Mike Leigh: Peterloo protesters would be ‘horrified’ by voter abstention

‘Never compromise’ … Mike Leigh at the Mediterrane film festival in Malta. Photograph: Tom Nicholson/REX/Shutterstock for Mediterrane Film Festival

Mike Leigh has criticised UK voters considering abstention at this year’s general election, saying the subjects of his 2018 historical drama Peterloo would be appalled by such disengagement.

Speaking at the Mediterrane film festival in Malta, Leigh said the protesters who gathered in St Peter’s Field in Manchester to demand the reform of parliamentary representation in 1819 would be “not only horrified but mystified” about “people procrastinating about whether to vote and seeing justification in not voting, which is what’s happening right now”.

An estimated 18 people died and more than 600 were injured after calvary charged at the 60,000-strong crowd, who were to be addressed by radical orator Henry Hunt. At the time, only the richest landowners could vote, very few of them in the industrial north of England.

Two years earlier, a mass petition to parliament for universal suffrage (for men) had been rejected by the House of Commons, despite attracting three-quarters of a million signatures.

The killings were dubbed the “Peterloo massacre” by the Manchester Observer, which folded in 1820 but urged its readers to instead read the Manchester Guardian, whose first reports came from Peterloo.

Despite strong reviews, Leigh’s Peterloo scored no Bafta nominations. Speaking in Malta, Leigh said that his period movies, including Peterloo, Mr Turner (2014) and Topsy-Turvy (1999), were the “only times I’ve been able to get bigger budgets”.

He continued: “What I failed to do and continue to fail to do to this day is to get money together to make a contemporary film on a bigger scale and with more characters. I couldn’t do a big wedding in detail because it takes time and money.

“My big regret – and I fear I will go to my grave before too long and carry this regret with me – is that no one ever had the balls to back a film on a bigger scale in the way I’d have liked to have made.”

Leigh nevertheless remained bullish about not cowing to Hollywood intervention to enable such endeavours. Asked his advice for younger film-makers, Leigh said: “Never say: ‘Well, I don’t really want to do this project but if I do this, then I’ll be able to do what I really want to do. You’re giving yourself away. You’re wasting your time. Never compromise, do what you really believe in and fight for it.”

Leigh, 81, made his name with Nuts in May (1976) and Abigail’s Party (1977), and made a succession of movies in the 1990s – Life is Sweet, Naked, and Secrets & Lies – which won him a reputation as an ambitious and excruciatingly accurate chronicler of contemporary English life.

He returned to this territory in 2008 with Happy-Go-Lucky and in 2010 with Another Year. His forthcoming film, Hard Truths, due for release in autumn, is another modern-day film and reunites him with Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Voter abstention is one of the unknowns in the UK general election, which takes place on 4 July, with potentially millions of voters likely to avoid the ballot box, citing disillusion with all political parties.