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As directorial notes go 'shut your mouth!' might seem harsh, if not a little abrupt. Of course it helps that Atonement director Joe Wright and his leading lady Keira Knightley are good friends, veterans of a successful collaboration two years ago on Pride & Prejudice.
And the instruction that Wright proffered his star was less about ending further discussion of how to play the emotionally complex Cecilia so much as a way of capturing an essential truth about the English in another era.
"So much has come from America since the war," says Wright with a weary sigh. "Everything's been Americanised including the way that after a sentence we often leave our mouths open like slack-jawed cowboys. It's a really horrible thing, no-one shuts their mouths any more. It’s something we had to remind ourselves about."
As the time of year approaches when we remember the war dead it's a startling thing to see their generation portrayed as young and vital characters on screen. And while the stiff upper lipped tone of movies from the period were consciously referenced there is a dirt under the fingernails quality to Atonement, a rugged reality that reinforces the notion that our grandparents actually had the same thoughts, fears and desires as us.
"I really enjoyed watching Celia Johnson," notes Knightley. "She has this incredible ability to not say what she’s feeling but you still know exactly what’s going on. It's exciting, it's everything that’s not said, and it really adds to the tension.
"The fact that these people aren't able to do what we do today, to say 'this is exactly what's going on,' or 'this is exactly what the problem is,' socially they couldn't do that. So it's all about inner conflict, all bubbling beneath the surface. In a funny way, I think I found it quite liberating."
The social constraints Knightley refers to conspire to repress the unspoken emotion between Cecilia and Robbie (McAvoy) for much of the film, in a staid manner that fits into our sanitised view of the period. For the actors direct research was obtained by speaking with historians who specialise in the inter-war years.
"There's a great book called Wartime Britain 1939-1945 which I found quite helpful," adds Knightley. "We also had a historian come in and talk about where they were politically in 1936. We were all saying 'it was all leading up to the war,' and they were saying 'whoa, wait a minute, they didn't know that for sure'. That was quite a big thing to get into all of our heads.
"Also there was a huge question of whether Cecilia would have been a virgin or not, and how likely it would have been that she would have had any other experience at Cambridge. It was interesting to hear how Joe wanted her to be a virgin, and the historian said she probably wouldn’t have been. She probably would, in her words, have had ‘a bit of a fiddle', which I thought that was quite interesting."
When war breaks out Cecilia volunteers to be a nurse, and Robbie seeks salvation in the army where he was part of the desperate retreat through to Dunkirk. To understand what this must have been like McAvoy sought the first hand experience of men who had done just that.
"We spoke to several veterans," he says quietly, "and that was hugely illuminating, vital to what we went on and recreated. Just spending that time with them actually gave us everything we needed and some parting comments pinpointed how devastating it was for them."
One can only wonder what their reaction would be to the Dunkirk sequence in the film, recreated by Wright in Redcar. It unfolds as an apparently single steadicam shot weaving through the shocked troops, the battered architecture and the detritus of a seemingly unwinnable war.
"I wanted a kind of magical, elegiac sense to that scene," says Wright. "It's a scene about wastefulness, it's a scene about the waste of human life, of animal life, of machines, of industry, of everything. The reason that scene works, to me, is because of the extras and the local people who came and gave their time with so much dignity. They really put their hearts into it.
"My primary concern on that day was to make sure they were involved and engaged and feeling like they were performers. There was this incredible feeling, this incredible energy of over 1,600 people all focusing on this one little bit of film. That was an incredible experience, one that I’ll never forget."
We shall all, in the greater scheme of things, remember.
ANWAR BRETT
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