Hannah Rothschild: How did the advent of Channel 4 change your working life?

Mike Leigh: Before then you couldn’t get an independent film together. I’d had a seventeen year break since my first film, Bleak Moments. Then Channel 4 came along and suddenly the landscape changed. I made my second film High Hopes for them.

Seventeen years is a long time to wait. Had you given up believing you’d make another feature?

Absolutely. And if you’d told me then that I’d go on to make eight or nine more feature films, get a number of Oscar nominations, two Oscars, a Palme d’Or and a Golden Lion at Venice, I simply would have said, go whistle.

Wasn’t it heartbreaking to spend seventeen years not doing what you really loved – making movies?

It was much more painful then than it is in retrospect because within that period of time I was still working all the time and developing my filmmaking skills. I had done quite a number of some very successful plays at the theatre and, apart from that, grown up somewhat.

You sound remarkably sanguine about it.

Things happen and life is meant to be that way you know. A little bit of Zen about the whole thing. It is what it is. And actually, it couldn’t have worked out better than the way that it has.

So how did Channel 4 contribute to your second film?

I’d worked with David Rose [the first head of Film4] a lot at the Beeb and did Nuts in May. And it was him who commissioned Meantime. Sadly, it was just a bit early to be a feature film, but six to nine months later it would have been. But we got on and did what’s now an obscure but very popular underground film. It is now out on DVD. Then I did, consecutively, The Short & Curlies, High Hopes, Life is Sweet and Naked.