that in itself is totally real, then you believe. It's not fair to compare what we do with those productions, crap though they no doubt were.

Of course, I wasn't making a critical judgment at age 8 or 9.

But I am. And that's because one of the subsidiary agendas with the film was to say: "OK, let us strip away the rusty encrustations and the barnacles -- all the layers and layers of coyness and whimsy which isn't what Gilbert and Sullivan is about. Let us access the actual stuff that's been hidden from us by generations of various growths over the course of over a century, like bad performances and shows which are inherently youthful being played by overweight, middle-aged people." Going back and looking at Gilbert and Sullivan pure -- as the modern, fresh, vibrant kind of culture that, for all its eccentricities, their theater was -- helps it to come alive.

Next page | Redefining the period piece