your team will know where to look, how to
select elements to include in your story, and
what archives will be most useful to your
research. The banners carried by activists
at their public demonstration, for instance,
drew from all kinds of sources that allowed
our production team to recreate the actual
designs on which they’re based. Looking at
paintings of the so-called Regency Period
of English art history, and the work of
such great English caricaturists as
Thomas Rowlandson, George Cruikshank,
and James Gillray, was especially helpful,
too, when it came to realizing how our filmMOVIEMAKER.COM WINTER 2019 43PAST MASTER: MOVIEMAKER MIKE LEIGH’S KNACK
FOR HISTORICAL FICTION SHINES AGAIN IN PETERLOOPUBLIC FLAGGING: GRASSROOTS ACTIVISTS TURN
BANNERS INTO BLUDGEONS IN PETERLOOwould depict members of the royal family.
We also had to embrace that this is a film
about grassroots politics, and we knew that
intelligent audiences would have to be able
to go along with that. That meant exploring
different levels and nuances to our “radi-
cal” characters. There are the middle-class
radicals—respectable, cautious. Then, there
are the young, working-class radicals, who
really want a revolution. Peterloo depicts a
time in English history when the memory of
the French Revolution cast a shadow across
everything, and served as an inspiration to
these radicals. A lot of the various speechesgiven in the film draw from actual speeches
that were given, to tell the story of how the
government’s fear of revolution was what
motivated them most.
Many people in the northwest of England
in the Manchester area, myself included,
grew up not knowing about the events we
depict in Peterloo. It’s not that it wasn’t all
documented, but it happens that we weren’t
taught about it in school. Why we weren’t
is one of the great mysteries that I’ll never
know the answer to.
My goal, then, is for a 21st century audi-
ence to be able to digest Peterloo from our
modern perspective. There’s no way you can
look at what this film’s about and merely
say, “It’s an antique museum experience.”
If it works for you, it will be because you
were able to respond to it from an emotional
place. And I didn’t make the film to make it
“safe,” either. It’s there for you to walk away
with a discussion—to reflect on how you can
act upon your own understanding of our
world. MMPeterloo opens in theaters April 5, 2019,
courtesy of Amazon Studios.PHOTOGRAPHS BY SIMON MEIN, COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS