More and more people are being born, and the Earth isn’t getting any bigger. We’re on a serious disaster course. The only thing a filmmaker can do is try to express some hope in his work.

Question: Are you optimistic about the future?

Mike Leigh: I can’t really see how anybody could be particularly optimistic about the future in general because we are destroying the planet.  I mean we have been having a conversation here for some half an hour or perhaps 40 minutes and in the time that we’ve been talking far more people have been born who will fit into this entire skyscraper in New York that we’re actually sitting in and they have to be fed and the world hasn’t got any bigger in that 40 minutes, so... And this is quite apart from...  I mean, territory and food and resources are going to be fought over and that is quite apart from the additional burden of ridiculous religious fundamentalism of various kinds.  So it’s quite hard to be optimistic about the future, but we battle on and you know we value life and we… some of us try and express some sense of hope through the work that we do, but we can’t just sit around being blindly optimistic because we are on serious disaster courses I would say, but that is not news.

Recorded on October 7, 2010
Interviewed by Max Miller