It isn't very often that you get invited on to the set of a film directed by British film-maker Mike Leigh. If you do, you are not likely to discover what the film is actually about, or to be told by this defiantly secretive director of his high hopes. "All I'll say about this film," says Leigh in a break from filming on a deserted housing project in London, "is that I have a wonderful cast and it concerns the usual things my films are about - love and death and hope and despair."
The secrecy is partly because the plot and filming schedule are worked out in weeks and sometimes months of rehearsal, and even then the actual shoot isn't set in stone. It's enough to make Hollywood shiver. Besides, Leigh doesn't like talking about his projects until after he's shot and edited them.
What he can say is that the film is about a mini-cab driver, played by Timothy Spall, and his family. This much is confirmed during a look at a sequence in a small top-floor bedroom, where myself, Leigh and Dick Pope, his now regular cinematographer, squeeze in to watch Spall and Lesley Manville as his wife say a lugubrious goodnight to each other.
Leigh tells me that the housing project in Greenwich, east London, is deserted except for one tenant who refuses to leave. It affords Leigh the peace and quiet he likes.
"We have so many regulars, one or two of them Oscar winners, that everyone knows how we like to proceed. There are no actors' tantrums and there's no shouting, even from me. We just get on with it."
Leigh's method makes the work of his regular producer and business partner, Simon Channing Williams of Thin Man Films, extremely difficult. Channing Williams says he has lost count of the times he's been listened to very politely and then just as politely shown the door. This is even after Oscars for Topsy Turvy and Secrets and Lies, which also won a Cannes Palme D'Or.
What Williams says during his pitch is anybody's guess. He can't say what the title is, he can't talk about a plot, he can't say who is likely to be in the cast. Presumably he just says it's a Mike Leigh film and reminds investors what the director has achieved. The Oscars have certainly helped, but it still isn't easy. Does Mike appreciate his difficulties?
"Yes, he does," says Channing Williams. "But he goes his own way, and that's that. I'm used to it by now."
Those who have allowed him to carry on regardless have been British film-backers Film Four, the now unfortunately extinct British Screen, and the French, who show more enthusiasm than British financiers for Leigh's projects and have backed him for his current project. But the fact is that only Topsy Turvy, his most expensive and expansive film, has failed to get its money back, though it was a close thing with Naked, also one of his best.
Leigh regrets that Topsy Turvy wasn't sent to Cannes because the French distributor thought French critics would not like it, not knowing much about the 19th-century British light opera creators Gilbert and Sullivan.
"That was a big mistake because it would have given us a good send-off. After all, it's not only the French who go to Cannes," he says. "Sometimes all the effort of planning and making a film gets ruined by matters that have nothing to do with it. But I'm very proud of Topsy Turvy. We got a lot of praise, even if the audiences were ultimately disappointing. I'm sure that if more had seen it, they would have liked it. I'm fed up with people saying to me that they live somewhere out in the sticks in Britain, they want to see my films, but they can't find them anywhere. Because if they do have a local cinema, it's not as if they are being fed with masterpieces!"
But it's the blockbusters that often bring in the budgets up front. "I'd love a bigger budget. But I'm careful and I don't go over-budget. I do what I can with what I've got. And that means very precise planning." Wouldn't Hollywood like that? "Perhaps. But I wouldn't like them. I don't like using star names and I don't like their kind of smiling interference. Which doesn't mean I would never make a film in America, or elsewhere. But I wouldn't do it for Hollywood. It's not my scene."
What is his scene is to continue making high-calibre films, which may prove more of a headache for his producer than for Leigh.
"I don't care if I never do another play; I think I've finished with the theatre. Film continues to fascinate me. What I don't always appreciate is what happens when we finally hit the cinemas, especially in this country."
Will his new film make a loss as Topsy Turvy did? "There's a palpable sense of excitement from the French backers as they watch the rushes," says Channing Williams. "There is a real feeling that this is something special."
With Mike Leigh, it usually is.