ANYONE who’s ever read an interview with Oscar-winning film director Mike Leigh will know that for all the loveable fools he puts in his movies, he doesn’t suffer them too gladly in real life.
But he was on searing form by even his trenchant standards when I ran into him at the Screen on the Green in Islington on Sunday.
“He can burn in hell!” he boomed when I asked him for his opinion of Holborn squatters’ rights activist Jim Paton, the man he blamed for his latest film coming close to failure before a single frame had been shot.
Vera Drake – starring West Hampstead actress Imelda Staunton as a backstreet abortionist in 1950s Islington – has won rave reviews and is set to be Leigh’s biggest hit since the Oscar-winning Secrets and Lies.
But Leigh’s blazing row with tenants of Gray’s Inn Buildings in Rosebery Avenue, Holborn, in 2003 meant it nearly never happened.
Mr Leigh had planned to use the condemned block – now a building site – as a set, but was forced to find an alternative at short notice after tenants objected.
Speaking to me after the screening in Angel on Sunday, he said: “The people who lived in that block are the only people in the whole world that I don’t care whether they see the film or not.
“I couldn’t give a stuff about them.
“They behaved in an appallingly stupid way and were incredibly unfriendly.
“And the man who forced us to go elsewhere can burn in hell as far as I am concerned.”
The row began when the last tenants of Gray’s Inn Buildings, many of them former squatters, discovered that Leigh had been granted filming rights by their landlord, Community Housing Association (CHA), without their knowledge.
They were incensed that CHA had been paid while tenants were expected to put up with the disturbance for nothing, and that an advance crew of set dressers had damaged their communal garden.
Leigh and his crew were chased off by an angry mob as the ill-feeling peaked.
A peace deal was eventually brokered after he offered each tenant £1,000 for filming rights, but it collapsed in acrimony when Mr Paton held out for £2,000 because his flat was larger and had three tenants rather than one.
Mr Paton speaking yesterday (Wednesday) told me: “We wanted to teach Mike Leigh a lesson about how to treat people.
“He refused to deal with us directly and his whole version of the story is second hand.
“How would he have felt if we had turned up at his garden before 7am and started tearing up his garden?
“I haven’t seen the film but it’s probably very good if its like any of his others, but that doesn’t give Mr Leigh the right to behave in such an arrogant way.”
Mr Leigh countered: “A lot of people were very angry because they missed out on the £1,000, but it worked out better for us in the end because we went somewhere much better, where the buildings were better and the people were friendlier.”

Jake feels hard done by

IN a missive to comrades, the effusive Jake Sumner has unloosed his annoyance with the New Journal accusing this organ of trying to “unseat’ him as a Camden councillor for the Camden Town and Primrose Hill ward.
In a newsletter to Labourites in the ward, Cllr Sumner (pictured) clearly feels hard done by in the coverage of the controversial closure of the Camden Town Neighbourhood Advice Centre.
You may be aware that though the centre was shut down in December 2003, the building remains empty and boarded up. At last, a planning application to turn it into a mini-police station has just been handed in at the Town Hall – 13 months after the occupants were turfed out.
He admits that he – and the other ward councillors – feel ‘embarrassed’ about the drawn out episode. “Every day it remains empty is a poignant reminder,” he writes.
But, he emphasises, the ward councillors have been “continually pushing” to get it raised up the “political agenda”.
He implies, however, that all these efforts have been ignored by the New Journal. “No other councillors have received such vitriol”, he accuses.
With his newsletter dripping with such emotion, you would think members would rush to branch meetings eager for entertainment.
But I noticed that turn-outs are critically low – eight attended the December meeting while a previous meeting had to be cancelled because it was ‘inquorate’.

Harriet scotches Cook report

ALL those rumours that our mayor, Harriet Garland, was Peter Cook’s girlfriend can be laid to rest.
Though a TV documentary over Christmas suggested she was an old flame of the great Hampstead comedian (See centre pages) the mayor sadly took great delight last night (Wednesday) in denying any emotional involvement with Cook.
“I wasn’t a girlfriend of Peter’s,” she told me “though we were very good friends.”
Harriet (pictured) and her ex-husband Nick stayed with Cook and his first wife Betty in New York when Beyond the Fringe transferred to Broadway.
But whence the rumour? Wishful thinking on Peter’s part, I wonder?
“Well, it could have been,” she said. “I was very pretty in those days,” she replied bashfully.

Vegas-style drinks session

THE famously bibulous comic Johnny Vegas (pictured) and his entourage took over the Good Mixer pub in Camden Town on Monday to film a new TV show, Locked in Vegas.
His guests included Terry Nutkins from Animal Magic, Timmy Mallett from Wacaday and sit-com veteran Keith Barron.
During the day the Good Mixer’s staff were busy keeping tabs on the copious amounts of beer, champagne and cocktails which were flowing.
I hear that as time wore on a barrage of shouting and swearing rose from the pub leading to the sudden departure of one of the celebrities with the words ‘bloody disaster’ ringing in his ears.
By the end of the evening Johnny Vegas was in a very emotional mood.

So, will Ruth seize the Dei?

I CAN enlighten readers who may have been puzzled in reading recently that the new education secretary Ruth Kelly was a member of the seemingly mysterious Catholic body – Opus Dei (Latin for Work of God.)
All is revealed this week in an email from the information office of Opus Dei about the appointment of Father Gerard Sheehan, a priest of Opus Dei, as the new priest at St Thomas More church in Swiss Cottage.
Anyone who suspects Opus Dei is a kind of Masonic organisation have got it wrong.
It exists, says the email, to “promote a profound awareness of the universal call to holiness among men and women from all walks of life. The faithful carry out their mission to evangelise in the workplace giving coherent Christian witness at work, at home and in ordinary life.”
Gripped with this world outlook, I wonder what reforms Ruth Kelly will introduce in education.

Weighty tomes

Lovers of literature would do well to take a walk to King’s Cross today (Friday).
Housman’s, the venerable old bookseller situated in Caledonian Road, King’s Cross, has devised a novel way of reducing last year’s stock.
As a public-spirited way of celebrating their 60th anniversary, Housmans will be selling books by the kilo. At £5 per kilo this means that only aficionados of Umberto Eco and Marcel Proust’s gigantic tomes will struggle to secure a bargain.