Creating ‘Career Girls’

Flashback. The 1980s. Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman are two young women on the verge of Important Acting Careers. Cartlidge, a London native, is scrounging a living by posing nude in art classes. Belfast-born Steadman is taking time off from university studies to live the high life in Italy with her boyfriend.

Flash-forward. 1997. Manhattan. Cartlidge and Steadman are negotiating the preposterous postmodern furniture in the lobby of the Royalton Hotel. They have come to talk about their work on Mike Leigh’s “Career Girls,” which opens Friday in Los Angeles and New York. The film roams back and forth between the ‘80s and the present as it traces the friendship between two university roommates who meet again at age 30.

Leigh’s first effort since the breakout success of last year’s “Secrets & Lies,” the film is a tour de force for the two actresses, who alternate between the tics and neuroses of unformed teenagers and the self-confident poise of single working women.

As an eczema-ridden schoolgirl, Steadman’s Annie is an emotional house of cards. Even as an assured adult, she can barely make it up in a high-rise glass elevator without cowering toward the door. Cartlidge’s student Hannah is tough and manic, insulating herself against the world with a shield of glib jokes. The wit mellows somewhat as an adult, when Hannah adopts the starchier posture of a yuppie worker bee.

“They are poles apart but similar in so many ways,” says the fresh-faced Steadman with a light Northern Ireland lilt, initiating a breezy give-and-take with her co-star. “There are amazing coincidences, synchronicities, if you will, in their various backgrounds,” chimes in Cartlidge, whose lanky, angular art-model’s face suggests the love child of a Giacometti sculpture and Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”

The “synchronicity” between the two actresses, too, is the result of the extraordinarily intimate four-and-a-half-month working relationship.

It is the signature cart-before-the-horse process by which Leigh first chooses actors with whom he wants to work, then subjects them to an intensive period of improvisations out of which characters and, ultimately, a “script” are invented. Even in the most final state of the dialogue, nothing is written down.

What never ceases to astonish audiences about the polished end result of any Leigh film is that neither the director nor his actors set out with the first clue as to what the film will be about.

Leigh’s now-fabled method of making movies has been so chronicled by the media that the actresses have been given marching orders by the film’s publicist to avoid discussing the process. Talk about mission impossible. With little prodding, the women begin to bend the rules. What, for instance, would be a typical improvisation?

“An example would be the first time Annie meets Hannah and her roommate Claire,” explains Steadman. “She has rung them up prior to going over to see if the room they are letting is still empty. They arrange a meeting. And you do the improvisation around that. So the scene you see where Annie knocks on the door and is presented to Hannah and Annie is that improvisation, refined. Then you have to improvise a whole chunk of time when they were at college together, figuring out what their preoccupations were. Hours and hours and hours are spent living in that student flat with everything in it, establishing as much of the physical reality as possible.”

For Cartlidge, the film caps an extraordinary run of movie roles, including Emily Watson’s compassionate sister-in-law in Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves,” the photo agent in Milcho Manchevski’s “Before the Rain,” and Sophie, David Thewlis’ clinging ex-girlfriend in Leigh’s “Naked.” In Steadman’s case, it marks a formidable film debut after stage and television credits.

While some actors might blanch at the prospect of going into a film without the conventional net of a pre-ordained screenplay, Cartlidge, a two-time Leigh veteran, embraces the method.

“I actually think it feels like you’ve got more of a net,” she insists. “I’m not worrying before I come into this interview, ‘Ohmigod, what am I going to say? How am I going to sit?’ I’m not worrying about it, because I know who I am--if you say to me, ‘What color shoes did you wear yesterday?’ I could tell you. Now if you know your character as well as you know yourself, if you’ve done your job properly and have made a detailed, six-dimensional person, all you have to do is be. It’s an amazing security. It’s also exhausting.”

At least some of that exhaustion, as Steadman explains, can be attributed to Leigh’s insistence on improvisations that flesh in the characters’ lives during the intervening years of the film’s action, material we never get to see but which, nevertheless, was essential to the actresses in shaping the matured characters.

“We did thousands of hours of improvisations, so obviously there is a wealth of material that didn’t get onto the screen or else it would be four hours long. . . .”

“But that is Mike Leigh’s territory and his skill,” says Cartlidge, picking up the ball. “If you had different directors watching the same improvs, you’d end up with any number of different movies. But what you finally end up with is Mike’s choice and sense and perception of those situations. So it’s a skill.”

What Leigh calls “the manufacture” of his movies, begins with the selection of his actors.

“I do these things very empirically and very instinctively and intuitively,” he said in an interview from London. “But it felt like a good combination. Katrin obviously did an extraordinary character in ‘Naked,’ and she’s done some other films as you know, and it felt just time to kind of move on with her. I happen to have a particularly good rapport with her. And Lynda, who is a new discovery, just seemed to have a special, a real kind of focused intelligence and a questioning mind. It just felt like somebody I wanted to work with.”

Leigh filmed the past and present scenes in separate chunks, except for a three-day stretch when torrid summer heat necessitated switching time periods to take advantage of cooler locations.

“What is interesting about that time-period exploration,” Cartlidge continues, “is trying to examine how much of the external world affects a personality.

“I loved particularly thinking about how Hannah’s sense of humor would change--what levels would it go to. It’s still there, but it’s nothing as raw or uncontrolled or anarchic as it was. The anger is still there, but it’s pinned down. I really like the pinstripe jacket she later wears, because it is a metaphor exactly for what has happened to her emotionally, that it’s all been sorted into neat lines. But it’s still an armor. It’s still an armadillo.”

Cartlidge’s little play on words reflects just how deeply Hannah’s pugnacious wit has inhabited her soul. “I don’t know where it came from,” insists Cartlidge, who had to hone her wit the way a dancer trains her body. “My flat, which is only two rooms, was covered in boxes of books ranging from limericks of the toilet to ‘Wuthering Heights’ [an essential prop in “Career Girls”]. I was dipping into anything. It got to the point where I’d be picking this bill up [she reaches for the breakfast tab on our table] and read ‘17% gratuity.’ I’d start thinking about the nature of gratuity and think, ‘What’s a joke about gratuity?’ ”

Steadman had to match Hannah’s glibness, point for point, in the all-encompassing degree of her own character’s frailty: Nervous twitches aside, the young Annie is a walking tear duct, waiting to spill. So invested was Steadman in the young woman’s suffering that when she attended a screening of the film with the cast and crew, she was startled by the sound of laughter. “Annie was so often the butt of all the jokes that it took a long time till I could distance myself from it. I didn’t even think we had a funny film on our hands.”

The ability to find the humor in people’s Achilles’ heels and excesses is a specialty of Leigh. “Career Girls” includes a sad-sack character named Ricky (played by Mark Benton), a fleshy idiot savant whose neurotic hemming-and-hawing makes Hannah and Annie seem models of composure by comparison.

Cartlidge defends her director’s winking perspective, one that encourages extreme postures from his actors and often mocking laughter from the audience. “I share the view with Mike that the world is full of grotesques. And that, unfortunately, because of some law of cinema, we’re not used to seeing people who are not within the neat confines of the frame. People with big mannerisms, who don’t dress according to the fashion books. We feel somehow it’s a little bit too vulgar for our tastes. ‘But once you see a Mike Leigh film, you go into the streets and see people and start going, ‘Why, she could be a Mike Leigh character!’

“Let’s bust the edges of the frame! Let’s see two women behaving totally indecorously, not sitting demurely on a sofa in a nice pair of stilettos. Let’s see them picking their noses and scratching their bums. I bought a book of Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs the other day. He also loved the grotesque, and some of his most personal drawings are of women sitting in chairs with their legs wide open and their backs curved. And these are real people! I’m sure at the time people would have gone, ‘How disgusting to show women like that.’ But we are like that!”

Flashback. The 1980s. London. Katrin Cartlidge is beginning to get low-paying roles in fringe theater, where she learns her craft. At 21, she lands a gig in a TV soap opera called “Brookside.” Not her cup of tea, but it’s money, and it beats nude modeling.

Flashback. The 1980s. London. Lynda Steadman has finished her studies at a cushy drama school where she would hear Mike Leigh lecture and would daydream about appearing in his movies. Instead, she gets a TV job, a soap opera called “Brookside.” It is one year after Cartlidge has left the show.

Flash-forward. 1997. New York. Katrin Cartlidge is recalling the year of “absolute hell” she spent as an actress on “Brookside” when Lynda Steadman comments, “In this soap there are loads of different families, but my particular character was brought into the same family that Katrin’s character was brought into.”

“No!” says Cartlidge, her eyes flaring. “That’s the first time I’m hearing that!”

Steadman shifts into a dishy TV soap mode. “I became a good friend of Jim and, oh, I can’t remember all their names now, but I was involved in Colin’s family.”

Cartlidge takes this in, abashed.

Steadman adds, “Oh, you didn’t know that?”

A smile of mock recognition breaks across Cartlidge’s face. “So, we’re from . . . “ she exclaims.

The actresses whoop with laughter at this perfectly Shakespearean climax to 4 1/2 months in which their lives merged, then splintered off again in separate directions.