Mike Leigh sits before me, in his Soho office, a man without regrets – certainly with regard to his work, but probably in most aspects of his life, one suspects. If this doesn’t make him unique in the film industry, then he’s certainly in a tiny minority. The 75-year-old British director has made 20-odd films – from his TV work in the 1970s up to his latest release, Peterloo, perhaps his most ambitious and certainly his most expensive project yet – and he has never once had his arm twisted to compromise on his creative vision. He chooses the subject, handpicks the actors and the version we see on the screen is exactly the one that Leigh intended.

“I’m open to people who are happy for me to do what I do,” he explains. “I’m not open to anybody who tries to tell me what to do. I have on many occasions walked away from a project where there’s been even the suggestion that, ‘Well, we’ll back the film so long as there’s an American star in it.’ Walk away.”

Really, he’d walk away? “Of course,” Leigh replies, clearly considering the question either idiotic or mad. “And I have done on a number of occasions. It’s like a novelist being told what the novel should have in it. Or a painter being told, ‘It must include a lighthouse.’ And that’s the polite version.”

So Leigh is no people-pleaser, and yet, of course, at the same time he has become one of our best loved film-makers. He was raised in Salford and when he started making plays, and then films, he always imagined he would focus on contemporary issues. A particular inspiration was Jack Clayton’s 1959 film Room at the Top, a story of love and class set in a Yorkshire mill town, which came out when Leigh was 16.

“Now when I saw it, which was in a local cinema in north Salford, what was exciting about it was if you walked out of the cinema into the street, it was the same world as was in the pictures,” recalls Leigh. “I’d spent all of that time up till then sitting as a kid thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a film where the characters in the film were like real people?’”

Leigh developed a method whereby he would begin each project without a script – only after months of rehearsal and improvisation would one emerge. The process would lead to a varied canon that includes Life is Sweet, Naked, Palme d’Or winner Secrets & Lies, and Vera Drake, which earned him a Bafta for best director. Away from work, in 1973 he married the actor Alison Steadman, a frequent collaborator on plays and in films, and the couple had two sons. They divorced in 2001, and Leigh now lives in central London with the actor Marion Bailey.

In 1999 Leigh moved into “period” pieces with Topsy-Turvy, a study of Gilbert and Sullivan’s creation of The Mikado. He has since made Mr Turner in 2014, following the final years of the painter JMW Turner, and now Peterloo, which had its premiere at the Venice film festival. (Peter Bradshaw, in his five-star Guardian review, wrote that it was a story that “needs to be heard right now”.)

The new film builds up to a reconstruction of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, a little-taught, shameful episode in which British troops turned on a peaceful pro-democracy rally in St Peter’s Field, Manchester. Back then, less than 3% of the population had the vote; Manchester didn’t even have a member of parliament. An estimated 60,000 people came to hear the radical orator Henry Hunt (played in Leigh’s film by Rory Kinnear), but as soon as he started to speak, soldiers charged. Up to 700 people were injured and 15 died. The outcry – the event was named Peterloo, a nod to the battle of Waterloo, which had taken place four years earlier – inspired the founding of the Manchester Guardian, now the Guardian, in 1821.

“A long time ago, I remember reading about it, thinking, ‘That would make a good film’, but that’s in the days before I thought I would make a period film at all,” says Leigh. “So I didn’t really think I would do that.”

Leigh changed his mind about five years ago. As always the process began without a script. Casting was particularly arduous this time round: there are about 160 actors in Peterloo. Leigh is wilfully mysterious about his auditions, describing them as “a trade secret”. He explains: “There are plenty of very good actors whose bag this isn’t, who don’t do character acting, who aren’t particularly interested in issues and the world. Apart from anything else, every actor in Peterloo was really on to it and into it. You know there are intelligent actors out there. And there are loads of actors out there who are very good actors but they are thick. And none of them are ever in my films.”

Leigh approaches the Observer’s You Ask The Questions interview in much the same resolute way that he makes films. He is sincere, often very funny, but when he has finished a thought, he lets you know and there’s no budging him. He’ll say: “That is all I have to say on the subject.” Or: “Moving swiftly on.” And if he doesn’t like a question, as will become clear, he certainly lets you know it.

Questions from famous fans

Lesley Manville
Actor

Sometimes in our work the stars align and we create something that we feel is personally complete, true and represents the best of ourselves. Is there a film or play in your career for which you feel this is true and why?
It’s slightly like being asked which of my two children I prefer. I love them both. And in a way that’s how I feel about my work when it boils down to it. Obviously, some of my pieces resonate in particular ways. For example, Meantime, which came out of wanting to say something about unemployment at a certain stage four years into Thatcher’s reign, I’ve got a kind of soft spot for that, but it isn’t that I really think it’s better or more what Lesley’s asking about than any of the other films.

Jarvis Cocker
Musician

How did you first learn about the Peterloo massacre? They don’t teach you about it at school…
Well, we did it for four seconds for O-level, in 1959, along with the Cato Street Conspiracy and all that, but there was no sense of “it happened here.” And when we were making the film, a lot of people ranging from early 20s to my age didn’t know about it. Where I grew up in north Salford, you could get to where it happened on the bus in 15 minutes and I never knew about it. My dad was a socialist, never mentioned it. My primary school could have taken us down to where it happened, marched us around and got us back to school by lunchtime, it was that close.

Angela Eagle
Labour MP

Do you think that those who fought for a radical and democratic reform of the British political system after the Napoleonic wars would be satisfied with the progress we’ve made since?
Good question, Angela. If their time machine dropped anchor in 1945, they’d have been ecstatic. If they got back into the time machine and moved forward to 2018, I think they’d have mixed feelings. Of course they’d have been enervated by the universal franchise, but they would have found it horrifying that people have the vote and don’t vote. They would have found that extraordinary, that working-class people, all sorts of people, don’t manifest their rights.

The other thing you get in the film – this is what happened – is you get these working-class radicals, young firebrands, who are not only making articulate speeches, they’re quoting the classics. Don’t forget, there was no education, so they’ve been either self-taught or taught through Sunday schools. Now those people, again, if they got out of the time machine now would be horrified that people have education and they don’t take advantage of it, they are cynical about it.

Mary Anne Hobbs
DJ

Are you happy?
Yes, I am very happy. I am delighted to have lived as long as I have. Not least because my father died after many heart attacks at 71, so I’ve already beaten him by four ye ars. His eldest brother died of a heart attack at 39, his elder brother died of a heart attack at 59, and his sister died of a heart attack at 55. So I’m happy to be alive and I’m happy to have had what I regard as a privilege of having made 21 films without any interference from anybody, which is amazing. And a lot of plays. I’m happy to be a grandfather. I’m happy in my domestic situation. And I’m more than anything eternally gastronomically happy. That is the answer to that question.

Jim Broadbent
Actor

Who are your favourite directors, past and present?
Ha, thanks Jim. Remind me to break your legs – no, I’m being silly. I hate these questions, because it’s so wide-ranging. Miloš Forman, Ermanno Olmi, Billy Wilder, Ken Loach, [Yasujirō] Ozu, [Akira] Kurosawa, Ida Lupino. The thing is, because I’m a film watcher and a film lover, there’s all kinds. David Lynch is in many ways very alien to me, but I think he’s a really great director.

Rachel Unthank
Singer-songwriter

The wonderful thing about democracy is that everyone counts, everybody has a voice. Making Peterloo, was it difficult to find those individual voices, and did original accounts and source material help you tell the personal stories and fates that must have been caught up in this epic struggle?
Original accounts were very important and very helpful. And it isn’t difficult to find them because a great deal of material is documented: 300 witnesses of the actual event all testified after the event. All the newspapers of the period exist, both in the British Library and the National Archive at Kew, and they were all at our disposal. And although this is not what the question is directly about, I hope that the film that we’ve made gives you a sense of the importance not only of community and society but the strength of individuals, the individual humanity, which is what I try and do in all my films.

Joan Bakewell
Broadcaster and writer

How much did growing up in Manchester shape your politics and the radical tradition?
It did, but more by osmosis than by indoctrination. You grow up in Manchester and Salford, you grow up in a world where people tell it like it is – and don’t bullshit. And that has informed not just the way I am, but the way I look at things to some degree. I suppose it has shaped my politics, but I can’t really articulate that.

Nina Stibbe
Writer

I once heard of a person writing a thesis entitled ‘Beards in the work of Mike Leigh’. How important are beards to you?
Beards? Fucking silly question. Beards are not especially important to me, but I do think that shaving is a filthy habit. And I’ve had a beard continuously since March 1967, and my children, who are now in their late 30s and early 40s, used to say they would creep into the bedroom in the middle of the night and shave me. They’ve never seen me without a beard except in photographs.

Why did I stop shaving? Well, at that time, if you really want the details, I had occasionally shaved off my beard because I occasionally did a bit of acting. But at that point in the proceedings I was 24 and was working as the assistant director at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, and I knew that I was just going to be a director for ever. And although I don’t have a beard because I think you look more like a director if you’ve got a beard, I do think shaving is a time-wasting, filthy, irrelevant and resource-wasting habit. And I was gagging to stop shaving and I did at that point.

Emily Thornberry
Labour MP

Given how long Mr Turner was in your mind before you could bring it to the screen, what’s the next great Mike Leigh film we haven’t seen yet because you’re still waiting for the funding?
This is a question with no answer, because the vast majority of my films – the exceptions being Topsy-Turvy, Mr Turner and Peterloo – have been films where I have not said anything about what they were going to be, because they’ve evolved during the process of manufacture. And any future projects come under that heading and there isn’t a nurtured project that hasn’t yet happened.

Francis Lee
Director

You’ve given me brilliant advice in the past, but what’s the best advice you’ve been given?
It’s probably, “Fuck off and don’t waste my time!” Now, that’s a really hard question. If I’m totally honest, Francis, I actually don’t know the answer to that question, so without wanting to sound arrogant, I don’t remember ever having been given what I would regard as brilliant advice. I’m afraid that’s the answer.

Jon McGregor
Novelist and short story writer

How many times would you recommend chewing, say, a mouthful of nuts? Or mushrooms?
This is obviously a reference to Nuts in May [Leigh’s 1976 TV film]. Keith’s insistence on 75 times, which of course comes from WE Gladstone, is the definitive answer. And it is not in my gift to challenge such wisdom.

Questions from readers

Peterloo appears to be a bigger, broader film than any you have attempted before, and on an important subject that other directors have avoided. Were you daunted or overwhelmed at any stage about the task you took on? What drove you to see it through?
Dick Curtis, posted online
I was daunted because it is a daunting subject, but the important thing is that, unlike novelists and painters and potters and poets, you don’t make films by yourself. And I work with a really creative and talented and committed team of people – on both sides of the camera, crew and actors. So I was daunted, but overwhelmed no, because I think once you reach the state of being overwhelmed then things have got on top of you and things are going wrong and I don’t think that happened.

Your films have contained many career-best performances from actors (Timothy Spall, Alison Steadman, David Thewlis). Did your Rada training inform the way you work with the actors on your films – either positively or negatively?
PercyThrills, online
It absolutely informs the way I work with actors: it was the starting point and the starting point was negative. In other words, when I went to Rada – and Rada is very different now it has to be stressed, it’s a good school – but when I went there in 1960, what you did there was a very old-fashioned kind of acting. Very external, technical, you never investigated anything, you never asked questions about, “Who are these people?” You never even talked about what happened previous to this action, you never did any research, any improvisation. And I spent my whole time there before I graduated thinking, “It could be better than this.” So it was the starting point for my whole approach to acting and completely fed into how I work with actors.

Coming from such an “establishment” middle-class background (father a GP, attended a grammar school and then Rada, then Central School of Art and Design, then the RSC), why do you think yourself qualified to tell the experience of the working classes when you yourself have never had to struggle?
Likewhatever, online
First of all, I don’t come from an “establishment” middle-class background. I come from what you could call a middle-class background because my old man was a doctor. Secondly, I grew up in a working-class area and went to working-class schools with working-class kids and so on. Thirdly, and this is the important answer to the question, I would consider that I am – as any decent artist should be – capable of understanding, sympathising and empathising with all kinds of people. So the idea that because I’ve never struggled – and who’s to say that I’ve never struggled? The questioner doesn’t know enough to make such an assertion, but let’s accept for argument’s sake the premise – that does not disqualify me from making stories about people of all shapes and sizes.

You have said: “My job is to liberate the actors and give them immense scope to be creative.” How did this manifest itself in Peterloo? How much creative licence did you afford the actors?
Cathy Morris
Well, in spirit I gave them as much creative licence as ever I do, because that’s how it works. It may be that an actor is standing up and saying lines that come from a speech that somebody said 200 years ago, but there’s more to it than just saying the lines in the speech. The question is, “Who is the character? How does the character behave? What is his or her experience? What is the context in which this is happening? How are other people reacting?” And those things have all been arrived at by exactly the same means that I would arrive at any action in any of my films.

There’s a scene in Topsy-Turvy where Gilbert and Sullivan are sitting on a sofa and basically Sullivan is trying to say to Gilbert, “I don’t want to compose any more of these trivial works. I want to compose truthful things about life.” And quite a lot of what they say to each other in that scene has been taken from letters they actually wrote to each other, but we’ve made it organic, we’ve stitched together. So rather than just improvise and fix the lines, we’ve assimilated actual dialogue. And famously, JMW Turner apparently said, “The sun is god,” at the moment that he kicked the bucket. It’s obvious that Timothy Spall didn’t improvise, “The sun is god,” because it’s written everywhere you care to look that that’s what he said. But that’s easy, that’s just saying it. The question is, what about the characterisation? The performance? The context? And that can only be approached in exactly the same way that I’d approach characters we are making up from scratch and situations we are evolving from scratch.

When choosing a theme to explore for a film, what are the elements you need before you decide it is worth doing?
David Buckingham
This is an impossible question to answer, it really is. Because what I don’t do, that other people making different kinds of films do do, is to say, “This is a theme, let’s build a story around this theme.” Because it’s about people, looked at in various different kinds of ways. What the themes are sort of emerge. Now, of course, I’ve made films that started from a particular thematic premise: Secrets & Lies came out of wanting to do something with adoption, because I knew people who had adoption-related experiences. Vera Drake comes out of the fact that I’m old enough to know what it was like before the 1967 Abortion Act when people had unwanted pregnancies and there were illegal abortionists around.

But both of the themes implicit in those choices are obvious immediately, without even thinking about it. You just know they come ready made in the human experience, on all kinds of levels. So I suppose I’m saying, I don’t really think in terms of themes, but about people issues. Relationship issues. Society issues. Coping issues.

Do you have any movie that you regret making?
Taco DiCaprio, online
No. It’s the same question as which is my favourite film. To have a film that you actually regretted making, it would have to be a film where the content or indeed the quality of the film-making was so bad that you didn’t want anyone to see it. Or that it was afflicted by so much compromise that, again, you feel you’d rather it didn’t exist. Again, without being smug, I have the privilege of never having made such a film. No film I’ve made has been interfered with.

Your films have, at least on one occasion, been compared to Yasujirō Ozu, in the sense that they concentrate on quiet and quaint real-life stories. What were your early directorial influences? And have they changed over the years?
Alexander Turner, online
Until I was 17, and came to London, I never saw a film that wasn’t in English. I only saw Hollywood and British movies. And I saw a lot of films, I went to the pictures a lot. So my early formative perception of cinema was westerns and other kinds of Hollywood movies and musicals and British films, a lot of British war films. At that stage I was very influenced by Ealing comedies and a bit later by Boulting brothers, and by Powell and Pressburger.

I hit London at exactly this time of year in 1960 and – wham! – world cinema. I hadn’t seen a French film or an Italian film or a Russian film or a Swedish film or an Indian film like Satyajit Ray, fantastic. All the nouvelle vague guys blew your mind. I discovered Italian neo-realist cinema, and Japanese cinema, Bergman. I think within a week of arriving in London I found myself at what was called the St Pancras arts festival, and they showed this strange Swedish film about this knight playing chess with death [Bergman’s The Seventh Seal]. I mean, it was a mind-blower!

Has a project ever been discussed in which you, Ken Loach and Jimmy McGovern come together and create the mother of all-powerful dramas?
25aubrey, online
No, is the short answer to that. And I can’t expand on that, except to point out that Jimmy McGovern is a writer, I am my writer, and indeed I don’t know what [Ken Loach’s regular screenwriter] Paul Laverty would have to say about it. But apart from all those refined points, the short answer to the question is no. Never.

Given that most directors work in a very different way from yours, do you find the majority of films unwatchable for being stagey and fake?
tommyboy79, online
No, I don’t, I enjoy watching films. At this moment, we’re a few days away from the London film festival where I have a free pass, and I clear my diary and watch films of all shapes and sizes because I love watching films, and watching films is as important a part of being a film-maker to me as anything else, just as you would expect novelists to read books and painters to look at art. Of course there are films every so often that I do find fake or stagey, but that’s not an endemic condition of the fact that it wasn’t directed by me.

Have you ever been courted by major studios to take on a big-budget movie? If not, would you like to do it? Would you like to take James Bond in a new direction?
Dave Phillips
[Laughs] Well, I’ve always thought that it would be a good idea to make a film about James Bond going to visit his ailing mother in a suburban house. The entire film is about that confrontation! When I got the best director Bafta award for Vera Drake back in the day, back in 2005, the event was at a hotel on Park Lane and I remember, we all had quite a lot to drink and there was a lot of jubilation. And there is a staircase that goes down with a balcony around it and I’d just been introduced to [Bond franchise producer] Barbara Broccoli, and we walked down together, you see. And as we were walking down, people were saying, “Congratulations Mike!” and I said, “I’m directing the next James Bond film,” which Barbara Broccoli was very amused by as well. And people, being far dumber than you expect, went, “Oh great, great!” As if.

I’ve never had serious discussions with major studios because that’s not the sort of film that I make. And if I did, the film would be interfered with to such an extent that it would never happen anyway. So it’s never really arisen. However, this is a slight footnote to that: I long ago – as I’ve already said – gave up all desire in any shape or form to be an actor, but I have always thought it would be nice to be the man in the James Bond film who says, [adopts an eastern European accent] “Good evening, Mr Bond.”

How do you manage to make such depressing films and not end up jumping off a bridge? I do like your films by the way.
_plank, online_
Well, first of all, I can’t swim. Although not all bridges, it’s true, are over water. But I would reject the idea that my films are completely depressing to the exclusion of all else. My films are about humanity and there’s always love and warmth and humour and things that are sad and depressing as well. I’ve never made a film that is exclusively, relentlessly bleak and depressing. So if there is a reason why the reader actually likes my films, despite the question, that’s the reason.

If I wanted to become the next Mike Leigh, what advice would you give me to make my dream a reality?
Shannamy, online
[Snorts] Stop shaving and jump off a bridge. What a fucking silly question! Being the next Mike Leigh would not be as great as you may think. And what you should really do is concentrate on being the next you. And my only advice to you in that project would be: never compromise. So it invites a pompous answer and there it is.

I know it’s supposed to be private but did you vote Remain or Leave? What made you go for your choice?
compayEE, online
What do you think the answer to that is? Guess! Of course I voted Remain. It was obvious at the time of the referendum that Brexit was a ridiculous, dangerous course of action. But now, two-and-a-half years on, it becomes abundantly clear on a daily basis that this is proved. We are on a disaster course, that’s all I have to say on that.

1819: The Peterloo massacre; 1919: The Battle of George Square; 2019… Where will the riots start?
AlexMontrose, online
This is a question that is probably more Brexit-related than we care to think. We can’t know where those riots will start, but if they do start it won’t be good news. And I derive no pleasure from constructing the sequence of 1819, 1919 and 2019.

Peterloo is released in the UK on 2 November