Traveling the Road to Reality : Movies: British director Mike Leigh delights in stories that depict people the way they are, not the way Hollywood thinks they ought to be.

If Mike Leigh had been given the chance to direct “Die Hard 2,” he would have cut away all that stuff about terrorists and machine guns and hand grenades and planes blowing up. For him, the movie would have started as soon as Bruce Willis got Bonnie Bedelia out of the airport and went home to spend Christmas with the in-laws.

What most engages the British director’s warm, wry, imagination--class differences, family politics, economic blight--are so far from the loop of commercial moviemaking that it’s doubtful Leigh will ever be given a chance to direct a big-time movie, action or otherwise.

This suits Leigh just fine. He says he probably wouldn’t be any good at it because he’s far more interested in what he calls “the continuous subject matter” of Life As It Is Lived Today.

Not that Leigh wouldn’t like a bigger audience. His 1988 film “High Hopes” was greeted with such enthusiasm on both shores that many of his rooters believed he was about to make a breakthrough in the international market. The film is a charming, pokey and velvet-fisted view of Thatcher-era Britain as waded through by a pair of aging hippie Marxists and their economically and emotionally stressed friends and family.

In “High Hopes,” one saw the political aspects first, while human aspects gradually emerged into view. The opposite may be true of Leigh’s new film, “Life Is Sweet,” now playing at the Westside Pavilion.

“Life Is Sweet” looks like a garden-variety working-class sitcom: Gruff and klutzy dad (Jim Broadbent) works as a hotel chef and has sunk some of the family nest egg on a mobile snack truck that just sits in the driveway. Sweet and giggly mom (Alison Steadman, Leigh’s real-life wife) teaches dance to kids and sells baby clothes. Their twin daughters (Claire Skinner, Jane Horrocks) are as different as night and day. One works as a plumber and speaks in a soft, gentle whisper. The other sits around the house, mopes, shrieks and makes herself vomit junk food.

Such details give the movie some of its darker tinting. And yet overall, it has the expansive, limber humanism of “High Hopes” and is, on the surface, less “political” in tone.

Or so Leigh thought. When he and Steadman went to New York to promote the movie, they attended a special preview of the film before “what I suppose you can say is a middle-aged, middle-class, middlebrow audience,” he said.

To Leigh’s surprise, many in the audience grumbled in outrage. Some even walked out in protest.

“A lot of them said they couldn’t understand the dialect,” Leigh said a couple days later. “But the bottom line was: They found it offensive. It was slightly throwing because we had a rather glib assumption that absolutely everybody was going to love it and we realized this wasn’t the case. It’s . . . well, in a way, it’s a classic middle-class response to someone who really looks at things as they are. In the end, I suppose this makes it a subversive film even if that wasn’t the intent.”

Such extreme reaction may also come from the fact that his kind of naturalism, however amiably packaged, registers too far off the scale of what movie audiences are conditioned to expect; his characters don’t behave in archetypal ways and don’t resolve their conflicts as neatly as they do on TV or mainstream movies--that is, when movies deal with working-class families at all.

“Yes, well, I suppose all that comes from my point of view,” Leigh said, “which is merely to look at people as people are, as opposed to looking at people through the kind of prism which is a received idea of how people ought to behave in the movies.”

The “Hollywood propaganda machine,” Leigh said, conditions audiences to expect standard, predictable fare.

“And the tragedy is that the actual propaganda spreads far into the corners of people’s minds to the point that it affects not only the movies they watch, but the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the music they hear,” he said. “So it distorts the reality so much that the reality becomes the fake reality of popular culture. Incidentally, we’ve got two kids ages 13 and 10 and they are as susceptible to this as any kids in the United States.”

Leigh was born in Manchester in 1943 to a doctor who practiced in the kind of lower-middle-class environment that has informed the director’s work. Like many other British kids growing up in the ‘50s, Leigh spent a lot of time in darkened movie houses.

He studied art, acting, film and theatrical direction at schools such as the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He made his first feature film in 1971, “Bleak Moments,” which won awards at film festivals in Chicago and Locarno, Italy, and he spent most of the next two decades working in British television which, he says, “is where the British film industry basically was hiding out” throughout the ‘70s.

Throughout this period, Leigh wrote and directed slice-of-life dramedies like “Nuts in May,” “Four Days in July,” “Grownups,” and “Meantime,” the latter being a scathing 1983 account of unemployed life in East London featuring such soon-to-be-stars as Gary Oldham and Tim Roth. He didn’t make a theatrically released feature film until “High Hopes.”

While Leigh is listed always as both writer and director, his movies are not so much written out as they are developed through a very loose collaboration between himself and his ensemble of actors.

“Actually, it’s pretty disciplined in that what you don’t get is a kind of committee doing it,” Leigh said. “There are pretty clear divisions of labor, and obviously my job is to shoulder the responsibility of the story and the style.”

Leigh said it helps to have “the kind of actors who are extremely intelligent character actors.

“The whole world of the film comes together through improvisation. But nothing gets improvised on camera; it’s all very rehearsed,” Leigh said.

Leigh claims many artistic influences, the least surprising being two filmmakers, Jean Renoir and Yasijuro Ozu, who were masters of the kind of humane realism to which he aspires. But in some ways he’s closer to Samuel Beckett, whose characters, like Leigh’s, find reasons to carry on despite having very few encouraging signs to do so.

”. . . If there is a political theme to ‘Life Is Sweet,’ it’s that. That in an economy as stripped-down and chaotic as it is right now, people are left to find their own mechanisms for coping, for not giving up.”