Georgie Hobbs talks to the director and stars of Atonement, which is based on Ian McEwan's award-winning novel, about the filming of its brief, very sexy, encounters.
All North London swagger and cheeky grin, 35-year-old director Joe Wright is in fine form. As he strides up to take his seat in a panel in a room packed with journalists, he assigns his old (or that should be young) pal, Keira Knightley her place in the middle, barking a joking, “do as you're told, Knightley,” when she protests, “Cor, it's like an auction this. A fiver, a fiver!” he shouts gamely. If so the Atonement team, completed by James McAvoy, are well on the way to a successful sale.
Just last week Wright became the youngest director to open the 65th Venice Film Festival. And it's only his second film and now there are Oscar rumours in the air. He has, after all, taken a seemingly unfilmable Booker Prize winning novel and turned it into a masterpiece. Did the fact that the book has become such a contemporary classic make it all the more daunting to tackle?
“Yeah, but the problem is I don't have much choice; when a piece of material gets its claws into me I'm at its mercy,” says Wright. “However much I try and talk myself out of doing something I can't help but do it. So that's how it was with McEwan's spectacular novel. It just got under my skin.”
Atonement is an ominously gripping love story wrenched through a lifetime. Though it bristles with tightly-fitting period details, it is actually a devastatingly modern, if not, post-modern tale. The story is told from three perspectives, we witness its selfish storyteller, Briony Tallis, gleefully murder narrative cohesion then wallow as her characters' (real and imagined) lives disintegrate around her.
One of the coups of the film is the casting of Briony through three different ages. From spoiled brat to saintly nurse and lastly as a shame-faced author, it must have been hard to find three complementary actresses?
“I always had Vanessa [Redgrave, Briony at 70] in mind because I worship the water she walks on,” says Wright. “But I didn't cast her until I found a young Briony. Normally, you get the adult first and then you try and find a child who can, not only act, but will resemble the adult. But, Saoirse [Ronan] is the clearest example of the acting gene that I've come across so we cast her first.”
Wright says that Jane Campion's 1990's film, An Angel At My Table (a biopic of New Zealand's most famous author, Janet Frame) had a huge impact on how he later filmed the three Brionys. “I learned to make one big visual statement about the character because then you'll know immediately who that person is,” he says. “In An Angel At My Table, it's big, red frizzy hair, I thought that was a bit much for Briony. So she gets get the same [blonde] hairstyle, the same mole on her cheek, the same blue eyes and that's it.”
If only he'd changed the hair. A wispy grey-blonde bob, it looks fine for a little girl in the 1930s, but seen again on her as an 18-year-old WW2 nurse and yet again as a 70-year-old in 2007, it backfires, screaming implausibility. Says Wright: “The hair, well, you know, I mean, it's an extraordinary feat of Briony's to be able to maintain that hairstyle for 70 years, especially in this day and age, but er, she did!”
Ronan, however, is as exceptional as Wright claims. An untrained Irish actress, she veritably steals the show from its stars, Knightley and McAvoy. When she barges in on their jaw-dropping sex scene, it's the most awesome example of coitus interruptus ever put to film.
“You have to believe as an audience that based on that moment, those characters wait for each other for four or five years,” says Knightley. Filmed from Ronan's ethereal gaze we see McAvoy (who she believes to be a 'sex addict') pin up her sister's slight frame until she appears to levitate in front of a laden bookshelf. Ronan gasps. So does the audience. Though Wright claims a five minute close-up of Redgrave as his favourite scene in the film, there must be many who'd argue for that love scene in the library.
Dressed in a bewitching green evening gown in the film, Knightley notes, “You don't see any [body parts] and yet I do believe that that it is 10 times more erotic than gratuitous love scenes where you see everything. They're sort of pointless which this one certainly wasn't.”
Wright likens love scenes to choreography. During filming he would constantly whisper precise instructions into the actors' ears: “From my foot slipping out of my shoe, to my biting my lip, everything was story-boarded,” says Knightley.
It might sound sordid, says McAvoy, but Wright's over-bearing direction was liberating. “Otherwise you get this horrible moment of: 'I don't really know what this scene is, I just know that we have to snog, and we have to shag,'” he says, barely pausing for breath to add: “You think: 'oh fuck, do I feel her boobs? I don't want to feel her boobs, we've not talked about this and she's going to think...oh fuck!' but in this one we both gave up our trust to Joe.”
There is a general groan from the panel when Knightley is asked how she feels about sex scenes. It is a question aimed at getting some juicy gossip from a Hollywood starlet, but she is tight-lipped. “It's part of my job; I'm an actress.” With McAvoy and Wright, two male friends sat either side of her, she's bolstered enough to continue: “Obviously it's never going to be the most comfortable thing to do, especially when your mate's directing you...” At that 'her mate' interrupts, “It was a laugh!” She rolls her eyes and laughs, “All right, it then became a laugh!'
The mood is lightened. She reveals that rehearsals saw the two friends differ over her character's ‘honour'. “It was a huge question whether Cecilia would have been a virgin. Maybe she would have had any other experience when she was at Cambridge [university],” she says. “Joe, wanted her to be a complete virgin but a historian came to talk to us and said she probably wouldn't have been. She probably would have, in her words, had a 'bit of a fiddle', which I thought was quite interesting!” Her burst of laughter wipes out any remaining awkwardness. She says watching David Lean movies such as Brief Encounter and In Which We Serve helped her and McAvoy marry stuff-upper lips with the lusty desire required of them.
Wright is a big fan of the stiff-upper lip. He, of course, made his name with 2005's rejuvenated version of the British classic novel, Pride and Prejudice. He's also an avowed fan of Noel Coward, so it's unsurprising to learn that he disapproves of America's touchy-feely approach toward life. “Everything's been Americanised since the time of Atonement and I'm not sure about their whole thing of talking about your emotions the whole time. I'm not sure it really works.” Knightley is beginning to agree. With an accent precariously balanced between trendy 't'-dropping and clipped vowels best served on a silver spoon, she is today veering into 1940s' mannerisms herself. Prefacing her sentences with the retro 'in a funny way', she explains that, “In a funny way, Celia Johnson has this incredible ability to perhaps not say what she's feeling but you know exactly what's going on. It was sort of more enjoyable to keep it all in. In a funny way, I found it quite liberating.”
Wright interrupts to condemn America's impact on British facial expressions. “It's this really horrible thing, no one shuts their mouths anymore!” Adopting a Midwest tone, he drawls, “We're kinda like slack-jawed American cowboys.” His London locution returns as he says, quite seriously, “It's something that we always had to remind ourselves about.” The actors roll their eyes in agreement. They've heard this one before. As we're out of time, the room is left with the strange vision of Wright and his mate, the mesmerising 21-year-old face of Coco Mademoiselle and a million teen boy bedrooms, yelling in unison, “Keira, shut your mouth, Keira. Shut your mouth.” Laughing together, they jostle their way out of sight and into Claridge's well-heeled corridors, while the polite, more subdued McAvoy is stalled by a enthusiastic fan.
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