Mike Leigh
ST: You’ve made period pictures before but the scale of Peterloo must have presented a new challenge. Just the amount of historical material you need to translate into drama to make the story legible is huge.
ML: Absolutely. But at the most basic level, this film isn’t any different from any of my other films: it’s about putting three-dimensional people on the screen in a fleshed-out, plausible way. Not ciphers. Not movie cliches. Characters. Real people like you and me. Added to that, you’ve got people who make speeches, express ideas and all the rest of it – it’s complex. Everything that comes out of people’s mouths is drawn from real speeches – it’s distilled from that.
