T
O MAKE Peterloo—my new film based
on the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, during
which tens of thousands of Manchester na-
tives were attacked by government militias
for demanding Parliamentary reform and
expanded voting rights—I took exactly the
same approach as with my other period films.
Like Topsy-Turvy and Mr. Turner, I knew that
I would be breathing life into people I read
about who actually existed. No matter how
much research you do, you still have to create
characters in an organic, three-dimensional
way so that they live in front of the camera.
So, my way of preparing to make each
character and event “real” was with improvi-
sation. In the end, both improvisation and the
scripting process are there to serve the film—
whatever the film is. Some of my films were
made “naked,” and we invented the whole
concept, which created and evolved the story.
But with Peterloo, we were drawing from his-
tory, and with that, there are things that we
invented. The overall result is a distillation, or
reconstruction, of events—that’s the job.
Telling the story of Joseph (David Moorst),
a soldier who developed post-traumatic
stress disorder from the Battle of Waterloo
four years prior to Peterloo’s political up-
heaval, didn’t require any long, complicated
sequences that go into elaborate detail.
Joseph’s story is not about anything other
than the battle—not a bloke getting into his
car driving down the street, or a man or
woman eating breakfast in a flat. It’s about
the Battle of Waterloo, so that’s what hap-
pens. Our battle sequence is all in one shot,42 WINTER 2019 MOVIEMAKER.COM
REAL-LIFE REFERENTS
AND IMPROVISED
STORYTELLING
IN PETERLOO
HELP AUDIENCES
EXPERIENCE
THE EVENTS THAT
LED TO THE INFAMOUS
19TH CENTURY
BRITISH MASSACRE
BY MIKE LEIGH,
AS TOLD TO AMIR GANJAVIEand it’s down to the essence of what’s going
on, to give a sense of his point of view.
Still, Peterloo is the only film I’ve made in
which there is no definitive central char-
acter. Everything in moviemaking is an
aesthetic choice, and that choice is purely
a function of the film’s content. Peterloo is
about an event that involved a lot of people
across a widespread social spectrum, so it
would be irrelevant and counterproductive
to make any of the film’s characters speak in
a contrived, artificial way in order to make
one the central character in the story. That’s
not what the film is about.
Somebody asked me whether Peterloo
particularly references Sergei Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin and Akira Kurosawa.
The truth is, it doesn’t. I don’t look at films as
referents when I’m making my films, because
in the end I’m not into pastiche. I don’t make
films about films. That isn’t to say, however,
that Eisenstein and Kurosawa are not there in
my DNA. I’ve also read a lot of 19th century
literature—some of which, such as books by
Elizabeth Gaskell, resonate with the period
depicted in Peterloo. When you embark on a
project that’s historical in nature, one door of
research opens another door, and a picture
starts to form.
Most important, though, was that we had
an historian, Dr. Jacqueline Riding, as part
of our film crew. Somebody like that onPHOTOGRAPHS BY SIMON MEIN, COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS