'He combines a great exploratory free spirit with an incredible screen discipline.'

I was born in the middle of the war in 1943. I figure I'm a year older than Timothy in Humphrey Jennings's A Diary for Timothy. He was born about 18 months after me. I am fascinated to know what happened to him. He could have been a hippie in the 1960s - or anything could have happened to him. When I watch the film I constantly want the narration to talk somehow about the 1960s, and the 1990s, and project the future. Which Jennings does with great subtlety. The film really does look forward, but at the same time is absolutely rooted in its time.

	Still from A Diary for Timothy

The world that you get in those Crown Film Unit productions is a very real world for me. It is a world in my memory. It is the earliest world I can remember. Of course, it would be very easy (and I am sure some people do this) to put the whole of Jennings's work down to some kind of unhealthy, insular English inward-looking spirit. But I don't think it is like that at all. It is very outward-looking; it's very alive. And what is extraordinary is the way he combines a great exploratory free spirit with an incredible screen discipline.

It is fascinating the way he gets real people to be real and yet you can tell they have all obviously worked out what they were going to say. He seldom, probably never, uses actual spontaneous dialogue - it is always structured, always rehearsed. It's far too ordered and neat to be cinema vérité, and yet he manages to capture his subjects' reality in a very living way.

There is a scene in A Diary for Timothy where the soldier has been wounded, and you see him in various stages of convalescence. The doctor and nurse are showing him how to walk with two crutches. It is perfectly straightforward: the doctor is giving instructions and at the end she says, 'Well, not bad for a first try.' When you look at it closely, you can see it is incredibly worked out; they know exactly what to say and it is as well designed as any feature film of that period.

Still from Listen to Britain. View a clip from Listen to Britain. You'll need the Real plug-in, download it here.

I also admire Jennings's Listen to Britain. It is a fantastic piece of film-making for all of us (and this includes me) who in our films have tried to build film stories in an atmospheric way, using all kinds of elements, including sound and music. Listen to Britain does this extraordinarily well, and with an incredible ease of editing. Although it is not a narrative film, it is an exemplary piece of film storytelling and it raises the hairs on the back of your neck every time.

If you look very closely at Jennings's work, you start to see some very interesting behavioural detail. For example, he often gets people to scratch - all over the place, across all of his films. You can see that he told them to do it when the camera gets to a certain moment. On your first viewing, you just accept it as part of the texture but it actually does look very self-conscious. The reason he's doing it is to introduce some kind of realistic movement into the very static style of documentary at that time. Don't forget that it wasn't until after the war that BBC radio realised that you could interview a working-class person spontaneously. Before that, they used to go out and talk to ordinary people, then write a script, and then get them to read the script.

So for all of us who were influenced by the BBC, by Tony Garnett and Ken Loach, there is in a way a connection that goes back to Jennings. But it is very hard to say anything about direct influence because when you go back and look at what Jennings was actually doing, its great strength, its great joy, is that he was completely idiosyncratic. I think he was completely original and manages to take very simple things and make them continue to seem very simple in what is in fact a very sophisticated and profound way.

Mike Leigh is a writer and film-maker whose films include Abigail's Party (1977), Secrets and Lies (1996) and Topsy-Turvy (1999).

^ top