Production
The film was a co-production between British Screen Productions, Channel Four Films and Thin Man Films, a production company created by Mike Leigh and producer Simon Channing-Williams. This was the first release by Thin Man, who have produced all Leigh's films since Life Is Sweet.
The script was developed by Leigh and the cast, employing his established practice of collectively improvising and rehearsing for several weeks prior to actual shooting. For example, Aubrey's bizarre recipes were devised by Leigh and Timothy Spall over the course of an evening, and then checked for plausibility with a professional chef, who advised them about which ones were technically impossible to prepare; all the ones that appear in the film are, as Leigh put it, "all feasible, gross as it sounds."
David Thewlis, who played Nicola's anonymous lover, was disappointed at being given such a small role. Leigh promised him that the next time he considered Thewlis for a role in a film, "he'd be given a fair slice of the pie." Thewlis' next role in a Leigh film was his award-winning performance as the lead character Johnny in Naked.
The film was shot entirely on location in Enfield, Middlesex, U.K.
Alison Chitty found the house in Enfield for Life is Sweet and fell in love with it because of its garden shed. She also found the old mobile snack-bar, which Rea's Patsy sells on to Broadbent's Andy as a pig in a poke, in Northampton, and painted it up.
Life is Sweet 's visual world is bright, jaunty, primary-coloured - Leigh's next film Naked was conceived in blacks and blues and a 'dark, dilapidated grunginess', the contrast with this, its predecessor, very marked.
Read more about this topic: Life Is Sweet (film)
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—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)
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“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)