- Born
- Birth nameKristian Leigh
- C.S. Leigh was born in 1964. He is a director and writer, known for American Widow (2009), See You at Regis Debray (2005) and Far from China (2001).
- Mysterious biography.
- Ambitious projects.
- Constantly working on art projects.
- Films featuring long shots.
- Unpaid bills.
- Since C.S. Leigh is notoriously unreliable and some of his films have not been completed or have no distribution or might not even exist, his biography and filmography should be handled with caution [see: "A True Rip-Off Artist", Vice, Dec.2013].
- Speaks French and English fluently.
- A man named Neil Thomas Ward wrote online "In Search of a Lost Film", published on March 5th 2018 in 'Medium', and claims in it that C.S. Leigh died in early 2016. He doesn't present any hard proof, only a very elaborate story about his decade-long search for Process (2004), which is out of distribution, and his strange friendship with Leigh. In spite of some Wikipedia sites using Ward's claim as factual truth, neither a proof nor an official statement exists, that he really died in London, England, UK, in 2016. Since Leigh owes many people large sums of money, it might be simply a new strategy to escape his creditors by using disinformation and a new facade.
- What's missing nowadays is major ambition in work. I don't mean ambition to be famous. I mean ambition to do something that can't be done or that no one sane would do. [2010]
- [on the troubled production of American Widow (2009)] Well, it's been going on for some time, even if it's been kind of in a static stage right now. You know that the producer of Process (2004) - Humbert Balsan - committed suicide? (...) This was probably the most meaningful event of my adult life. We were supposed to be working together on that film on the Paris sequences and on other films, I was about to start shooting in one month, and he committed suicide. So I had the people, the crew, not much money, but I decided to continue anyway. I'm convinced I had post traumatic stress disorder for the whole first shoot. Luckily I had several great experiences doing that, for example shooting with Yekaterina Golubeva and Cat Power, but I never had enough money to complete the film as I would have liked to, and I'm not willing to make a big mess just to finish it and do it badly, so I've been showing little pieces of it in different places, but I've been never able to finish the film. It's not far from being finished but I haven't been able to find the money. It's been an evolving experience, meaning the actual story has changed because it's been going on for so long... How I initially planned it was to tell a story about loss and 9/11 from the point of view of seven women. That part hasn't really changed, I've shot scenes with men that I won't use them. So, after doing the initial shoots, after a year, a year and a half it just became very difficult to maintain it, so it remains unfinished. But the sequences I shot are there, they remain, I've preserved them, they look great, and I've been keeping everything safe, and adding some new things now and then. But it's not something I've been thinking about showing a lot at the moment. I'm not sure I understand what the audience means to me anymore. It's become abstract. [2014]
- Yes, I've had unpaid debts in the past. It's occasionally, I'd even say often, a problem. (...) I guess it's a problem with ambitious projects and not having enough of a budget to do them. But I wouldn't agree that's been true of every project I've ever worked on, it's just been true of a lot of them. [Interview with Christian Storm, Vice, Dec. 2013]
- I have often said that I make films in a curatorial way. By that I mean I put together a series of elements which all together tell a story which is not the same as the film narrative so to speak.
- I met a pair of novice Dutch producers who offered to produce my first feature, Sentimental Education (1998), based on Gustave Flaubert's novel and set in the contemporary world of modelling with the focus on a male model having a crisis of faith. The cast was pretty amazing including Arsinée Khanjian, Guillaume Canet, Julie Gayet, Thom Hoffman, Isabelle Carré, and Sylvie Testud. The producers did everything they could to give me what I wanted. Ultimately we fell out and they tried to edit the film without me. I couldn't let that happen and consequently the film has never been released.
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