This interview of Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Interview Magazine by Ben Barna.

Mike Leigh is a genius at making movies that center on the parts of life no-one really wants to talk about. Anger is probably one of the defining characteristics of the last few years and it doesn’t really show up on the screen as the main character. Marianne’s character Pansy is a study of a person who is always angry. She’s a challenging person to stay with, not the usual gracious woman carrying anger with good posture and modesty. She’s someone you find easy it is to distance yourself, prefer not to see yourself in, and you’re left unsure how much of a choice it is for her to stay this angry. All of this has made the film stick inside my crevices and I know 10, 15 years from now, I’ll come back to it, and glean more. This is what makes a Mike Leigh movie, it lives forward.

I think we’ve become very lazy viewers, or very lazy storytellers, in that you’d watch a film and 10 minutes into a murder mystery or whatever, you’re like, “Oh god, it’s him. He’s the one that did it.” If this was a regular movie, Pansy, after the Mother’s Day lunch, would have transformed into this loving, pleasant, mild character. When in life does that ever happen? This movie is for adults. It’s for thinking people, and for people that can go, “Okay, I’m going to go and finish this film off in my head, or argue about it with my friends. I think she goes downstairs.” And other people go, “No, I don’t think she does. I think this is the breaking point and that she’s going to look after herself.” It’s about handing the movie over to the audience.