Girls talk

by Peter Keough

MIKE LEIGH may be a tough taskmaster, but Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman, as a pair of college roommates who reunite after 10 years in his new Career Girls, aren't complaining. The prospect of turning in an Oscar-nominated performance in a work by one of the world's greatest filmmakers is worth the temporary sacrifice of one's life and individuality.

"I haven't worked so hard in my life," says Steadman, who's in her first Mike Leigh movie. "And probably never will again unless I work with Mike Leigh. Being in every scene, it was 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, week in and week out. I think we only got two days off, Easter Sunday being one of them."

"It's kind of like having a baby," says Cartlidge, who previously worked with Leigh in Naked.

"And women say they'll never go through that again and they do," notes Steadman. "It would be difficult to say no to Mike. I love the way he works; those weeks of rehearsals were brilliant fun."

"He works through extensive improvisations over a period of months," explains Cartlidge. "He doesn't encourage improvisation actually in front of the camera. That's not what he's about. He's about being very precise and very crafted. So what you would do is collaborate with him, you will absolutely fix what's going to be said or done in a particular take or scene, but what is being said has been arrived at through the best of all possible combinations of a series of improvisations. It's not a question of sitting down and waiting for Mike Leigh to tell you what to say. It's a question of knowing your character 100 percent, having worked on it all these months and getting into the brainset of that character, being able to speak and express yourself in the way the character would."

Such an immersion in character is not so easy to slip out of once the shooting is over, Cartlidge points out.

"After I played Sophie in Naked, for example, I went on holiday with my boyfriend at the time. We went to France. I took Sophie's jacket with me, the boots, and the black trousers. I actually have no recollection of this. But I walked around basically in costume for a good week. I didn't realize it until months and months later, when my boyfriend said, do you realize you were in costume for the whole holiday?"

Sophie, like the two women in Career Girls, is typical of Mike Leigh's female characters in her uniqueness, but also in her victimization and damaged condition. Has Leigh a bit of a sexist streak?

"I think he's interested in damage in people in general," says Cartlidge. "Regardless of sex. Naked was accused of being a misogynist piece because it had a male character at the center of it who was very damaging. Mike does feel the world we're in is too abrasive to create these loving, caring people we all wish we were. It doesn't work. I think he's one of the few directors willing to face up to that. And he doesn't treat women patronizingly. He allows them to be unsympathetic, to be ugly, to be beautiful, to be painful, funny. Most men are terrified of women having their lipstick out of place, let alone scratching her head or picking her nose or having a laugh."

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Peter Keough can be reached at pkeough[a]phx.com.