Exclusive Atonement Interview

10 September 2007

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“I think it’s always quite daunting to try and do an adaptation of a book people are so passionate about and I think, speaking to people, people really love this book,” Knightely adds. “Of course everyone’s imagination is going to go off in a different way, and they are all going to see these characters as different people, hopefully what you can do is present people with a totally new version of it and if you can do that then that’s great.”

“The book is very visual so therefore I tried to make an almost literal adaptation of the book when we got to a passage in the book, like Robbie in the cellar for instance, and there is this little sequence that talks about going back to before it all happened and so we literally ran the film backwards,” claims Wright. “

We were very literal about it most of the changes that happened, happened for financial reasons rather than creative reasons, the book worked , obviously, so we tried to be faithful to it and I kind of had faith that the film would work too, if we stuck to the truth of the novel.

“A lot of adaptors of novels there’s a catchphrase that they all have, this received truth that they have, that of course at some point you need to throw the book away, and I always used to nod my head and pretend to understand what they meant, but I think you only throw the book away if it’s rubbish. And so we never did that, we kept the book by our side through the whole process, and obviously you have to cherry pick a bit, but I also think that literary people presume that literature and the written word has a monopoly over internal truth and I personally, as a dyslexic, don’t agree with that to me the films of Fellini or Bergman, the great classical masters of the medium, spoke just as much truth as Tolstoy or Dickens. It’s just another medium and I think anyone who thought the book was unadaptable was underestimating the power of film and the power of the medium.”

For this adaptation the director has assembled a very talented British cast in particular his two leads Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. For Keira this is her first ‘woman’ role as s he attempts to move away from her Piraes of the Caribbean tag and make her mark as a serious actress. A nd James McAvoy's star keeps on rising and after his turn in The Last King of Scotland he is quickly establishing himself as one of this countries best leading men.

Origionally Wright had thought of Keira when deciding who to cast for the late teenage Briony but when she read the script Keira had her eye on the role of Cecilia.

“ I didn’t try to make her more sympathetic that I though she actually was, I don’t think I thought that she was a horrible person, I think what was interesting about her was probably a very good person who was going through this particular groove where she was being horrible to people for no particular reason." explains the actress.

" I think what was interesting about the whole think is you are looking at this period, 1930s 1940s, where the stiff upper lip is at it’s peak and she is certainly someone who’s emotions are repressed and she doesn’t find it easy to tell everyone what is going on and I think that she is bubbling with emotions and rage and she’s a bit like a pressure cooker about to explode. But no I didn’t make her any more sympathetic than I think she was, in the book it’s very clear what’s going on, and for me, particularly in that section, used it as a bit of a blueprint really I totally understood why she was behaving in the way that she was."

But James McAvoy had trouble understanding his character Robbie Turner. “He is an idolised version of humanity I suppose and I found it very difficult to get a handle on that because I didn’t necessarily find him very truthful to begin with because he was good and wholesome, and I don’t know many people like that.

"And it wasn’t until Joe convinced me of the possibility that someone like that might exist somewhere, you know your Ghandi’s had to come from somewhere and your Mother Theresa’s had to have beginnings, that I realised that this figure could exist and could be some higher self, as Joe put it, and once I accepted that I found it a lot easier to play the character because I could play him truthfully and interestingly, because it’s only truthful representations of people that are interesting. Also he really represents us, as much as he is idolised he is us, he is the audience and we destroy him and that’s why we love watching ourselves be destroyed somehow it makes us feel that the storyteller understands.

“I think in a funny way that’s why is really enjoyed looking at, in particular, Celia Johnson she has the incredible ability to not say what she is feeling but you know exactly what is going on." says Knightley.

"It was a really exciting thing it’s everything that’s not said that is really important and it really added to the entire tension that these people are not able to do that they can’t say this is what is going on, this is what the problem is, socially they can’t do that so it’s all inner conflict bubbling beneath the surface. In a funny way I think I find it quite liberating it was more enjoyable to keep it all in, it was an amazing experience."

They young actors extensively researched the period in which this movie is set in a bid to understand their characters and what, especially in the csae of Cecilia leads them to supress their emotions.

“There’s a great book called War Time Britain 1939-1945, which does exactly what it says on the tin, which I found quite helpful, not particularly for the 1936 section." laughs Knightley.

"We had a historian come in and talk to us, which was great, about where they were politically where they were in 1936 because all of us were saying of course it’s leading up to the war and everyone’s going whoa they don’t know that, they don’t know that for sure. And that was quite a big thing to get into our heads.

"Also there was the big question as to whether Cecilia would have been a virgin or not and how likely it would have been that she would have had any other experience when she was at Cambridge, you wanted her to be a complete virgin, but the historian said that she probably wouldn’t have been she probably would have had, in her words, a bit of a fiddle, which I thought was quite interesting. So that was good and Joe also got us to watch a lot of David Lean movies In Which We Serve and also Brief Encounter."

But James had to understand the military aspect of this period in history and what Robbie's role would have been at Dunkirk.

“For the Dunkirk section of the movie we did some military training, even though by that time the forces were very desperate and unregimented. Also we spoke to several veterans of the Dunkirk disaster and that was hugely innovating and vital to what we later went on a recreated listening to people who were there and the fact that they are very tight lipped. But just spending that time with them gave us everything that we needed to know and some parting comments, that weren’t particularly pin point, were devastating."

But perhaps the most daunting scene film to capture was the deeply passionate and erotic, yet pivotal, sex scence in the library between Cecilia and Robbie which acts as a release of their, especilly Cecilia's, repressed emotions.

Keira claims: “It’s part of my job I’m an actress and it’s very obvious in this film that that love scene is incredibly important. I think that all you have got as an actress is your face, your body, what’s inside your head, your voice they are my tools and I have to use them. Obviously it’s never going to be the most comfortable thing to do, and particularly when your mate is directing you, and suddenly you go shit I don’t really want to.

But director Joe Wright insists that: “It was a laugh."

“It then became a laugh. It was incredibly important that that scene was incredibly erotic and incredibly passionate you have to believe that, as the audience, that based on that moment they wait for each other for four or five years." says Knightley.

"Joe was brilliant he totally story boarded the whole thing from the foot rising out of the shoe to the biting of the lip everything, so we knew exactly what we were going into, which makes it a lot easier. You have to deal with these things when it’s that important a scene and it has to be that erotic and what is wonderful, I think, and what I thought was very clever at the time is you don’t actually see anything and I do believe that it is ten times more erotic than most love scenes where you se everything, they are gratuitous and pointless, and this one certainly isn’t and it was quite an exciting think to do."

Joe explains: “It’s choreography, it’s like you choreograph a piece of dance, it all has to be precise to express that feeling. If you just go now make out against the bookshelf nothing would happen basically.

James McAvoy was confident in his director that they would achieve the desired results: “It’s also quite liberating to have a director stand beside you and say do this and do that, it seems quite sordid, but it liberates an actor I think because what’s amazing in this film is you were left in no uncertain terms of what we were trying to accomplish and what would be good."

"And in that love scene it’s really, really, really advantageous because you don’t have that awkward moment were we don’t really know what his scene is about we just know we snog and have to shag and ‘action’ and your like for fucks sake do I feel her boobs? I don’t want to feel her boobs because we haven’t even talked about that. But in this one it was to the point where we talked about it before we engaged in it, even during the scene sometimes, you were going do this James or whatever and you felt liberated and because we both gave up our trust to Joe it helped us."

Central to this story is Briony, who as a young child wrongly accuses Robbie of raping thier cousin, and how she copes with what she did as she gets older. To portray Briony's attempt at atonment throughout her life Wright had to cast three different actresses spanning seven decades.

“Often when you have a child play a version of the same characters as an adult actor you the adult actor first and then you try to find someone who, can only act, but can look like the adult but we did it the other way around." explains Wright.

He continues: "I kind of had Vanessa in my head and I kind of really wanted to cast Vanessa because I worship the water that she walks on, but I didn’t cast her until I had found a Briony, so therefore it didn’t matter what she looked like. So we hunted for a Briony that could act basically, and it’s amazingly difficult to find kids that can act, and Saoirse is the clearest example of the acting gene that I have ever come across she can just do it, and that’s weird.

"You work with actors like Keira and James and you think obviously they weren’t just born that good they have learnt it, they have trained but then you meet someone like Saoirse and she hasn’t trained and this what talent is, maybe James and Keira were like that I don’t know. She was extraordinary. Once I had her I could cast the other two and I learnt something from Angel At My Table make one big visual statement about the character, in Angel At My Table it was this big, red, frizzy hair, and then you will know immediately who that character is. So she kept the same hair style and mole on her cheek and blue eyes and that was it you stop asking that question, and the hairstyle it’s an extraordinary feat to be able to maintain the same hairstyle for seventy years."

While the 1930's depicted the high life of theat period it's the images of the war that pack the greatest punch in the movie as Joe Wright and his team re-created the horrors of Bray Dunes at Dunkirk. Redcar was chosen for the location was and a thousand extras were drafted in help bring the scenes to life, but Wright struggled to bring his vision to life with a $35 million budget.

“In the screenplay, as in the book, you have these stuka attacks, and you have got these hundreds and thousands of refugees on the roads, and have people being shot and it’s an epic journey. And so one day I went to Tim Bevan and said we needed another $4 million to be able to realise the whole walk to Dunkirk sequence properly and he, bless him, said I won’t give you a dollar over thirty to make and art film and the hairs on my arms stood up and I went what did you call me. And it was at the moment I realised that this was a licence to do what I want and so I pulled everything out of the walk to Dunkirk and made it just these three figures walking to the beach and made it slightly more of an esoteric journey. I also shot lots of sequences of them walking because I thought that the monotony of the walk was something I really wanted to try and impress upon the audience so there are these endless shots of these three blokes walking through noting that I thought were really profound and interesting and obviously if you are trying to portray boredom the audience are going to feel a t bit bored so those got kind of cut back a bit. Then I put all our resources, or what resources we did have, into the beach shot at Bray Dunes, Dunkirk.

"People must bear in mind that the budget for this film was pretty much the same as the budget for Pride and Prejudice, four million more, and so we put all our resources onto that beach. So I thought right I only have one day with these thousands of extras and how do I utilise them to the best effect, originally I had thought of this montage sequence, but I though to cover a montage properly I would probably need about fifty set-ups, and traditionally I only get fifteen to seventeen set-ups a day, I thought we were going to be fairly short changed. I knew what was going to happen at the beginning of the day we would be spending all the time on these great shots then by the end of the day everything would be rushed. So one day, kind of as a joke, I said do you remember that shot we did in Pride and Prejudice, that long steady cam shot, wouldn’t it be cool if we did that on the beach? And everyone went ha ha ha and then that amused so I did it again, but as my friend Moira Brady said ‘There’s no such thing as a joke Joe’, and the joke turned into something dauntingly real.

"I was also interested in capturing the light, I mean I had faith that at one point we were going to get really good light that day, and I had almost chosen the location because of the direction of the light at evening and I wanted a magical sense to that scene, it’s a scene about wastefulness the waste of human life, of animal life, of machinery of everything, so I wanted that magic hour light. So we rehearsed all day and at six o’clock we started shooting, and we did three takes, and o the third take the light was with us and it was magical. It was terrifying though because the radio contact between the camera and recording equipment was such a long distance that we didn’t actually have a record of what we had just shot so we were all just looking at each other saying did we get it, did we get it? Who knows? So I went for a fourth take but the steady cam operator collapsed as he came round the band stand so time was up."

James insists that rehersal was necessary and nothing was left to chance: “I think very little was done on the hoof it all had to be pin point accuracy. We arrived at six in the morning and we rehearsed for ever and you really had too, it didn’t feel like we had rehearsed for ever, we rehearsed just enough because we had a thousand people, and there was all those people to co-ordinate, so even though we had all day to rehearse you still would have like more. So there were times were, I know Danny and I in particular, were just on the edge of messing it up hugely, and I can see those moments in it, and you just think I’m glad we got that third one, coz both Danny and I nearly royally mucked it up, and had we had to stop and run again Peter Robertson our steady cam operator, who did an amazing job, clearly wasn’t up to it because he has covered a mile on sand, going up hills, running, going up stairs, just so much carrying a small elephant, a steady cam weighs a hell of a lot."

Yet despite all of Wright's planning and rehersal it didn't all go to plan “I didn’t all go right, but we won’t tell you what bits went wrong, but for me the reason why that shot works, if it does, is the extras and the local people who came and gave their time with so much dignity, they really put their hearts into it, and my primary concern on that day was to make sure that they were involved and engaged and feeling like they were performers. And there is this incredible energy of over sixteen hundred people, or what ever it was, all those minds focusing on one little bit of film and that was an incredible experience and one that I will never forget and if it does work then it’s testament to the lads in Redcar."

Atonement is British film making at it's very best as it led the British charge at Venice Film Festival as one of nine Brit films all fighting for the top prize the Golden Lion. Joe Wright has brought together a power cast to tell a story of love, loss, emotional repression and redemption that spans several decades.

“It was fascinating to think about what changes have occured during the last sixty seventy years, how we have changed and what it was like before then and I don’t know about the American got to talk about your emotions the whole time I ‘m not sure if that really works.

Read my Atonement Review

Helen Earnshaw FemaleFirst

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