The Press Box - 'The Big Picture' — Joe Wright Bounces Back From His Darkest Hour (Ep. 386)

Episode Date: November 22, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey sits down with director Joe Wright to discuss how he picked himself up after the failure of his 2015 film, ‘Pan,’ to deliver ‘Darkest Hour,’ a Winston Churchill biopic that stars a mesmerizing Gary Oldman. Plus: Wright discusses the changing state of the movie business and why he took the reins on an episode of ‘Black Mirror.’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Made a film called Pan, which had lost about $100 million, and I was suffering my own crisis of confidence and doubt in what I was doing and capable of doing, and I felt like giving up. And then this script came across my desk. I'm Sean Fennessey, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is the big picture. Winston Churchill once said, History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. You could say the same for Joe Wright, the filmmaker behind Pride and Prejudice,

and a Corinna Atonement and other films. His new film was about Churchill. It's called Darkest Hour. It's a very serious, very stormy look at one month in Churchill's life in 1940. And it's an interesting film for Wright because he's coming off of what was considered his least successful film, 2015's Pan. And he used that moment after that failure to recalibrate. He made an episode of the TV show Black Mirror. And then he pondered on what he was going to do next.

And he saw some inspiration in Churchill. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Joe Wright. Very pleased to be joined by Joe Wright today. Joe, thanks for coming in. My absolute pleasure. Joe, you have a new film. It's called Darkest Hour. It is about World War II.

This is not your first World War II film. And so what I want to know is why did you decide to return to this setting and time? Frankly, I was fascinated by the character I read on the page. I've never been particularly interested in Winston Churchill. He's not been a kind of hero of mine. But I read this story about this funny man who had been through a long life of triumphs and disappointments. He'd got a lot wrong in his life. And yet he came to this moment in time and was the right person for the job that no one else could really do.

And I was interested in the crisis of confidence that he suffered. I was interested in doubt and the idea that doubt is a key component to the attainment of wisdom. And I was interested in how something like that, something that's generally considered negative, can be turned into something really positive. Why did that speak to you at this moment? Because I had made a film called Pan, which had lost about $100 million and had been slated, really, by... most everyone and I was suffering my own crisis of confidence and and doubt in what I was doing and capable of doing and I felt like giving up and then this script came across my desk and showed me that actually giving up was was not an option was there part of you that wanted to

do something completely different from Pan because of that experience very much so I am I realized after Pan that I wasn't cut out and necessarily for the kind of big studio movies. And I wanted to return to something that was closer to my wheelhouse. I had no idea what I was going to do. I'd pulled out of all the projects that I was attached to and thought that maybe I'd just make theatre instead and so on. And then I got this amazing script from Charlie Brooker,

which was just people talking to each other in rooms. it totally inspired me and it fascinated me and it engaged my creativity in a way that had not been engaged for some time. And I remembered why I do what I do. And that is to try and express cinematically the experience of trying to relate to other people. So you decided to continue to direct? Yeah. So I decided to keep doing it. Or that I had no option.

I had no choice but to keep doing it. Had Darkest Hour come across your desk at this point? And then whilst I was out in South Africa shooting the Black Mirror episode, Darkest Hour, came across my desk. And I read it and I found that I laughed and I cried. And it was men in rooms talking to each other. The creative challenge of that thrilled me. Let's talk about that creative challenge. I'm curious.

This movie, like I said, is set in a time in which you've made other films, but the look of it is quite different. The style, even the execution. The movie has sort of a TikTok feel. How did you go about setting up how to tell this story? Well, as a kind of reaction to what I've been doing before, including Pan, but also, you know, Anna Karenina and movies like that, I wanted to reinvent my aesthetic, really, and I wanted to pair everything back and to try and be as simple and as minimalist as possible. I was also listening to a lot of minimalist music at the time, Max Richter and Niels Fram and, of course, the great Philip Glass and so. and I wanted to try and achieve some kind of cinematic aesthetic equivalent to that music. I was very lucky to be working with a great DP called Bruno de Benelli.

Bruno's made an anomaly French DP. Yeah, and he's very rigorous. And so together we developed a style that was trying to just be as simple and as honest and as dramatic as possible and as truthful as possible. How do you make a chamber piece like this propulsive? That is the thing that is interesting to me, is this movie has a rhythm and an energy, even though it is, like you said, just people talking to each other in rooms. I'm always talking about rhythm, and I talk about rhythm on set a lot with the actors.

Sometimes my notes to actors are less about emotional states or backstory. I'm often more kind of singing rhythms to them. I'm a terrible singer, but singing rhythms to them, that will express somehow what I'm trying to say. Does that come in line readings? How do you do that? Sometimes I do, but I try hard not to. Film for me is most like music.

It happens in time, and I think about it in time, which is ironic because I'm dyslexic, and dyslexics have a problem with time. And images and sound are at the service of that time. Do you think that that has helped you in some way, being dyslexic maybe with being able to communicate what you want because it's not as on the page for you at times? It's the way I think, you know, and I think dyslexics have a problem understanding certain patterns,

and so what I'm always trying to do is find my own patterns in images and sound and time. And I guess also, you know, when I was a kid growing up, I watched a lot of television. I mean, like hours and hours and hours and hours of television. And then eventually I kind of found a way to read. I'm still a very slow reader, but I found a way to read. That's an interesting thing. So when you receive a script now, how do you analyze it? How do you read it?

Are you marking it up and taking your time in that way? Or how do you respond to it? Slowly. My agent can read a script in 30 minutes. I'm always shocked by that. And suspicious a little bit. How closely is it being read? Yeah, exactly.

Whereas for me, it takes me about, if I don't get distracted, it takes me about four hours, you know, to read a script. And I can always tell if it's a good script if I read it straight through without allowing distractions. And as I'm reading, I'm seeing it, for instance, with the opening of this movie when we first see Winston Churchill, he's in bed smoking a cigar and eating breakfast. And he's dictating a speech or telegrams.

And so I read that on the page. And what I see in my mind is that his new secretary, enters the room, the room is dark, you don't see him, and then a servant opens the curtains to reveal him, and so you hear him before you see him. Let's talk about building Churchill. Gary Oldman is playing Churchill here. This is an extraordinary performance. Obviously, it's already drawing a lot of raves.

But there's a lot that must go into determining not just the performer, but the way that you're going to build this character, right? So what is the first thing you think of when you're reading the script about how to make him come to life? Gary was not necessarily a very obvious choice for Churchill. But the obvious choices didn't excite me, and I wasn't sure that I'd go and see a movie about Churchill with them playing Churchill. In fact, there have been some films with maybe some obvious choices about Churchill recently. Exactly. And so therefore it would have felt like I was just retreading the same path.

Eric Felner and I had the idea of Gary. And that worked in my mind because I saw Churchill as being quite intense. borderline manic and then these kind of great depressions that he suffered as well, almost bipolar. But this intensity of energy, this dynamism, this kind of, people seem to think that, you know, the classic image of Churchill is that he was born in a bad mood. But that's not what I saw, you know. I think he didn't suffer fools lightly. But so, so Gary is someone who throughout his career has shown us some of the most extraordinary intense performances and he had the right energy and you can either cast someone who you know has the the physical look of the character or you can

cast someone who has the essence of the character and I think it's you know you can fake the exterior but you can't fake the interior necessarily Gary had the essence we started by talking about the way Churchill walked and he smoked a lot and he had this kind of snuffle and he had this kind of snuffle and his breath. That was the first thing we talked about. I took a picture of Gary walking as Churchill in one of those early sessions and sent it to Dario Marianelli. Your composer. My composer and said, you should write a piece based on this photograph. This is way before we start shooting and it needs a kind of TikTok tempo rhythm. Do you make the performer aware of things like that when you say I'm a visualizing it being kind of a TikTok feel here,

and so you'll know when you're walking, when you're acting. Absolutely. I find it's best to be as open as possible and engage everyone in all aspects of the movie. I mean, I think you want everyone to feel a sense of ownership, especially with someone like Gary. You know, Nill by Mouth is one of my favorite films. So it's the first time I've worked with an actor who is also a great filmmaker.

And so he understands all of that stuff, you know, and he gets it and he enjoys it as well. It becomes fun. So it was an incredibly close collaboration, both in terms of what he was doing and really what I was doing as well. Working, you know, with prosthetics like this and this transformation that you guys create, did he have to be cajoled into doing that? I mean, that's a big commitment to spend months of your life putting on all this makeup every day and having this character in this specific way. Not really. I mean, I think Gary enjoys, as we've seen from his body of work, he enjoys transformative performances characters. It's kind of what he does.

What's the biggest challenge about making a movie about real-life events? You've done it a couple of times. The problem is that you can't really change those events. And so, you know, in a movie like The Soloist, there wasn't the happy ending that might have been expected of that movie. and I was determined not to kind of, you know, not to pretend that Nathaniel Ayers ended up playing, you know, first cello for the L.A. Philharmonic. The happy ending was something smaller and simpler. It was just friendship. Did you ever have a desire to change anything about the way that Churchill did what he did at this time? Yeah, I mean, the underground scene, what you're trying to do is attain, you know, you're not necessarily wanting the facts, you're wanting the truth. and they sometimes are different things or can be expressed differently.

We know that he would go AWOL often and he did go AWOL on that day. We don't know where he went. We also know that during the war he spent a lot of time meeting members of the public, especially those victims of the Blitz and that he would often kind of seek their counsel and he would also sometimes have a little cry.

He was known for kind of cry. openly in public. And so all of those elements, which I felt were really vital to the film, worked in that scene in the underground. How do you prepare for a movie like this? Are you a voracious researcher? Do you have, to interview people, you know, when you have real-life events like this? I do a lot of reading. I watch as many sort of Pathay newsreels and real footage as possible. I spent some great time at the Imperial War Museum in London, which has a lot of. an amazing archive of 35 mill prints that you watch on a steambeck, which was heaven.

Really amazing. Amazing footage, like, if you ask for May 1940, and they have footage that's English, footage that's French and footage that is German. And it was very interesting to see the styles, the difference in the styles. The German stuff is all very dynamic and exciting and kind of extraordinary angles and close-ups, Dutch cameras and all of that stuff. And then you look at the French stuff, and it's very poetic, and there's kind of, you know,

willows over ponds and sort of dreamy. And then you look at the English stuff, and it's really like observational and a wide shot of a street, and it holds, and then a man crosses the road, and then it cuts. And it's like, wow, okay. A nation has a...

styles. A nation does. But yes, so what I do is I spend a lot of time reading and watching stuff. I also spend a lot of time looking at contemporary work, by which I mean I have a great visual reference researcher. And some of the most important time I spend is lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling in a state of relaxation, listening to music and thinking about the film. Visualizing. visualizing the film. That's very important. People don't understand that bit. They think you're just lying on the sofa. It's really... I support you. I believe that that's meaningful. People always describe your films as painterly. They say Joe Wright is a painterly filmmaker.

Do you like that? Do you like to be described in ways like that? No, I don't actually. I'd like my work to be described as cinematic. I don't want to, I don't want my films to look like paintings. I want them to look like cinema. But that's okay. I mean, it's not, I don't hold anything against that. Listen, I'll take compliments wherever they come. But yeah, no, I try to make, as I say, I try to make my films as inherently cinematic as possible, which means, you know, as Tarkovsky put it, sculpting in time.

Oh, it's just always interesting when an adjective is affixed to a filmmaker and then you just have to use that word every time you start writing about their films? Yeah, it's okay. I don't, you know, I mean, it's very nice. I'd rather people said my films were painterly than rubbish or ugly, you know, and I like beauty. I find there's not enough beauty in the world, and so if I can bring a little more beauty to the world, then that's great. I would hope it's cinematic beauty rather than painterly beauty. I think one of the problems with film is that it's borrowed from so many other art forms, and it's still trying to find its own inherent,

It's still relatively new, right? Yeah, in the span of time, it's 150 years old. Absolutely. I read a lot of breasts on, you know, his notes on the cinematographer. And I keep that by my bed whenever I'm shooting, and each morning I'll read, you know, a little piece or two. And that helps me remember that I'm making film, not painting or theater or, you know. Are you able to then communicate that to your DP or something and say, I was reading this, or will they be like, oh, that's pretentious that you're trying to tell me that?

No, do I sound really pretentious? Not at all. I'm talking, you know, this is stuff, you know. But in a workspace, you know, there's like a thing. Making films is also, is very physical, is very mechanical in some respects to. Oh, no, my sets are very emotional places. Yeah? Yeah.

No, I, I, I keep a loving atmosphere. I don't like any shouting. I play lots of music. I try and give all the crew a sense of ownership of the film. We're making a film together. I sit beside the camera. when shooting, I don't go to the monitor or hide away. It's a very tight and intimate space.

If there's a scene that is emotional, I cry, and I'm not kind of embarrassed of that. If there's a scene that's very energized, I play loud Chemical Brothers music and I dance, you know. What was the soundtrack on this film? We played Major Laser Bubble Butt a lot. Wow. You should see Gary as Winston dancing to Bubble Butt.

It's really good. I kind of use music to express what I'm trying to do, the atmosphere of the scene, also to the periphery of the set, because they're all these people who, electricians or the caterers or whatever, who aren't in the center of it. And I want them to have an understanding of the atmosphere. There's a lovely day in the House of Commons when we had 500 extras on set, and we all, the entire room, sang together the Beatles, Hey Jude. and that was at the beginning of the day at like 7.30 in the morning.

And we sang that just prior to Gary arriving on set. And then as the kind of final chorus came in, Gary arrived. And there was this enormous swell of cheering and singing for Gary. Now that may sound just like fun, which it was, but also what it does is it creates an atmosphere of collaboration, of ownership, and support for Gary. So Gary walks onto this set and has this feeling that everyone is there for him and that everyone is there to support him. And that means that he's able to feel free and loved and supported.

That is a nifty trick. Maybe in my day job, I will start applying the Friday sing-along. Yeah, it's really good. Sounds inspiring. So this film in part chronicles the Dunkirk moment as well. Obviously, there's a film about Dunkirk made by Christopher Nolan this year. You know, I know that the two films are essentially, they work well as companions. in some ways. Your film is not about Dunkirk, but it does feature some of that. But when you

learn that Nolan is working on a movie that is about that in some respect, or do you even learn that? Are you keeping track of these things? And then does that affect the decisions that you make? I try not to keep track of these things, because I think it's really dangerous to compare oneself to other artists. You know, I don't read the trades or anything. But obviously, there was a certain point when one became aware that that was happening, and one was kind of a bit nervous about it, worried that there might be a Churchill in the movie. Obviously, I have huge admiration and respect for Nolan, and so it's going to be a good film. I know that.

I purposefully didn't watch the film until I'd finished ours. And when I did, I discovered what I think is an extraordinary piece of work, and I was incredibly impressed by it. And I was really interested in the idea that we were both, it seems, going for something quite minimalist as well. Sometimes people start to think that there's not enough space, you know, it's all a competition. But success is, you know, is not finite.

There's space for all of us. And I applaud any good films being made because the more good films are made, the more people are going to see them. You've worked on a few films that have been nominated for Oscars. I think that there's a decent chance that this film is going to be nominated for Oscars and BAFTAs and Golden Globes and all those other things. particularly your team, Sarah Greenwood, Jacqueline Duran, who both worked on this film, have been nominated. You yourself have not been nominated.

Is that something that you think about? Do you aspire to that? When Atonement got seven nominations, including Best Picture, and I didn't get nominated, it didn't really bother me at the time. And then it kind of gnawed at me a little bit, and so I had to examine that. If I was nominated, that would be great. I'd like that, not least because it would enable me to be more daring and bold with the next film. The process is what I love. You know, I love making films.

I love it, love the process of making a movie. And so everything is aimed at being in the position to be able to do that. An Oscar nomination allows one, you know, to make another film. I remember when I made Pride and Prejudice, my producer said, well, you know, only one. one in ten first time filmmakers ever makes the second movie. And I still have that hanging over me. It's a great way to psych someone out. So, yeah, right size it.

It would be really nice. It's not validation of a lifetime, nor is it nothing, you know. You mentioned Pride and Prejudice, which is a great film and it was very successful. It was a box office hit, I think, unexpectedly to some people. Does the box office matter to you? The way you think about it changed it all over the years, and do you focus on those things? I don't, you know, I don't like follow the numbers and the tracking and all of that stuff. It would send me mad.

I'm obsessive. And so if I allow that obsession in, I would be in trouble. But it definitely means something because, again, it's about whether you get to make another film or not. But I feel like I have a responsibility to bring back a 100% profit. And if I can do that, I'm happy. There does seem at the moment that, you know, people want a kind of 5,000% profit. And I'm not really interested in that responsibility. I don't, you know, if I can get 100% profit, I'm good.

So no superhero movies coming from you anytime soon? I don't think so. I mean, I think to make those films, you have to have loved them as a kid. And I didn't love them as a kid. You were watching Kislovsky as a 15-year-old, so. Yeah. I was watching drama and loving drama. I was watching Alan Clark and Kemp.

and Ken Loach as well. You know, I was watching Robert Altman, Scorsese, David Lynch, and Coppola, and those are the people that I aspired to be. The way that some of the filmmakers that you named in, a lot of filmmakers now are getting a chance to tell more stories is in different forms, different shapes. Sometimes that's on Netflix, sometimes it's on a streaming service. Is that something that you've considered diving into at any point in your career?

Yeah. I mean, Black Mirror was Netflix. and I loved it. It does feel more like a sketch than a painting. Than a painting. Oh, look at me. Yeah, never say never. The experience that the audience have is limited.

I personally love sitting in a cinema with a group of other people, a kind of temporary community of people and experiencing something as a community collectively. And that's really an important element of film for me. But I don't, I don't, I'm not kind of snobbish about it. What I see happening on television is, is amazing.

And, and it's great, great storytelling. You mentioned the desire to be able to just make the next film. So I'm curious how you decide which film to make next. Do you have another project lined up right now? Yeah, I do. I'm hoping to make a adaptation of John Williams' movie Stoner. And how do I decide, after Pride and Prejudice, there were two scripts that I was thinking about,

or two pieces of material that I was thinking about. One was Birdsong by Sebastian Fawkes and the other was Atonement. And my very smart agent who can read a script in 30 minutes said, do the one that you feel like you know a secret about. And it was immediately clear, therefore, that I should do Atonement. I had a kind of, it was as if I knew a secret about it. Can you tell us that secret?

No, it's not like a secret that it's like I can see it. Just that feeling. Yeah, that feeling. I can see it. It's a sensation. And I don't necessarily think that anyone else would have the same sensation or the same feeling. If I read a script and I think, yeah, I could do that and it's really good. It's a brilliant script.

And I can imagine 10 other directors doing the same thing with it, then I won't be interested. But if I have a kind of, if I have a sensation that allows, it can just be an image. It can be a moment in time. What is Stoner saying to you right now? Why that book? It's a heavy one. It's quite a midlife book. It's about finding the beauty in the details of life and about disappointment and love.

And it's about grace. I think Stone is about grace. And I'd like to make a film about grace. So I always like to wrap up these conversations with a question about what's the last great thing that you have seen? Killing of a Sacred Deer. Oh, yeah. Tell me about that.

I loved that as well. Oh, my God. It's a beautiful film. I mean, just, you know, deeply, deeply frightening on a deep psychological subconscious level. I'm fascinated by how he gets those strange, almost disassociated performances out of people. I've never met him at Yorgos,

and I'd love to and talk to him about that. Apparently, I read that he, or someone told me, that he writes the scripts in Greek and then has them translated, literally translated. and that adds to that kind of stilted quality. Yeah, exactly, which I think is possibly interesting. That, I think, is one of my favorite films of the year. But they're very, they're many.

I love Lady Bird. Greta is a heroine of mine. I adore her and I adore her work. And really lovely to see a proper filmmaker. You know, she's, she's thinking about form rather than just performance or words. What's it like to see Sersha in a role like that, having worked with her 10 years ago now? It's a bit odd.

Yeah? Yeah. It's not 10 years because Hannah. Oh, of course, sure. But you came across her at such a young age. Yeah. No, it's amazing. And she's still, when she was 11, she kind of appeared as a fully formed actress.

Her talent was so extraordinary. And usually I'm not really into this idea of kind of, you know, the romantic idea of genius and a light shines down on somebody and they are chosen and gifted. But my God, if I ever did. then it would be her. Joe, congratulations on Darkest Hour. Thank you for doing this. Oh, my absolute pleasure.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you.