As a dyslexic who grew up in the wings of a puppet theatre and left school
without any GCSEs at all, Joe Wright did not seem to be cut out for great
things. But after the British director’s first film was nominated for four
Oscars and his second, Atonement, opened the Venice film festival to acclaim
last week, it’s clear that a glittering new talent has been catapulted into
the firmament of world-class directors.
How, at 35, could you possibly top that? Well, Wright’s girlfriend is Rosamund
Pike, the beautiful blonde Bond actress who took all her clothes off in
Hitchcock Blonde at London’s Royal Court theatre and with whom Wright
recently bought a house. And his muse is the delectable Keira Knightley,
whom he steered to one Oscar nomination for her role as Elizabeth Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice and who is now tipped for another after her starring
role in Atonement.
“Who’d have ever thought it?” Wright mused of his meteoric rise in an
interview last week. “All I ever knew, since watching my mum and dad
rehearsing puppet shows, was that I wanted to be on set, part of that
collaborative experience. Everything else is just nice icing on the cake.”
Atonement, which goes on release this week, deals with the awful realities of
war but contains a sublime moment that Wright lifted straight from the
convention of make-believe at his parents’ Little Angel marionette theatre
in Islington in north London. The film’s two lovers appear to hover off the
ground in ecstasy, just as the Little Angel puppets had levitated when they
kissed.
Tousle-haired, laid back and lippy, Wright was not the first choice to direct
Atonement, adapted from Ian McEwan’s “unfilmable” bestselling war story. He
had not read the book — nor had he read Pride and Prejudice when he took it
on in 2005. Yet most critics agree that he has remained faithful to McEwan’s
novel while delivering a film of ravishing beauty and romantic passion that
could make it The English Patient of the Noughties.
According to Paul Webster, a producer of Atonement, Wright is “a great
romantic, a philosopher in a way, an interpreter of big ideas in cinematic
form. He’s one of the most exciting artists I have ever come across”.
Atonement is a story of how a family is destroyed by a lie. It begins on a hot
summer’s day in 1935 when a country-house aristocrat, Cecilia (Knightley),
is having a secret affair with the housekeeper’s son Robbie (James McAvoy).
It looks more sinister to 12-year-old Briony (Saoirse Ronan), whose wild
imagination misconstrues Robbie as a sexual monster who subjects her elder
sister to emotional torture. Her accusation that he raped an underage friend
leads to Robbie’s imprisonment and the unfolding events of a 64-year
timeframe.
For one of Wright’s most memorable sequences, he mounted a long tracking shot
of British soldiers in disarray as they wait to be evacuated from Dunkirk in
1940. The scene is a triumph over the film’s paltry £15m budget, which
forced him to cancel the Stuka dive-bombers he had pencilled in and assemble
1,000 extras for a single day’s shooting at Redcar in Cleveland.
“We rehearsed from 6am that morning, and at 6pm the weather was right and we
shot it,” he recalled. “It’s the third take that’s in the movie, because on
the fourth the Steadicam operator collapsed: his knees gave way.”
A workaholic and stickler for detail, he interviewed wartime nurses and
veterans of the British Expeditionary Force and researched the clothing,
colour palettes and clipped vowels of the era. Still haunted by perceptions
of being “dyslexic, middle-class and soppy” at school, he works intuitively
rather than intellectually: “I trust my emotions to make up for my lack of
esteem for my own intellect.”
Curiously, this professed lack of self-esteem is exceeded only by his
reputation for arrogance. As a child, he once upset his peers by listening
to Noël Coward and “poncing around in a dressing gown, which made me
slightly unpopular with the other kids, but f*** ’em”.
Famous for his candour, he declared he had bought his new house in Britain
“because I don’t want to float off into a world of Hollywood bullshit”. In
his view, the British film industry must continue to make movies that are
“for and about the British audience” rather than try to emulate America.
Atonement is an all-British effort, shot in England and produced by a UK
company, Working Title.
Taking a pop at America’s acting mentors, he proclaimed that naturalism was the death of drama. “Lee Strasberg came along and the Method f*****
everything up. Marlon Brando does not have a monopoly on truth.”
He caused a stir last year by castigating Bafta’s voters for denying Knightley
a best actress nomination, although she was put up for an Oscar and a Golden
Globes award. He still rates the omission “disgusting” and blames snobbery.
Knightley was 18 when she approached him for the role of Elizabeth Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice, only to be told: “I think you’re too pretty for the
part.” After seeing her again some time later he relented, muttering “No,
you’re not perfect” and cast her.
He wanted her to play Briony in Atonement, still imagining her as “an
18-year-old kid”, although she had set her sights on the part of Cecilia.
Suddenly confronted with “this mature woman” of 21 in a striking dress, he
caved in again. He has certainly coaxed more subtlety from Knightley than
any other director, leading to tabloid gossip that Pike, who played
Knightley’s sister Jane in Pride and Prejudice, was envious of her younger
co-star — a rumour Pike was keen to dispel.
Born in London, Wright was the son of John and Lyndie, who had founded the
puppet theatre. It became “my whole world growing up”, Wright recalled. “The
stories gave me my moral education and my imaginative world.” When a visit
to see the Disney film Bambi prompted him to ask how films were made, Lyndie
fashioned a cine camera with paper frames and a shoebox. After John died in
1991, his wife and daughter continued to run the theatre.
At his rough comprehensive school, where teaching amounted to “crowd control”,
Wright retreated into his own world. Between the ages of eight and 18 he
also attended Anna Scher’s local drama school and began to get jobs acting
on stage with the likes of Rupert Everett in Another Country and on screen
with Donald Sutherland.
Meanwhile, the shoebox camera had evolved into a little Super8. His short
films, allied to a painting talent, helped to get him admitted to Camberwell
College of Arts. Later he trained as a film-maker at Central Saint Martins.
In his last year he won a scholarship to make a short BBC film that won
recognition, leading to a script-writing stint for the serial Nature Boy
with Callum Keith Rennie. He followed this up by directing the television
serials Bodily Harm with Timothy Spall and the highly acclaimed Charles II:
The Power and the Passion with Rufus Sewell, which won the Bafta best drama
serial award.
Wright seemed to take delight in skewering the petit bourgeois manners and
mores of Pride and Prejudice, aided by Matthew Macfadyen as Darcy and Donald
Sutherland — Wright’s old mentor — as Mr Bennet. Among a host of awards, the
film won Wright the accolade of Bafta’s most promising newcomer.
Finding himself at the helm of Atonement after Sir Richard Eyre dropped out as
director, he shocked Christopher Hampton by demanding that he rewrite the
adaptation he had already finished. “It had never happened to me before,”
Hampton confessed. In Wright’s opinion, the screenplay “mucked about with
the book”.
“And so what I did was return the script to the structure of the book, back to
basics, which is exactly what I did with Pride and Prejudice. I don’t know
how to make Ian McEwan’s book any better than it is.”
Wright had been due make a film version of the play Gaslight, which opened in
June at London’s Old Vic starring Pike, but pulled out after realising that
his attempt to modernise the script was “fairly stupid — it’s called
Gaslight, for Christ’s sake!”. Instead, he is flying off with Pike to make a
Hollywood film with Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. Called The Soloist, it
is the story of Nathaniel Ayers, a musical prodigy who developed
schizophrenia.
The proceeds will help to finance his other project, a small British film
called Perfect Wonder, the story of West Indian emigration to Britain in the
1950s.
Wright has acknowledged that Atonement is not perfect. “But as Samuel Beckett
said, ‘Fail again, but fail better.’ And I know I failed better on Atonement
than on Pride and Prejudice.” There’s backhanded modesty. Some day, as they
say in Hollywood, that boy’s mouth will get him into real trouble.
