How does Mike Leigh make a movie? It’s complicated, but his actors wouldn’t have it any other way

There’s a mythology that surrounds Mike Leigh’s films. It’s a famous methodology he’s cultivated over decades, from his early stage work to his film debut, 1971’s “Bleak Moments,” to his string of acclaimed titles — including “Naked”, “Topsy-Turvy” and “Happy-Go-Lucky” — through his most recent effort, the emotionally jarring “Hard Truths.” In fact, the filmmaker is incredulous that anyone might think that he could, as he puts it, “just point the camera at some actors and say, ‘Do whatever you feel like.’” “The idea that you could arrive at ‘Hard Truths’ that way is impossible,” Leigh tells me, sitting in StudioCanal’s London office with frequent collaborator Marianne Jean-Baptiste, 57, who stars as the hard-worn, furiously disconsolate Pansy Deacon in the film. But I love it.” Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths.” Her character began as a list: people Jean-Baptiste either knows or has encountered. Leigh had previously cast Jean-Baptiste in his stage play “It’s a Great Big Shame!,” and it felt like an easy yes to make her Hortense. “We spend so much time working on these characters and establishing their habits and things like that, so that when you come to improvise you’re coming in fully loaded,” Jean-Baptiste says.