Sweet Sue, the delightfully spiky new comedy from Leo Leigh, opens with a disastrous date. The titular east London heroine, who is played with flattened charm by Maggie O’Neill, has been waiting at an inexpensive-looking restaurant for 20 minutes, eating breadsticks, when her date calls. “Where are you?” she protests. “I’m starving here.”
A heaving voice on the other end of the call says he has had enough. It’s official: he has stood her up. It’s the first of many blackly comic relationship catastrophes for Sue, the owner-operator of the tatty Sue’s Party Supplies emporium.
It gets worse. Her elderly mum is vocally disappointed when Sue calls around to the nursing home instead of her brother Pete. “He’s not going to be able to see you for a bit, Mum,” says Sue. That’s an understatement. At Pete’s funeral she meets Ron (Tony Pitts), a socially awkward biker with a preening, Instagramming son named Anthony (a scene-stealing Harry Trevaldwyn), who often has a “sugar daddy with boundaries” in tow.
These very different men come to define – or possibly blight – Sue’s emotionally ramshackle existence.
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The film, which unfolds as a series of vignettes, was developed over several years and extensively workshopped. “I’d say 90 per cent of what you see in the film was there in terms of structure and story,” says Leigh. “There just wasn’t any dialogue. The way I write is that everything is broken down in a script format. So, for instance, the opening scene in the Italian restaurant would stay ‘Interior, an Italian restaurant, a woman sitting alone, the sound of a phone, and a man saying he’s not coming.’ The whole film is structured like that. The script is only about 30 pages. But it’s a conventional script other than having no dialogue.”
The methodology has produced one of the year’s most complicated female characters. Sue is simultaneously downtrodden and irrepressible. She’s done with dating yet scrolling through a dating app. She’s Anthony’s new best friend and then suddenly – hilariously – his wicked stepmother. It’s an interesting first feature from a male director.
“I honestly wish I had some amazing speech about that,” says Leigh. “To me, it genuinely felt like an option like any other. Why not make it about her? But now people are seeing the film they keep asking me why. And my answer to that is: why not? It was a better way into the story. I understand why people are curious. It says more about the lack of roles for women than my intentions.”
Leo Leigh is the son of Alison Steadman, the star of Abigail’s Party, and Mike Leigh, the Palme d’Or-winning director of Secrets & Lies. His early memories include many set visits.
“My first was probably Life Is Sweet, in 1990,” he says. “The scene was kids dancing with their dance teacher. Don’t think there was anything before that. It wasn’t like Francis Ford Coppola taking his kids on to the set of Apocalypse Now. We were allowed on set at an age when we weren’t going to be a problem. There was such a friendly atmosphere. Everyone was quiet and respectful ... People assume I was having play dates with Lily Allen and Peaches Geldof. I hung out with my mates in Wood Green [in north London]. We didn’t know anyone in show business. Set visits just felt like watching mates get together to make something.”
Growing up, Leigh watched Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton from his dad’s collection, graduating to a local video store where the kindly proprietor was cavalier with age restrictions on Predator, and onwards to the works of Shirley Clarke, Alan Clarke, David Leland, Hal Ashby and Todd Solondz. These days he’s impressed by the uncompromising work of Luna Carmoon and the documentaries of Molly Dineen.
“I find her films a massive inspiration,” says Leigh. “I think films, especially documentaries, are now so squeaky-clean, with drone shots. She’s a film-maker with a camera who goes out and makes documentaries in a no-nonsense way. I think that’s missing from a lot of contemporary documentary making.”
Much of Leigh’s work has been in documentaries, including Fact or Fiction: The Life and Times of a Ping Pong Hustler, a portrait of the former table tennis champion Marty Reisman, and short films for Vice, notably as the cinematographer for Beautiful Liverpool.
“I based the characters in Sweet Sue on characters that I’ve met in real life,” he says. “Sometimes you need someone and you think, Wow, this person, this story and who they are would make a great documentary. But sometimes you just see someone out on the street or you meet somebody at a party and you think, They are not necessarily documentary material but their character should be in a film. In that sense it’s a similar process. But the actual process of making a documentary and a feature is very different.”
Last year Leigh’s first music video, for Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s side project The Smile, provoked a sensational response. Free in the Knowledge introduced a very English countercultural group and, in disorienting cuts, charted a psychedelic meltdown.
“I got a call to see if I had an idea from Smile. That was pretty mind-blowing in itself. I was already working on something that is loosely based on that film. Thom Yorke is amazing. The chat we had beforehand about film, music and art was amazing. He gave me lots of notes about the edit, but it was collaborative. It was never ‘I am Thom Yorke: do it this way.’ It was fun.”
Leigh is working towards a feature based on the concept of Free in the Knowledge. It’s being developed at the BBC. We can hardly wait.
Sweet Sue opens in cinemas on Friday, December 22nd
