But when Mike Leigh went to chairman of BAFTA Simon Relph for money 25 years ago he took that leap and the result was the film High Hopes.

The pair met again on May 7 this year at Brighton Dome, when Leigh was in conversation with Amy Raphael in the BAFTA: A Life in Pictures series, as part of the Brighton Festival.

The five-time Oscar nominee, BAFTA winner and the only British director to have won the top prize at Cannes and Venice, Leigh spoke to an audience of 1,800 people about his life and work.

His plays include Abigail's Party and his films Life is Sweet, Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake and the current Happy Go Lucky.

Unique in the way he puts together a film, he collaborates with the actors to create their characters, the script and the plot, rather than handing out lines to be learned.

He explained why he loves watching his own films. "If I don't like it, why should I expect anyone else to," he said.

"The thing about films is we don't make them by ourselves. They are a collaboration by a whole of people and it would be inappropriately disinegenuous to say I hate it.

"But I am fortunate that I never have to make films I don't really like or indeed work with actors I don't rally want to work with."

The son of a Salford GP, Leigh's often gritty and bleak work focuses largely on working class characters, situations and conflicts.

His stories deal with issues like failed relationships, births, marriages and deaths, parenthood and the secrets and lies within families.

Moving to London in the 1960s, and fascinated with making plays and films, he went to RADA where actor training at that time was about "learning lines and moves and not asking any questions".

There was no discussion about what the play was about, the world of the characters and their life off-stage and after the play.

"I was only 17 when I started and spent the whole time thinking this is somehow not what it should be," he said.

It was after that, at Camberwell Art School, he had an epiphany. "We were standing round with a nude model and everybody was working quietly and I suddenly thought what's happening in this room is something we never experienced at RADA – everybody was making an investigation into real life. There was a buzz in the room.

"It set me joining up some dots about things to do with creating, writing and directing – writing and directing were indivisible and the notion of the actor as an artist and not just a subservient observer."

He tried out the new method at the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham with a "prototype Mike Leigh thing" about a family living in a box, with the rest of the world going on outside and only a teenager interacting.

Since then he has worked closely with each actor on the characters' backgrounds, language, physical aspects and what they have been exposed to and they build in a three-dimensional way, layer by layer.

"I collaborate with everybody in the a way not dissimilar to the way I collaborate with actors," he said.

As for his next film, apparently it starts with a dog walking across the road but if you want to know why, you'll have to read his book...


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