Marianne Jean-Baptiste describes her collaboration with director Mike Leigh as “terrifying, exhilarating, exciting, creative — beyond creative, actually. It’s the most collaborative experience you could ever hope to have.” The actress previously worked with Leigh on 1996’s drama Secrets and Lies and has now reconnected with him for Hard Truths.
“ Basically, you have a list of people you know from real life. That list gets shortened until you end up with three to five people on that list,” Jean-Baptiste explains about Leigh’s unique filmmaking process (watch our complete video interview above). “Then once you’ve got those real people, you try and merge them together using physical exercises and talking them into existence. Once you’ve merged them, you then have a single character that you go all the way back to their first memory with.”
For Hard Truths, that process resulted in Pansy, an unhappy woman who lashes out at anyone and everyone around her, from strangers in public to her own family at home. It was “tiring” to play such a character, but “ delightful at the same time, because you’re really getting your teeth into something, and as most actors, that’s all we want. We want something that we can really kind of disappear into and relish.” That said, “ it was hard to turn the voice off, though, sometimes in the head, her thoughts bubbling away, criticizing people, complaining about things. Very often I’ve got to shut up and say, please, this is not the way I think or the way I see the world.”
This film has resulted in Oscar buzz for Jean-Baptiste and has already earned her awards from the British Independent Film Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the New York Film Critics Circle, among other organizations. She was previously nominated for an Oscar for the aforementioned Secrets and Lies, something she decribes as a “surreal” experience. Before that the Oscars were “ something that you had to stay up at night to watch because it’s this thing that happened in America far away in this place called Hollywood where all these very famous people are.” So when she herself was singled out for recognition, “ it was just like, huh? How did that happen?”
Getting that kind of attention again is “great. It’s absolutely wonderful. Again, you do a film with Michael, you don’t even know what it’s about, much less if it’s going to be any good. So when you do, and it’s getting this kind of attention and this kind of buzz, it’s just a wonderful thing.” She adds, “It’s a great thing for independent films, small films, films that haven’t been interfered with, that have just been a creative expression by the people involved in making it. It’s a very proud moment for us that it’s doing so well.”
