It's something to do with the beard that, and the sort of photographs he chooses to have published. Whatever else they say, it isn't joie de vivre. Unlike, of course, the films. So when someone asks Mike Leigh how he feels about Cannes, you don't expect enthusiasm.
I say 'someone' because the answer comes in the course of one of those inevitable Cannes group interviews me, Nigel from the BBC, two Italians, a Scandinavian, a German and a man in funny sunglasses who has no tape-recorder and takes few notes. Perhaps he was just sitting at the table when we all arrived and stayed for the crack (as in, I hastily add, the Irish phrase, 'Good crack').
And good it was. "To me, it's very good news indeed and I never thought it would happen," says Leigh about the sudden emergence of British filmmakers into the Cannes auteurist spotlight. "I think it's brilliant that it has I have absolutely no reservations about it at all.
And if anyone finds it difficult to reconcile my subject matter with my enthusiasm for the razzmatazz of Cannes, then they are naive and take a very narrow view of things. Apart from anything else, the dinners are good."
Leigh is especially sorry that Timothy Spall, his Falstaffian regular collaborator who plays Maurice, the photographer, in Secrets and Lies, is unwell and couldn't come along. "As a confirmed gastronome," notes the director, "he would have had a good time."
Leigh himself appears to be having a good time, especially since he has managed to find a way of following Naked, the hugely-praised 1994 Competition entry, whose unremitting bleakness is in sharp contrast to the reconciliation which is the theme of Secrets and Lies.
"One always lives under the threat - or the possibility - that you are just making the same film over and over again," he says. "But that's a problem for anybody that does anything, that you always tell the same story. And, in a certain sense, it would be true of what I do.
Naked, as a matter of fact, was quite a hard act to follow, because you make a film where you scrape away to the rock bottom of things, and then you have to make another film! "But, having said that, I'm quite comfortable about returning to the general subject matter that I have always done, which is relationships, people, family and all of that. And, frankly, Naked is no different."
Secrets and Lies, though, could hardly be more different in tone to Naked. Where the humour in that earlier film was savage, that in Secrets and Lies is warm, a smiling recognition rather than the murderous wit with which David Thewlis' character kept the world at bay. And, at the key moment when both films set themselves on course for the resolution of the story, Secrets and Lies veers off in a different direction.
In Naked, the characters seem to be briefly united in the 'Manchester song' before plunging even deeper into their private hells. In Secrets and Lies, they are pushed seriously apart when Cynthia's revelation that Hortense is her daughter entirely destroys the party. But then, in one of the best scenes Leigh has ever shot, there is a move towards reconciliation at a suburban bus stop.
Before long, relationships are restored and faith in human nature is reaffirmed. We are back in that familiar Leigh territory of coping with something which is very difficult to cope with something called life, which is only occasionally sweet and more usually extremely slippery.
"It's very complex," says Leigh with an unexpectedly jolly smile, "and I've had to put up with it for 53 years."
So why, then, does Secrets and Lies, possibly the most affirmative and reconciliatory of his recent films, carry a title which stresses the negative evasions that have so far prevented reconciliation? We all know that Leigh always shoots his films untitled and only agrees to give it one when the graphic artist working on the poster and the credits can't wait any longer. So why this title?
"I think it is important that there should always be a tension between the title and the film," he says. "And it's always a desperately difficult task to name these damn things, because they're never just about one thing.
I mean, I suppose you could call this one A Young Black Optometrist Seeks Out Her Birth Mother, but I think it would do the film a disservice on a number of levels."
So is there any truth in the rumour that the speech in which Timothy Spall's character actually speaks the title line was something that the distributors insisted be put into the film, and which Leigh wanted to leave out.
"No," says Leigh, leaning forward in terrier mode. "No," he says, "that's not true. What you've heard is a proper story misreported. The speech was always in. But I was reluctant to call it Secrets and Lies because the words were in the speech."
I seem to have hit a grace note with the man in the funny sunglasses, because he writes that down.
