"Hello, everyone." "Thank you for letting me into your living rooms like this." "I guess you've all already seen the film before, and for some strange reason have an interest in what I'm about to say about it." "Well, here I am in London on the banks of the River Thames, and once more watching this movie that I've spent two and a half years making." "Originally the title sequence I had in mind was a little puppet sequence, and these puppets would have lived in this doll's house that you see here." "My mum, in fact, who's a puppeteer, made a complete set of Tallis family puppets, but we felt the beginning was too long and so we cut that." "The idea was that we were playing with scale, that Briony, or rather, the writer of this piece, the storyteller, is God." "The storyteller manipulates people's lives in the fiction." "And so I was always interested in playing with the ideas of scale, which is why we start on that doll's house and then see that young Briony appears to be enormous as we pan around to her and we have these very close shots of her." "I specifically kept off seeing her face too clearly at the beginning." "I wanted the idea that Briony's wit, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, is always just ahead of us." "She's just elusive." "This music was recorded prior to us shooting, and so we were able to play the music as we were filming this scene, which added a great excitement to the day and gave Saoirse Ronan the right pace and rhythms to be walking at." " I finished my play." " Well done." "Have you seen Mummy?" "Well, she'll be in the drawing room, I expect." "I hope you're not gonna be getting under our feet today, Miss Briony." "I like the idea that the film starts with the end of something." "There is a life before the film started and the life will continue afterwards." " Hello, pal, I hear you're putting on a play." " Who told you?" "Jungle drums." " Will you come and see it?" " I'm not sure that would be quite..." "Why don't you let me read it?" "James McAvoy." "I quite like the way he kind of mucks up putting his gloves on here." "We specifically left that in just there." "I don't like things when they're too perfect." "It reminds me a little bit of Pride and Prejudice opening, this, the, kind of, introduction to the world." "Stupendous." "It's stupendous, darling." "Your first play." "Do you think so?" "Do you think Leon will like it?" "Well, of course he will." "The Trials of Arabella..." "This is a story about a writer, very specifically, and about the mind of a writer." "It's about storytelling and the mind of a storyteller." "So there, again, we're playing with scale." "That was the first shot of the doll's house, replicated with the real house, that pans down to our characters in the film who are now like dolls." "This idea of storyteller as God." "In the eye of God." "You have to be nice to them." "I wonder how'd you feel if your mother had run off with Mr What's-his-name who reads the news on the wireless?" "I like the way Keira spends most of her first scene with her eyes shut." "All her costumes are patterned, and often florally, and that was something that we wanted to build into this opening section, that it was very verdant and over-textured, almost, as opposed to the later sections where things become a lot sparser." "Why don't you talk to Robbie any more?" "I do." "Keira's delivery was something we worked on." "In fact, everyone's delivery was something we worked on a lot during rehearsals." "We're trying to discover what the dialogue, what the accent could tell us about the way people thought and lived at that time." " Do we have to do a play?" " Why do we have to?" " It's to celebrate my brother Leon's visit." " I hate plays." " So do I." " How can you hate plays?" "There's Felix and Charlie and Juno Temple, none of whom, by the way, have curly red hair, and the boys were slightly alarmed by their hair." " Jackson?" "Amenable, that's right." " Amenable." "I love Juno's costumes in this." "I like her pinks with the orange hair." "And the wallpaper behind Briony there is the largest design we could find so that she'd look smaller." "It's the magic garden of her imagination that she lives in." "And again, everything is pattern on pattern on pattern, the chairs and the seat coverings and the wallpapers and the costumes." "Everything is patterned." "I suppose we should start by reading it." "If you're going to be Arabella, then I'll be the director, thank you very much." "Sorry." "I'm going to do the prologue." ""Prologue." ""This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella," ""who ran away with an extrinsic fellow." ""It grieved her parents to see their firstborn" ""evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne."" "Yes?" "That's Alfie." "It was a bigger part in the book, and I'm not sure whether the kind of red herring of his character works later." "Well, I'm sorry, Danny." " Can we go for a swim now?" " Yes, yes, yes!" " No, I don't really think there's time!" " Cecilia will let us." "I'm sure a half-hour break would do us all good." "Cecilia?" "Cecilia!" "Cecilia!" "So the bee draws her towards the window." "The bee was something I came up with." "I like the shift in perspective..." "I needed something to get her there, basically, and I like the idea of the bee having a kind of sting in its tail." "It's something quite foreboding about this bee, and the noise I kind of like as well." "It's irritating and buzzes in your brain, like the imagination." "So this is the set up of the whole film, really, the idea of perspective, of seeing events from a subjective perspective, and there's something that I felt was very modern about the book and could be applied to the film." "It's a story told from a modern perspective, and so in a way, for me, the film was set in the contemporary time looking back, rather than from the perspective of the period." "She obviously thinks that he has some kind of power over Cecilia." "That he's controlling things." "This is where she starts to think badly of Robbie, basically." "This is the beginning of her turning against him." "And in a way, what she's doing is trying to protect her sister." "I mean, the question of her motives is always a very difficult one, but certainly, the protection of Cecilia is part of her motivation." "Again and again, I have Briony look directly into the lens, in a way, connecting with the audience." "Sense of Cecilia's restlessness here." "We were trying to achieve lovely bit of hot-pot acting from Brenda Blethyn there." "And the twins running through this is the, kind of, pin between the timelines." "I think this might have been the first scene we shot with Keira, and again, it's that pattern-on-pattern thing." "This is a fairly iconic scene for me in terms of the styling of this section." "Everything's too rich, too verdant." "It's almost kitsch." "Milan Kundera said that kitsch was ripe to the edge of rotten, and I quite like that notion applied to this section of the film." "That it's ripe to the edge of rotten." "This was just a way of getting her shoes off so that when we arrived at the fountain she could merely step on the shard of vase." "I got her shoes off in this scene so it wouldn't appear strange for her to have to take her shoes off later." "Probably one of the kitschiest shots I've ever done in my life." "Can you do me one of your Bolshevik roll-ups?" "This scene we shot over about three different days 'cause we kept on losing the sun." "We were very lucky with this house that the interior and exterior worked in one location." "So, whenever there was sunshine, we'd run outside and do some exterior stuff, and then when the clouds came, we'd go inside." "But it took a long time to get this scene because of a lack of sun." "I always try and keep the actors moving." "I never like..." "When you have two actors walking together," "I kind of try and keep them moving around each other so that they're moving within the frame, because otherwise it's just the background moving and..." "It's like when people have people..." "You know, when directors have characters driving in cars, it's actually very static." "Although they think it's gonna be lots of movement, it's very static, because the characters are static in frame." "I said I'd pay your father back." "That's not what I meant at all." "That fountain actually wasn't there at that house." "We built that fountain on top of another fountain which was much, much smaller." "I was so nervous about shooting this scene." "It's a very technical scene and yet had to carry a lot of emotion, so I kept on putting it off and telling everyone that I'd shoot it the next day or the next day because it was a very difficult scene to shoot." "With Keira getting in and out of the pond and the costume changes and drying her hair between every take, and it was just a complicated, messy little scene to shoot." "That's slow motion there." "This is the moment that they really acknowledge to themselves their sexual attraction." "It's a really important moment, dramatically." "I like shots of hands." "Anyone who saw Pride and Prejudice will recognise my slight fetish for hands." "And here calming the water that she just got out of." "Not quite sure what that shot means, but there is some kind of poetic meaning to it that I respond to." "I think in this shot you can maybe just see one of the puppets." "No you can't, that's rubbish." "So in a way what she's doing now is kind of going down into the depths of her imagination." "Whenever she walks into that tunnel she's kind of going into the hinterland of her imagination." "Benedict Cumberbatch was very upset not to be allowed to actually drive that car." "It's a stunt man driving that car, and he wasn't allowed to." "He got very upset about that." "No need to encourage him." "So now the film's set up, the central themes of the film are set up, and in walks the antagonist, if you like, the character that's gonna blow the whole thing apart, and that's Paul Marshall." "Mother?" "I like these colours of suits that we went for, kind of these, again, pattern-on-pattern, and these kind of pastelly synthetic colours for the gentlemen here." " Whisky?" " Please." "I had a lot of fun with the costumes on this film." "I like suits very much and I like the whole period very much in terms of costumes, so..." "Another dress for Keira." "This is my sister, Cecilia." "Jacqueline Durran, the costume designer, and I had a lot of fun with all the suits and dresses for this period." "Mother's lying down, she's got one of her migraines." "I'm not surprised, with this heat." "The snobbery here that Cecilia shows towards" "Alfie's character is kind of endemic, and I like the notion that she isn't a wholly nice person to begin with." "So Emily Tallis, the mother character, who has her migraines, in the book is a lot bigger part." "Harriet Walter is a wonderful actress, and I wish we could have made more of that role, but that's one of the compromises one has to make when adapting to cut certain characters down a bit." "I don't like it here." "A lot of Keira's costumes are based on the photographs of Lee Miller, a wonderful woman photographer from the 1930s and '40s, and I think this swimsuit and swimming cap are inspired by the photographs of Lee Miller." "...a good chance of including it in the standard issue ration pack." "Which means that I'd have to open at least three more factories." "More if they bring in conscription, which I say is bound to happen if Herr Hitler doesn't pipe down." "He's about as likely to do that as buy shares..." "Patrick's circle peek-a-boo hole in the side of his swimming costume there, and I was very disappointed when he sat down that you couldn't see it, 'cause it made me laugh, and I like taking the mickey out of Patrick about it." "So actually at the end of the scene, I get him to sit up only to expose the little peek-a-boo hole in his swimming costume." "Oh, Leon, you didn't." "So, Robbie, the housekeeper's son, whose father did a bunk 20 years ago, gets a scholarship to the local grammar, the Old Man puts him through Cambridge, goes up at the same time as Cee, and for three years she hardly speaks to him." "Wouldn't let him within a mile of her Roedean chums." "Anyone got a cigarette?" "I don't know what the hell he's doing these days, messing about in flower beds." "As a matter of fact, he's planning on doing a medical degree." "And the Old Man said yes to that?" "Benedict's swimming costume is a little bit too tight." "Look, I really think you should go down to the lodge and ask him not to come." "Why?" "There you go, there's the peek-a-boo." "There you go, there's the hole in the swimming costume." "Again, the water motif with Cecilia," "I'm not quite sure why or where that started but it just kind of..." "Something worked in my brain with the idea that she was always associated with water." "Maybe like the Little Mermaid, who is the star of a puppet show my parents did." "This is a very strange scene to shoot." "On the page, it didn't seem quite as sick as it then became when shooting." "You will never, ever use that word again!" "Do you understand?" "And left us all with a funny feeling in our stomachs." "You must be the cousins from the north." " What are your names?" " Pierrot." "Benedict plays the predator brilliantly and very against his natural character." "He's a very, very gentlemanly gentleman." "Your parents are absolutely wonderful people, that's quite clear, and they love you and think about you all the time." "I like the blocking of this scene, I like that move there." "I don't think she's ever been to see Hamlet, and I don't think Paul Marshall has either." "At least that was the note." "I like your shoes." "Duckers in the Turl." "They make a wooden thing..." "Duckers in the Turl is still there, I think." "I'm starving." "When's dinner?" "Well, I might be able to help you there, if you can guess what I do for a living." " You've got a chocolate factory." " Everyone knows that." "Then it wasn't a guess, was it?" "Benedict was quite, kind of, disturbed by the role he was playing, and so we talked a lot about it, and Juno was very supportive of him." "In a way it was more difficult for him to play the abuser than it was for Juno to play the abused." " Calling it the Army Amo." " Amo, amas, amat." "Top marks." "It's boring how everything ends in "o." "Polo" and "Aero."" " And "Oxo" and "Brillo"." " Sounds as if you don't want it." "Then I shall just have to give it to your sister." "Bite it." "Probably my favourite line from the film, "You have to bite it."" "And I was shocked by the way he did it, with such aggression, really." "So this is Briony's secret place." "This is her secret garden, and it's later violated by Paul Marshall." "This is where she finds him later." "...that the one with red hair was not to be trusted." "As his young ward dived again and again to the depths of the lake, in search of the enchanted chalice, Sir Romulus twirled his luxuriant moustache." "Sir Romulus rode with his two companions, northwards..." "I love shooting scenes like the one that's coming up here." "It's really just..." "We'd set up the camera, and it becomes a kind of improvisation between the actor and the camera." "They need to be in unison, they need to be dancing with each other, and it takes a very close connection between camera operator and actor." "And Pete, the operator, is wonderful at that." "That note is like sexual ecstasy to me." "That's why I used this piece of music at this point." "That high note when they both join together is," "I think, intensely erotic." "Seamus when we were shooting this, Seamus has got a little hand-held light and he's flashing it into the lens of the camera to give us those flares that, then, Paul Tothill used to edit." "I was really trying to capture a sense of the two of them almost metaphysically talking to each other." "One of the things I love about James is what a physical actor he is." "He really isn't afraid to use his body." "There is a legend going around that James was actually a gymnast previously, but I don't know if that was true." "But we always take the piss out of him for being a gymnast." "Dear Cecilia, you'd be forgiven for thinking me mad..." "This dress is also based on a Lee Miller photograph, or at least the top of the dress is based on a Lee Miller's photograph, and I had to have quite a few of those dresses made because they were so fragile," "and especially during the lovemaking scene, they got a bit damaged, so..." "So, each time we had to pull out a new dress." "Off out then?" "In each set there are little signs about the story, what's coming up, and just to the left of Robbie there, there's a picture of two soldiers," "wounded, walking across an empty landscape, which, in a way, is a precursor of what's to happen to Robbie." "Just as by Briony's bed, her bedside lamp has a cut-out of the Houses of Parliament, which is a precursor of what happens to her in St Thomas'." "Wanted to play with rhythms and sound a lot in this film." "That's something that my editor, Paul Tothill, and I have been working on for a while." "Very impressed with the way that James got over that fence." "One of my favourite sections of the film, this." "Briony!" "Is that you?" "I like the kind of slowness of this." "You know, I'm always trying to play with rhythms." "I mean, I think one of film's great assets is its potential for rhythm, and so I like the slowness of this rhythm before the staccato rhythms of what's coming next." "Are you all right?" "At this moment, I think Briony knows that she's gonna read it." "And if she takes it, she'll read it." "I think that's the worst thing Briony does, is that moment, actually." "I think she actually believed that she saw Robbie later." "But I think the taking of this letter with the knowledge that she's gonna open it and read it is one of the worst things she does." "Her biggest mistake." "Playing with sound is as much about where to use the pauses as it is to use the sounds, and I love that moment of silence when we come round the back of his head before everything kicks off." "I find silence quite creepy sometimes." "Briony." "This is one of the first sections I storyboarded, and I got very excited about the potential of intercutting these staccato rhythms." "Tricky shot, that Steadicam shot getting through that door." "Looks simple but is really a tricky shot." "Briony!" "And again, I always like playing with cutting between extreme close-ups and extreme wide shots for impact." "That being your extreme close-up and that being your extreme wide shot." "Always does something for me." " I suppose he's what you might call eligible." " Rather." "He certainly seems to think he's the cat's pyjamas." "Which is odd, considering he has pubic hair growing out of his ears." "That shot was probably designed to show off Keira's back." "I think she's got a very beautiful back." "So, I think that shot was designed to show off her back." "I wrote you a play, Leon." "I wanted to do a play for you." "I'm never quite sure that this scene really works." "Hasn't quite got the impact that I wanted it to have." " Briony, did you read this letter?" " Yes, let's." "That's a wonderful idea." " Briony!" " Here we are." "Scenes sometimes slip away from you a little bit." "I don't quite buy the reality of that scene somehow." "But I buy the reality of this scene." "A long time spent trying to figure out that dress for Lola." "We knew we wanted it to be pink but we..." "It was a very difficult balance of it being childlike but also kind of her attempting to look grown up." "She's on that funny cusp, poor old Lola, and an adolescent dress of that period was quite difficult." "Lola." "Can I tell you something?" "Something really terrible." "Lovely performance from Juno Temple there." "She's a stunning actress and would get quite emotional about scenes and always put herself down, but she was wonderful, I think." " He's a sex maniac!" " That's right." " What's Cecilia going to do?" " I don't know." "You ought to call the police." "This is a case of running out of time." "As a director, you're constantly managing the time you have for each scene." "And I ran out of time in this scene, so I had to conceive a way of shooting it in two shots, so you've got that shot and then Juno at the door, and I didn't have time to come in for close-ups," "which I probably would have liked to have done, but time ran out on us." "The costumes are often as much about the way they move as they are the way they look, and I think this dress of Saoirse's moves brilliantly, has a lovely kind of fluttery effect to it." "There's a little light shining on that diamond to give it the reflections, to give it that little kick." "This is what I always refer to as my Harry Potter scene." "That's another of my favourite shots in the film, that one of her feet walking towards and the dress coming down." "Swallows, the birds, are a kind of running motif through the film." "They kind of symbolise the imagination to me, and so there are swallows on the front of her dress here and there are swallows later throughout the film." "I'll try and point out the swallows for you." "And they're also a little thank you to a lady whose house we wrote the film in in Italy, and there were lots of swallows there." "This coming shot we always refer to as being the "fucking insects" shot." "Sex, to me, from a wide shot, always looks quite awkward and grotesque." "Sex only ever really works onscreen, as far as I'm concerned, in tight close-up, when one feels the touch." "Seen from an objective, wide shot, it always looks vaguely ridiculous." "Like two animals." "Cecilia!" "I like Keira's performance in this scene very much." "She really makes him work." " It was a mistake." " Briony read it." "That dress was specifically designed for easy access in the coming scene." "So the split up the front, which is normally sewn up..." "When she lifts her leg, the dress kind of falls away." "Have to bear all these things in mind." "I told James to perform that walk as if he had a bit of a hard-on." "Sometimes my directions, my notes to the actors, are very intellectual, and sometimes you just have to come out with a very basic, simple note, like, "Play the scene with a hard-on."" "What was in the version I was meant to read?" "I don't know." "It was more formal." "Less..." " Anatomical?" " Yes." "It's been there for weeks, and then this morning by the fountain..." "I've never done anything like that before." "And I was so angry with you, and with myself." "I like the way in the next shot she's not quite aware that he's as close as he is," "and then turns, and he's a lot closer than she thought." "So stupid." "Lot of looking at each other's mouths in this scene." "You do know what I'm talking about, don't you?" "You knew before I did." "Why are you crying?" "Don't you know?" "Yes, I know exactly." "I like the slowness and the classicism of that style until you get to this point, and then it's all shattered, it's all broken." "The camera operator is really kind of dancing with the actors, it's..." "In a way what I'm doing is allowing the camera operator editorial control." "He moves as he feels." "I also like the idea that that first kiss is like a proper Hollywood kiss, and then it doesn't really work, and so they have to stop and try again." "And now the kiss is for real." "We shot this scene with a closed set, so it was just the actors and myself, the camera operator and the focus puller." "No one else was allowed in." "And we laughed a lot, basically." "I played some music, I played Brian Eno music, so nothing too sexy," "'cause that would've just made us feel stupid, and while we're shooting this, I'm talking them through it." "So I'm shouting out, "Lift your leg up!" "Lift your leg up!"" ""Put your hand up her skirt!"" "And, "Keira!" "Put your hands down his trousers!"" "So I'm kind of talking them through it." "At one point I shouted very loudly, "Wank him off!"" "And at that point they just fell about laughing." "That foot lifting off the floor is a kind of..." "Is a reference to Chagall paintings, and the lovers floating in the air, that she literally lifts, she's suspended for a moment here," "off the ground, she's levitating." "I love you." "The important thing between actors and doing scenes like this is to just have a laugh, really." "I think if you take it too seriously, then it's all going to get weird and complicated." "They were just laughing every time I called cut." "Someone's come in." "Cecilia!" "This scene, I was trying to capture an experience I had as a child, when I went round to a friend of mine's house when I must've been about six or..." "No, seven or eight, and I went round to a friend of mine's house, and he showed me his father's collection of pornography that was hidden under the bed." "And I was so shocked and terrified by this collection, these sights," "and I kept on thinking about that when I was shooting this scene." "I always try and find personal attachments to a scene," "I always try and find something that helps me empathise." "I was disappointed with this scene." "I don't..." "Not the actors, but with my direction of it." "It feels a little too stiff." "It was a very, very hot day, it was incredibly hot in that room, and our energies were quite low, and I think that shows somehow." "Maybe it works for the scene, but I was..." "It wasn't as good as I hoped it would be." "What about you, Briony?" "What sins have you committed today?" " I've done nothing wrong." " Have you seen the twins recently?" "They didn't look very happy last time I saw them, poor little chaps." " You know nothing about it." " Briony." "I can't imagine what's got into you." " I've never known you to be so rude." " Well, they're not poor little chaps." " Just look what they did to Lola." " What are you talking about?" "Jackson and Pierrot bruised her arm." "Gave her Chinese burns." "I'm afraid she's quite right." "I had to pull them off her." "Also, I never quite know if you can see the scratch on Paul Marshall's face there that he's referring to." "Would you go and find these boys, please, Briony?" "Tell them dinner's ready, and where are their manners?" " Why do I have to go?" " Briony, you'll do as you're told, or you'll go straight to your room." "I like that bit, though." "I like the details." "I think details often say much more than wide shots." "Here's a case in point about that dress, the way that dress moves." "The hems of it fluttering there." " They've run away." " Who has?" "The twins." ""We are going to run away because Lola is so horrid to us and we want to go home." " "Also, there wasn't a play."" " Don't worry." "We'll send out some search parties." "They can't have gone far." "Cee, you come with me." "I'm not sure about how successful this little scene is there." "Pierrot!" "Jackson!" "Boys!" "Jackson!" "Pierrot!" "Again, another scene where we didn't have much time to shoot it." "You can only work kids so many hours in the night, so we were very limited with the amount of time we had with Saoirse for night shoots, which made this quite tricky." "These ducks that appear in this scene were a complete pain in the arse and kept on flying up in everyone's faces or not flying at all, and behind that boat is a poor fellow in a wetsuit trying to throw ducks in the air." "In the coming shot of Marshall and Lola," "I actually had Benedict leave his pants on, leave his underpants on, and the arse that you see there is actually a digitally created arse." "You know, it was someone's, unfortunately, someone's job to have to paint Benedict Cumberbatch an arse crack." "Lola?" "Are you all right?" "I was so proud of these two on this night." "They looked after each other so, so well." "They really cared for each other and they really supported each other." "And it was a difficult scene for them to shoot." "It's obviously dealing with very, very dark issues, and although they're both, you know..." "Juno's a very mature 17-year old, it was still, you know, it was a difficult thing to do, and they really looked after each other, and I was very proud of them for that." "I caught him attacking my sister in the library." "I don't know what he'd have done if I hadn't come in." " You actually saw him?" " Of course I did." "Plain as day." "And they kept totally focused." "It was 4.;00 in the morning when we shot this scene, and they were awake and focused and really," "really concentrated on the job." "Very proud of them." "Well, I can." "And I will." "Like the ribbons dangling from her feet there." "That's the sort of things that you just kind of notice on the day and try and involve." "There's quite a lot of, kind of, formal tableaus in this film." "I don't know how it happened." "It just kind of developed, really." "I haven't seen him." "I know who it was." "You saw him, then?" "So this shot is then a mirror or a rhyme with the very ending of the film when we see Vanessa Redgrave, older Briony, just against black, and..." "And that's what this shot is supposed to mirror." "Well done, darling." "That is probably one of my favourite shots of Keira in that dress." "I like smoking, I'm afraid." "Kids, don't do it!" "But I like smoking." "I still kind of..." "I like the glamour of smoking in the 1930s and '40s." "This is something where my designer, Sarah Greenwood, comes up with an idea, like that dressing table with the mirrored interior, and she offers me these possibilities, these ideas of ways of shooting things." "I'm constantly trying to be open to other people's creative input." "My brother and I found the two of them down by the lake." "You didn't see anyone else?" "Again, I kind of really enjoy playing with characters looking directly into the lens, and it feels quite modern and direct and bold." "When they went looking, I went up to my dad's." "I did, honest." "Just a little trivia for you, but Alfie Allen's sister is actually Lily Allen, and that song on her album about Alfie her brother is actually about Alfie Allen there." "I'm kind of being quite elliptical with the cutting here, and with the storytelling, because I think if you look too closely, the actual plausibility falls apart." "So I'm using a kind of elliptical structure and hoping I'll get away with it, basically." "There's too many questions around this section, so I'm trying to move through it without giving the audience time to ask those questions." "Sir, there is someone coming." "I really wanted the kids on Robbie's shoulders." "The kids were quite big, so they were quite tricky for James to carry." " Time you went to bed." " But..." "Now." "This shot is a perfect example of Jacqueline Durran's genius." "The way the light comes through that dress..." "That skirt is fantastic, I think." "A couple of times James fell over whilst trying to lift that kid off his shoulders here." "The next shot is one of those serendipitous things when I run out of time." "I had a much more complicated structure for this little scene, a much more complicated shot list for this little scene, and we ran out of time, so I came up with the idea of starting on the wallpaper and then jibbing down" "to find Briony in silhouette, and then she just sits up in that shot." "I like it a lot as it is, but it's not how I originally planned to shoot it." "Funny thing, the window that Briony's looking through when she watches this, there on the right is Saint Matilda, and Matilda's also the girl from the fairytales who's the little liar, so that felt like a little bit of synchronicity." "'Cause Brenda's so lovely, it's always shocking when she's angry, it's..." "And we kind of utilised that, really." "I was very, very impressed with the way Saoirse kept her eyes open without blinking throughout this shot." "She was really concentrating on not blinking here." "And again, this is a..." "You know, I was playing with sound, the beating on the bonnet turning into the typewriter, turning into everything." "There's no separation between music and sound effects, and again, here we're cutting from an extreme close-up to a wide, and Part Two." "I says to him, I says, "You can sit down there, twiddling your thumbs," ""waiting to get your head blown off, if you want to."" "So that mouth organ theme there is going to turn into a big orchestral theme throughout this section, but it starts with Mace playing it." "And when I first read the book, I..." "He was described as this enormous man, and I immediately thought of Nonso Anozie who's a wonderful actor I'd seen and knew from around London." "What's his game?" " He says he's got something for us." " Fucking hell!" "Wait!" "We have food for you" "Bread, sugar" "And wine!" "Danny Mays here is an actor I've been desperate to work with for a very, very long time." "He's a great theatre actor and has really shined in various Mike Leigh films as well." "And a great bloke." "These two French fellows are both comedians in France, which I didn't realise." "So when some French friends of mine saw the film they were surprised to see them in serious roles." "But I love their faces, especially the younger brother on the left." "I think he's just got such a beautiful face." "James took his French very, very seriously and practically learnt the language for that scene." "Good luck" "Come on, then." "Again, here's me trying to cover a scene in a short amount of time." "So hence, I cover this bit of scene in two shots simply 'cause I ran out of time in the day." "But it works." "Sometimes, you know, necessity is definitely the mother of invention when it comes to filmmaking." "I wonder if you have the word "toff" in America." "It means "posh." I guess you understand that." "Playing with sound, we're inside his head still, and it's only when we come through the doors that the sound of reality breaks through." "This was a scene we'd been building up to for a long time." "It was one that Keira and James and I held very dear to our hearts." "There's life bursting in with those doors opening." "It's all about what's not said in this scene, rather than what's said." "And the speed with which they talk." "Everything's under the surface, or at least we try to keep everything under the surface." "I'm sorry I'm late, I got lost." " Hello." " Hello." " Should we sit down?" " Yes, of course." "In this period, the accent means that they shorten the vowels of their words, and emotion is carried in the vowel." "And so very little emotion is expressed in the way they speak because of those short vowels." "Two." "Thank you." "James couldn't stop crying while we were shooting this scene." "In fact, neither could I." "There's a swallow behind him there and in fact, this tea shop is called the Swallow Tea Shop." "I should have pointed out earlier that there are swallows on the..." "Engraved into the doors as they came in, and on the table cloths, around the table cloths, there's swallows." " Apart from the uniform, of course." " Yes, I'm sorry." "I've got to go back" " to the hospital in half an hour." " Oh, God, that..." "There's a brass swallow behind him there." "We should've had a competition to see how many swallows people could spot." "You can see them on the menu there." "It's so complicated, this scene." "Or rather, it's so complicated, their emotions, and it's so complicated trying to love anyone," "I think, and..." "And that's what we were trying to express, all the difficulties of loving, of just being open and honest and clear and communicative with someone." "Trying to say the right thing." "Had I been allowed to visit you, had they let me every day," " I would have been there every day." " Yes, but..." "If all we have rests on a few moments in a library three and a half years ago, then I'm not sure," " I don't know if..." " Robbie, look at me." "So her look is quite different now, the lipstick and the much paler skin." "A lot less groomed." "It's a look that suits her, I think." "And also he's lost his suntan, and is now darker around the eye." "I often like using a breath, the sound of a breath, to cut on, to take us into the next scene." "These animals, like the frog and the owl here and the gecko later," "I guess, are suggesting a wider context, a natural world that has no cares of what these characters are going through." "And perhaps there's a slight reference to Charles Laughton's great film," "Night of the Hunter, which is constantly referenced, but it is a wonderful film." "A friend of mine has a cottage by the coast." "Said we can borrow it when you're next on leave." "We shot this scene outside Old Scotland Yard, and so there are a lot of CCTV cameras that were removed digitally afterwards." "It was very exciting to be shooting in London." "I've done very little shooting in London, although I've lived here all my life, and so it was a lovely day." "I've always travelled on the number 19 bus." "The number 19 bus goes from Islington, where I was brought up, into the West End and into the world of lights." "This is almost like a little fantasy of mine, to have a girl looking at me like that from the back of a number 19 bus." "The number 19, though, does not go to Balham, which certain people have pointed out to me." "Nor Oxford Circus, for that matter." "This was shot at dawn." "We arrived at the location at 4 a.m." "And set up the cameras and then waited for dawn to come." "I like shooting at dawn." "There's something quite magical and mystical about it." "The crew get a different kind of atmosphere." "And for the first time here, we reveal Robbie's wound." "Shrapnel wound." "In the original script, there was a scene before this where we saw the wound that we'll have a look at in the deleted scenes." "It was difficult, the edit of the Dunkirk section, the balance between getting the sense of how far they'd come and the mundanity of the walk, but without boring the audience, so it's probably the section that lost the most during the edit." "And certainly Nonso and Danny Mays suffered for that, which was a shame, but I think it worked out." "My darling." "Briony found my address somehow, and sent a letter." "The first surprise was she didn't go up to Cambridge." "She's doing nurse's training at my old hospital." "I think she may be doing this as some kind of penance." "She says she's beginning to get the full grasp of what she did, and what it meant." "She wants to come and talk to me." "I love you." "I'll wait for you." "Come back." "Come back to me." "Come back." "Come back to me." "Come back." "Come back to me." "So where we going, guv?" "So this scene is a case of using what you've got, of being open to what is offered to you." "I'd always imagined this location to have kind of dappled sunlight coming through the trees, and when we arrived on the day, there was no sun at all." "It was very cloudy and quite bleak." "So I got the special effects guys to circle us with tubes of smoke, and we wafted the smoke in, and suddenly it became this kind of misty environment which actually was probably a lot more exciting than the dappled sun would have been." "And then, at that moment, weirdly, the sun came out for a fraction." "And it seemed to work perfectly with the mood of what was happening, so I left it in there." "I love it when things happen beyond my control, when I have to respond to what is being offered to me by the story and the location and..." "That's something I try to apply to my work." "I don't know if this scene really works." "I mean..." "The idea is that these girls had been killed and then laid out, but whoever was laying them out didn't have time to bury them." "I don't know if that really works." "In this moment, I was telling James not to cry, not to cry, not to cry, don't cry." "And he was really trying to hold it in." "And I felt that it would maybe have some bad repercussions for him later if I didn't let him." "So as I was ready, as I felt we had the shot," "I said, "All right, James, you can let it go now. "" "And that's when he started crying." "And that's the moment we ended up using." "This scene is a difficult one." "It's important that the audience are aware, and I'm not sure if they are aware enough, that this is Robbie's version of this scene." "He's remembering this scene, and he's trying to figure out why Briony did what she did, why Briony accused him of the rape." "And he's decided in his mind that it's because she was jealous of his love of Cecilia, that, in fact, Briony was in love with him." "To me, that's not the truth." "What she says later is the truth, that she used to have a crush on him about this time, and that the crush went away." "And so, by the time she accused him of the rape, she was no longer in love with him." "And that, to me, is quite important, because the jealousy theory is too simple." "It's a lot more complicated than she was just jealous of their love." "Thank you!" "Thank you, thank you!" "That's an incredibly bloody stupid thing to do." " I wanted you to save me." " Don't you know how easily you could have drowned?" " You saved me." " Stupid child!" "I think she was definitely jealous of them having a relationship that she wasn't involved in." "I think that's true." "But it's not the whole story." "I will be eternally grateful to you." "Again, this is like..." "I mean, I love that shot, it's one of my favourite shots of the film." "It was purely responding to what we had around us." "That white swimming costume and that white swimming hat amongst the white cow parsley." "Jerry, come and have a go at us in fucking South End." "Or better still, Trafalgar Square." "The morning we shot this scene, I said, "Danny, I've got this speech for you to do."" "And amazingly, he learnt it in, literally, a couple of hours." "We fight in France and the French fucking hate us." "His accent is perfect in this scene." "It's a period Cockney accent, it's not a modern Cockney accent." "It's a Cockney accent from the 1940s." "Who's fucking ever been to Poland?" "It's all about room, empire." "They want more empire, give 'em this shithole, we keep ours." "Everyone's always trying to kind of rationalise the chaos of life." "And that's exactly what Briony does, and that's what Nettle is doing in that scene." "The idea is that Nettle is quite annoying until he redeems himself at the very end and is the best friend you could possibly hope for." "Dearest Cecilia." "The story can resume." "The one I had been planning on that evening walk." "Beautiful bit of photography here by Seamus McGarvey, and a bold choice of his, to leave her so dark." "She is just across the Channel." "This is something we shot later, after the main body of the shooting." "I felt that we didn't have enough Cecilia in this Dunkirk section." "I will return, find you, love you..." "This is the Corus Steelworks, which is actually still working." "And we did some work on it digitally to make it..." "To destroy it." "It's a very long crane arm here that was developed by..." "I think it was developed by, or at least first used by Terrence Malick in Thin Red Line." "Very light, very long." "And that sandbank is actually on the back of a truck, of a pickup truck, because that's the same beach that we then use in the following scene, that they walked down, so that I didn't have to move the extras around too much." "Fuck me." "So, the coming shot, I think I'm just gonna try and point things out to you that you may or may not have noticed." "Come on, get everybody to clean this mess up now." "We've just arrived, sir." "Can you tell us what we're supposed to be doing?" "The Steadicam shot took a day to film." "We had a day with these 1,000 extras, and this single shot was..." "Was the way that I conceived of being able to get the most out of it." "So everyone started arriving at 6 a.m., and we rehearsed and rehearsed all day till we started shooting at 6 p.m." "We got three takes, and this is the third take." "On the fourth take, the Steadicam operator collapsed." "His legs gave way, and we couldn't do any more." "We were incredibly blessed with the light here." "But I kind of had faith that we were gonna get good light." "I think sometimes you've just gotta have faith that things are gonna work." "The camera here is on a golf buggy, and you can see the tyres' marks there as we pull back." "The only CGI is the smoke, the big smoke in the background there." "These horses are circus horses and they're getting pulled over by a trainer." "There's no gun and there's no sound." "In reality, they're getting pulled over, and the camera has to move off them very quickly before they get up again, 'cause they don't like lying down for too long." "The camera steps off the golf buggy here, and he's walking now." "That's my mum's name, Lyndie, of London." "A little homage to my mum." "And then there's a pipe coming up through the fire here which is blowing the papers into the air." "A lot of assistant directors are dressed as soldiers here, so they're kind of marshalling the extras as we move through." "And I'm using extras in one place, and then getting them to move up into another area to walk through the shot later on." "The shot's kind of turned into a point-of-view shot here." "That's partly..." "The first time I saw that done was F. W. Murnau's film, Sunrise, which is a silent movie from..." "I forget when, 1928 or something." "And is a very beautiful use of point of view." "So that..." "The bandstand was built by Sarah." "A lot of this is built." "Obviously, the Ferris wheel wasn't there." "Nonso hated the fact that he tripped up there." "He was very upset about that." "But I quite like it, it's a kind of..." "Adds a bit of naturalism to it and makes us a little bit clumsy." "So I'm following the camera, but now I'm running down underneath the bandstand so as not to be..." "And this is a kind of..." "This is the trick bit here, that you get a sense that the camera's moving 360 degrees." "There's a load of stuff behind them now that you can't see, that is all modern." "Jane Frazer, the co-producer, chose this hymn, and I think she chose it beautifully," "I was very pleased that she got to choose the hymn." "The building on the left there is a real hotel, but it's obviously dressed to look like a French..." "I love the way James turns there." "So I'm basically running behind the camera, cueing things as it goes on." "You may or may not have noticed, but hanging from that Ferris wheel is a stuntman." "Where can you see him?" "You can see him there." "He's fallen out of his little cart." "And those are supposed to be circus horses, there's the stuntman." "And the French soldiers that you see coming here, through shot here, have..." "We've seen earlier on the beach, and now they've been marshalled up and they're coming through shot again there." "And they'll come through shot again later, you'll see them later." "Guv'nor." "I have to get something to drink." "You need one." "You're grey." "He's gone all grey, can you see?" "So now, the camera's stepped onto a kind of rickshaw thing and is being pulled back." "So he's not walking any more." "And these guns are kind of being cued." "Everything is being cued just before we arrive there." "Danny nearly got hit twice on the head there." "And then the soldiers that we saw in the background before are coming through here." "There's a guy playing piano on the right-hand side there, but we missed him on that take, which is unfortunate." "And then in the final reveal..." "So I used James looking out to pan the camera around." "Trying to motivate the camera move." "And then..." "Here, those French soldiers you see walking through the foreground there." "I think the emotion of this scene is largely carried by Dario's music." "But the idea of that shot is the wastage of war." "Everything is being wasted." "Horses, machines, human life." "It's all a waste." "And that was the overriding theme of that scene, and we had a wonderful time doing it." "I'm coming home!" "Laddie, I'm coming home!" "Fuck 'em all!" "This guy, the banjo guy, we just found on the day." "And he turned up and said he could play the banjo and knew some 40 songs, and so we sat him on the bar." "And he really makes this scene, I think..." "And again, it's that thing of being open to given..." "You know, being open to what the story gives you, or the day brings you, being open to..." "To the real life, and not trying to control everything too much." "If someone comes with a great idea, then I'll use it." "So this cinema literally happened to be on the beach." "So again, I'm responding to what's offered." "And this cinema's on the beach, and so..." "We thought, "Well, let's involve it."" "And it turned into one of my favourite moments in the film." "But it certainly wasn't in the script when we wrote it." "This is a wonderful film called Le quai des brumes," "The Port of Shadows, by Marcel Carné." "Are we in his head, or is this reality?" "I'm not sure." "I kind of like to think it's in his head, really." "I think she's wonderful." "Now we're in a completely different location, we're in Grimsby, in the old fish market of Grimsby, which is an amazing place, and..." "And the building on the right was an ice factory." "This scene we kind of improvised on the day." "It was supposed to be another woman that Robbie sees and meets." "But unfortunately, the actress who I'd cast, she was too old and infirm." "So we kind of improvised this scene or kind of..." "Well, we wrote this scene on the day." "And I was very glad that we did," "I think it worked much better than what we originally had." "But it was quite a hair-raising night, to say the least." "Again, a lovely bit of design from Sarah, I think, here." "And again, Seamus working with the scene." "There's a thing called a Hylen lens here, which basically defocuses everything other than the specifically chosen area." "So everything is out of focus apart from James' eyes there, and again, everything is out of focus apart from James there, which kind of gives her an angelic quality, makes her feel like even more of a spectral vision." "I love the fact that that reflection on the wall there, as well the light kicking on the wall, almost seems to give him a halo." "There is a certain amount of religious iconography in this scene, and that is intentional." "Although I'm not quite sure what it says." "It just felt right." "Usually, things just feel right." "I don't really intellectualise or, you know..." "I sometimes try and post-rationalise things to see if they're true." "But it's all kind of intuitive." "Hey, what have you done with your boots?" " Look, you're sure you're feeling all right?" " Never better." "It was exciting, this night, this shoot." "It felt like a proper major motion picture we were shooting, and you know, it was fun." "This'll do, down here." "And Danny is just giving an incredibly generous performance, I think." "James is obviously stunning, but Danny is being a brilliant support here." "And without him, James wouldn't be as good." "A lot of credit goes to Danny here." "You know, he's like the midfielder to the centre forward." "I shouldn't use football references, I know absolutely nothing about football." "And so, that's his tomb." "He's walking into his own tomb." "When we found this location and that shape in the floor," "I was very excited." "I like the idea of him walking into his own tomb." "And everything gets smaller and smaller." "We start with..." "You know, we had this big momentous beach shot, scene, and everything gets whittled down smaller and smaller and smaller until he ends up with, you know, a scene in a tiny basement, lit by a single match." "And that was the idea, to reduce and reduce and reduce it." "And in a way, the whole film reduces and reduces, until we end up with that close-up of Vanessa Redgrave." "But here, it's doing the same thing, you know, and death for me is something small." "It's an exhale of breath, it's a match going out." "It's not, you know..." "I didn't want it to be a big, dramatic death of him wading out into the sea, or..." "You know, I didn't want it to be an epic death," "I wanted it to be a tiny death." "It's a tiny thing, it's just an expiring of a match flame." "Tuck yourself in." "Keep yourself warm." "I think Danny's performance here, and James..." "I think they're just beautiful together, and I think..." "You know, Robbie could not have wished for a better friend at this moment." "And this is an important moment in Nettle's life." "He will never forget this moment, he will always remember Robbie Turner, and he will always remember how he" "held his hand, how he nursed him into death." "And that's important." "This scene is about friendship, and how the most unexpected people can become friends, can become the most important people in your life." "Nettle shows great sensitivity, and that's surprising for his character." "This, literally, is lit by a match." "That's the only lighting used here," "which is why you get this wonderful slow fade." "I think that's very brave of Seamus." "I like this whole backwards section." "It was supposed to be much bigger and longer and involve kind of backwards news footage of, you know, the Germans rolling back into Belgium, and, you know, Hitler's speech is backwards, and you know..." "That field of poppies was found by my mum when she was driving up to visit." "There's a whole scene that you'll see in the deleted scenes of that crowd in the riot." "And live without shame." "And then this was shot to be played backwards." ""Come back to me," trying to undo everything that's happened, trying to return to the source, trying to return to the meaning of his life, which is his love for Cecilia." "It was a fine balance in the edit, working out how much the audience felt that Robbie was dead or not." "And a question we constantly try to ask ourselves." "Bit too much noise, guv'nor." "In fact, that was the last moment of this sequence, but we put it earlier, so that you then had this, so that then you had a sense that he might possibly live on." "My direction to James was to play this scene like a child." " Christ." "You look a bit rough." " Thing is, I've decided to stay on for a bit." "He's kind of returned to some childlike state." "And I think the sincerity with which he thanks Nettle is the key to that." "I went out for a Jimmy Riddle just now." "Guess what I saw!" "They're getting themselves sorted out down on the beach." "The boats are back, and a geezer from the Buffs is marching us down at 7:00." "We're away." "Let's talk about this "away."" "I always used to try and talk to Danny about that, making us feel like, you know, the open sea." "I wanted to hear that in his voice." "Wake me before 7:00, would you?" "Thanks so much." "You won't hear another word from me." "Promise." "Robbie Turner is good, he's the higher self." "He's the best we can be." "St Thomas' Hospital." "The little ducklings." "Part Three." "There's a cut there, so that the group of nurses who walk through here are the same ones you saw walking through the other end of the corridor." "Suddenly, we've broken out of the hand-held kind of..." "We've left the hand-held looseness of Dunkirk, and we're into very formal, classic compositions, and..." "This stuff, really..." "I was thinking a lot about Powell and Pressburger, and Lean, and people like that." "It's a very formal, classical kind of style of shooting." "Until Dunkirk comes to St Thomas'." "I have a special attachment to St Thomas' and so I was excited to portray the heroism of the doctors and nurses there." "These kids are like, 18, in real life, they were 18, you know?" "Labels are folded to the inside, are they not?" " Yes, Sister." " Do them again." "Nurse Tallis, I'll see you in my office." "The rest of you are excused." "Because of that hair, because of that mole, you know that's Briony Tallis." "Is this job at all important to you, Tallis?" "And so, to give her a very clear look, from Saoirse as the young Briony to Romola as the middle Briony, and then to Vanessa as the older Briony." "There is no Briony." "You are Tallis." "Nurse Tallis." "Is that understood?" "Yes, Sister." "The real nurses were 18-year-old, 19-year-old girls, nursing these soldiers." "There is no Briony." ""There is no Briony" is almost a comment on the film itself, as well." "That you have three different people playing Briony, but there is no real Briony." "Here is the news." "It's as much about identity as anything else this film may be." "How do I know who I am, or do I just trust it?" "A bit philosophical, maybe a bit pretentious." "I like this scene, all these girls in their nighties." "Often, I cast actors who I've known before or I've seen in other things, but Michelle Duncan, who plays Fiona here, is someone who just came in to a casting, and I liked her very much." "She had exactly the right quality, so I cast her." "Mummy always did it for me." "I think Romola gives an incredibly rigorous performance." "She's incredibly disciplined, she's very, very smart." "She's a very intellectual actress and would often ask me very difficult questions." "Night-night, Ponty." "This is an important scene just for the sense that Briony is a writer, that she's always a writer, that this is a story about a writer." "It's about storytelling, it's about a storyteller's imagination." "And that's something that Ian McEwan kept on pressing on us." "Don't panic!" "It's only me." "Fiona, I almost jumped out of my skin." "So this is a scene that wasn't in the original book." "But I was trying to encapsulate a lot of what the book was doing in other scenes in this scene." "Don't you freeze to death up here?" "I love London." "Do you think all of this will be bombed and just disappear?" "No." "I don't know." "Do you write about Sister Drummond?" " Do you write about me?" " Sometimes." " Can I look?" " I'd rather you didn't." "It's private." "Two figures by a fountain is obviously the event that we saw early on, in the first part." "That's a very obvious thing to say." " It's complicated." " Yes." "Michelle gives us a very important dose of comedy in this section." "Danny gives it to us in Dunkirk, and I guess the twins and sometimes, Lola, gives us the comedy in the first part." "...she doesn't understand, but she thinks she does." "I probably won't ever finish it." "I look at you, Tallis, and you're so mysterious." "I've never been mysterious." "I'd told Michelle not to be shy of being funny, because I felt that we had to keep some levity." "I was very concerned that the film shouldn't take itself too seriously." "'Cause I find that a right turnoff myself, and we have to be careful not to take ourselves too seriously." "I certainly have to." "Here we are." "I like the fellow in the background." "He hangs around and chats people up, that fellow." "That's his character." "I'm still not sure how much of the film the audience get, 'cause I haven't watched it with enough audiences, or had enough responses, but this..." "So this is the letter that she writes to Cecilia that, then, Cecilia reports to Robbie, that we hear from Cecilia and Robbie's point of view back in the Dunkirk section." "So that we've gone back in time here." "Do something practical." "It says in the newspaper the Army are making strategic withdrawals." "Yes, I saw that." "It's a euphemism for retreat." "So those strategic withdrawals that Fiona's talking about there is the build-up to the retreat at Dunkirk." "I guess that comes across." "I hope so, anyway." "...the full extent of which I am only now beginning to grasp." "A bit of self-harming, there." "And topical." "Cee, please write..." "I wanted that sense of Briony trying to scrub away her sins." "It's a kind of fairly obvious reference to the Scottish play." "Bit of a schoolboy metaphor, I suppose, but anyway." "This scene was originally supposed to be set in a park, and I think it's a shame it wasn't." "I would have much preferred it to have been set in a park." "But we just didn't have the time in our schedule to, you know, travel to the park, to set it all up, the extras, et cetera." "It was just one of those logistical things that didn't work, and so I had to set it here." "I would have liked to have seen them out of the hospital, though." "Oh, no." "And he did save me." "But as soon as I told him I loved him, the feeling sort of disappeared." "A kind of house-ier moment before all of this horror kicks off." "I'm not sure about this sequence." "Other people, you know, some audiences seem to respond to it." "I never felt it was quite as good as I would have liked it to have been." "This whole set, the whole of St Thomas is actually a studio build." "We built it at Shepperton Studios, and..." "The interiors, not this exterior." "And I'm not a big fan of working in studios." "I find the energy very different and a lot lower." "So maybe that has something to do with it." "Nice bit of makeup there, though." "I wanted more red, I wanted it more..." "I wanted it to be more in-your-face," "I wanted it to be more impressionistic as well, this section." "I just think it's amazing, what these kids did, though." "You know, these young women did." "How they coped with it, I have no idea." "I mean, I wonder if we could put a bunch of modern 18-year-olds in that situation," "I wonder how they'd react." "The only thing that saves that last montage is probably the music, which I love." "I'm not shy of using a good bit of music to lift sequences." "There's a soldier in Bed 13." "Go and sit with him for a minute." "Hold his hand." "Off you go." "There's been no red throughout the St Thomas' section until we get to the arrival of the BEF from Dunkirk, and suddenly red appears in the film again." "The actor playing the French soldier here, playing Luc Cornet, is an actor called Jérémie Renier, who I think is a stunning actor," "an exquisite actor, who was in a film called L'Enfant which won the Palme d'Or in 2005." "Here you are at last." "Sister sent me for a little chat" "But he didn't speak much English at all, so..." "It was a strange, instinctual relationship between he and I, and I had to mime a lot of my direction." "What's she doing now?" "She is a nurse as well" "Did she finally marry that man she was so in love with?" "I've forgotten his name" "Robbie?" "What he was doing, I was very, very happy with." "It's a strange scene, this." "I don't know why it works." "I think it is incredibly important, but people, during the development of the film, kept on suggesting we take it out." "It seems out of the loop of the narrative." "Luc." "It's not involving Robbie and Cecilia, and it's not involving her relationship with Robbie and Cecilia, at least it's not on the surface." "But I think it does something, poetically and emotionally, for our understanding of Briony, that I think is really, really important." "It's the scene in which Briony kind of understands the power of storytelling to heal." "She lies to him, she pretends that she understands what he's talking about." "She concurs with his delusions, which, in a sense, is a small piece of storytelling, and it helps him." "And so..." "She learns that storytelling is not just destructive, it is also a thing that can heal, as well." "Or help." "Obviously, it doesn't heal him physically, but it can help his pain." "You remember my younger sister, Anne?" "She still plays that little Debussy piece do you remember?" "I also like the fact that, you know, as an image, one's looking at a brain." "Right there, and..." "And that says something about the film, as well." "Overall, I'm always trying to kind of involve the macro and the micro in scenes at the same time." "This scene is about, you know," "Briony and Luc Cornet, but it's also about the film as a whole." "Yes." "Is that why you came every day?" "I don't speak a word of French, by the way." "They could have been reading a recipe, for all I knew." "Except, of course, I had it kind of memorised." "In her opinion, we should get married in the summer" "Oh yes?" "Yes" "There, she's putting the blood on her face." "I hope that's more comfortable" "I love doing these kind of scenes," "I like doing these scenes more than any other type of scene." "I'd always..." "You know, like the love scenes or the..." "I like intimate scenes between two people." "I kind of know where I am with them, and I let the emotion of the scene direct my direction." "I'm frightened" " Tallis." " Briony." "There's an element of her finding herself in this scene, and that's why she tells him her real name, despite what Sister Drummond told her in the opening scene of this section." "Stand up, Nurse Tallis." "I'm not sure how well that moment works in the film, I'm not sure." "Now go and wash the blood off your face." "So the Debussy that Luc Cornet talked about his sister playing is now played here." "We tried using the Debussy over this scene, but it was just too slashy and sentimental, but somehow it worked for her to be thinking of that Debussy piece as she walked away from him." "I just love these faces." "I think there's nothing more interesting or beautiful than the human face." "And that's why I love close-ups so much." "So, in a way, this is a portrait of propaganda that obviously juxtaposes what Briony has just learnt about the war." "...unconquered, their spirit unbowed." "This is the epic of Dunkirk." "A name that will live forever in the annals of warfare." "In the course of a comprehensive tour," "Queen Elizabeth is seen here visiting a chocolate factory in the north of England." "So obviously, Juno and Benedict have been digitally added to that shot." "...with his lovely, soon-to-be-wed fiancée, Miss Lola Quincey." "I tried to get the eye lines so that Lola was looking directly at Briony, and Briony was looking directly at Lola." "Don't know if that reads, but that was the idea." "I don't know." "I mean, this again, is another sequence that needs to be quite elliptical." "Because otherwise there's too many questions asked." "...and to avoid fornication, that such persons as have not the gift of continence, might marry and keep themselves..." "I always wondered why I didn't shoot a close-up of, or at least two shots of Lola and Paul Marshall's faces for this sequence." "...that the one ought to have the other." "I saw him." "Therefore, if any man can show any just cause why they may not be lawfully joined together..." "I know it was him." "So then, this is kind of playing with perspective, the idea of Briony talking directly to us, and then that's reflected later in Vanessa's sequence." "And the spinning torch idea, telling the story, light telling us the story." "It didn't quite work, this moment." "I didn't quite get the kind of moment where their eyes meet." "I was trying to do something rather like the shot in Pride and Prejudice where Darcy looks up in the church pew and sees Elizabeth, and she turns away." "I didn't..." "Never quite got there." "But I like this scene." "As a whole, I think it looks okay." "Let the nursey through." "They're going down to the country today." "My friend, Tilly Vosburgh, being the mother there." "I think she's probably the only happy character in this film." "That whistle, obviously..." "That whistle always makes me think it's coming from the horse's arse." "And that's the same pig we had in Pride and Prejudice." "It was called Paul, named after Paul Webster, one of the producers of the film." "Paul's pig." "I'm looking for Miss Tallis." "Cecilia Tallis." "Is she in?" "Hot, hot day, this was." "It was a right killer." "And this was, I think..." "I think I'm right in saying that this was Romola's first day of filming." "No, second." "I tried writing." "You wouldn't answer." "So, the following interior scene..." "This is a set." "As I've said, I would always try and shoot on location." "But when a location is too small and I wanted the feeling of a very small space," "I had to shoot it on a set so that I could work around the set, work around the space, take walls out, et cetera, because otherwise you just can't get the amount of people into the room" "that you need to film a scene." "We took two days filming this scene, and it was really a privilege to be present for these performances." "I'd sit beside the camera with a little monitor in my lap and just watch the actors, and it's a real privilege." "Thanks." "I said to Keira, "What's the first thing you notice about Briony when she arrives?"" "And Keira said, "She's got tits."" "I want to go in front of a judge and change my evidence, Cee." "Don't call me that." "Keira's got bare feet, and Romola's got shoes on." "Probably two-inch heels." "And I kind of wished that we'd either put Keira in shoes or taken Romola's shoes off, 'cause I think she's a little bit too tall over Keira here." "But I love what Romola's doing in this scene." "I think it's brilliant." "I love her weirdness." "Well, I wanted to see you first." "They don't want to hear any more about it." "That unpleasantness is all tidied away in the past, thank you very much." "She's a bit of a freak, old Briony, and I love her for it." "She's so flawed." "About everything." "Sexually, everything, she's..." "You know, she's confused." "She doesn't know..." "She can't get a grip on the reality of life." "She thinks here..." "This is something that just happened between the actors, that Romola thinks here that Keira's gonna come and give her a hug." "And obviously, the hug isn't forthcoming." "This moment of her studying their bed." "Of imagining the sex that happened, and imagining the smells." "I don't think Briony ever has much sex." "She never gets married." "She's okay." "She's preparing herself." "She's gonna take the onslaught from Robbie." "There's something weirdly masochistic that's going on here in Briony as well." "And James is just extraordinary in this scene, I think." "I mean, you know, he's an actor at the height of his powers here." "Keira, in the back of the shot." "So every time James moves forward, I was worried that he'd block Keira." "So it gave her a motivation, which was simply to try and make sure that he didn't attack Briony." "So that she's always in the back of the shot, that she doesn't become blocked." "Of course, you don't." "Tell me, did it give you pleasure to think of me inside?" " No." " But you did nothing about it." " No." " Do you think I assaulted your cousin?" " No." " Did you think it then?" "Yes." "But yes and no." " And what's made you so certain now?" " Growing up." "Growing up?" "Again, she does it there." "How old do you have to be to know the difference between right and wrong?" "What are you, 18?" "Do you have to be 18 before you can bring yourself to own up to a lie?" "You have to kind of just find ways of, you know..." "If you've got a technical problem like that, you have to find an emotional solution to it, an emotional motivation for the actor." "And once you've found that motivation, it feels like it's not a technical thing at all." "...they were able to close ranks and throw me to the fucking wolves!" " Robbie!" "Look at me, look at me." " Don't!" "I probably would've preferred to have that little section there front onto the camera, not in profile." "But the performance in the profile take was the best, and so I had to go with that." "Again, this weird fascination with their sexuality." "I don't know why I had this shot of the old woman." "It's just..." "Is it about Briony seeing herself as an old woman?" "It's certainly homage also to Krzysztof Kieslowski and also to David Lynch." "...and he's got a train to catch." "So sit down." "She may be looking at her future there." "There are some things you're going to do for us." "The lighting in this scene," "Seamus' lighting in this scene reminds me of Godfather:" "Part II." "I'm not sure if that's a great composition, but the arms on the table certainly help." "You'll tell them everything they need to know to be convinced that the evidence you gave was false." "You'll meet with a solicitor, make a statement, have it signed, witnessed, send copies to us." "Is that clear?" "Yes." "You'll write a detailed letter to me explaining everything that happened leading up to you saying you saw me by the lake." "Try to include whatever you can remember of what Danny Hardman was doing that night." " Hardman?" " Yes." "It wasn't Danny Hardman." "And again, we're back to our saying in the very beginning about Danny Hardman and Alfie's character as the red herring." "Lola won't be able to testify against him now." "He's immune." "We're back to the wide shot." "So much of this scene has been played out in close-up, there's very little wide shots, and here, we're seeing the separation between the characters again." "It's a little bit stagy, with his back to them, but I think it works." "Blocking is one of the things I love most in the filmmaking process." "I love studying the relationship of figures, of people to each other, of how they work around each other, what body language says." "And then leave us be." "I will, I promise." "Lovely performance from all three of them in this scene." "It was a really exciting two days, and I felt very privileged to have been there with them." "Okay, so this next sequence, this next shot of Briony in the underground, that's a set." "Behind her is a roller, which is making it look like she's moving." "There's a light on the camera, which is reflecting off reflective material, like the same you get on a bicycle, kind of, reflective jacket, cycling jacket, and it was making it look like there was lights moving behind." "It's a bit more complicated than that." "One of Seamus' magic inventions." "Here's the voice of God." "Could we stop for a moment?" "Of course." "Is something the matter?" "I just need a couple of minutes by myself." "And I like this kind of brutal cut to the modern world." "In the book, this section suddenly switches to first person, and that formal technique is very startling in the prose." "And so I was trying to find a cinematic equivalent to first person." "And it seemed to me that that was interview." "So that's why I chose to make this last section an interview." "She's talking directly to the audience." "I wanted as little barrier between the character and the..." "And as little artifice between the character and the audience as possible." "And it seemed to me that the best way to do that was make it an interview." "Vanessa..." "I mean, you know, I could not have got luckier than working with Vanessa Redgrave." "Briony Tallis, I'd like to talk now about your new novel, Atonement, which comes out in a few days to coincide..." "Anthony Minghella is there on the left." "He was someone I showed the script to before we started shooting, and he was kind enough to read it and ask me questions, and those questions were sometimes difficult and confronting questions, and that was very, very useful." "He really helped me examine the script and helped me examine my intentions." "...which is essentially a continuous series of tiny strokes." "Your brain closes down..." "So here, this is the same shot as the one of Briony in the library, but on the other side." "In the other one, she was looking left to right." "Here, she's looking right to left." "If you went to cut them, they'd be looking at each other." "She's looking at her former self." "And I wanted to, after this whole film, after this kind of, perhaps, epic sweep of the film," "I wanted to reduce everything to just a close-up of an old woman against black." "Nothing else." "Everything's stripped away." "All it comes down to is that face." "I wrote several drafts as far back as my time at St Thomas' Hospital during the War." "I just couldn't ever find the way to do it." "Because the novel is autobiographical..." "A face, as I said, being what I find beautiful." "I especially find old faces beautiful." "And Vanessa's in particular." "No." "I had, for a very long time, decided to tell the absolute truth." "No rhymes, no embellishments." "I love that moment." "That's the truth moment." "That's when she decides to..." "You've read the book, you'll understand why." "To take this interview in an unexpected direction." "...I didn't personally witness, the conditions in prison, the evacuation to Dunkirk, everything." "But the effect of all this honesty was rather pitiless." "It's strange 'cause this is a film about happy endings." "It's about the purpose of happy endings, which she's discussing here." "By honesty." "Or reality." "Are happy endings..." "What is the role of a happy ending?" "For the storyteller and also for the audience." "I was too much of a coward to go and see my sister in June, 1940." "And I think in the end, we decide that happy endings are important." "They do serve a purpose." "They do give us something to aspire to." "So the scene in which I confess to them is imagined." "They ennoble the human spirit." "And I think that's a very, very important purpose." "And has this film got a happy ending?" "I'm not sure." "I think it's up to the audience." "...on June the first, 1940, the last day of the evacuation." "Cheerio, pal." "They're both left underground, Robbie and Cecilia." "Originally, in the book, it describes Cecilia dying in the bomb that destroyed Balham tube station, and it was only through research that we discovered that the bomb actually didn't destroy the tube station, it destroyed the gas and water mains above, and the tube station became flooded." "And suddenly, having already thought of all these water motifs for Cecilia, suddenly it was obvious that Cecilia drowned." "And the whole thing kind of found a circularity." "It fitted." "That's a model shot, by the way." "This is a model shot." "It's about four-foot high, that tunnel." "So..." "So there's the face of God." "The god of this story." "...they both so longed for, and deserved." "And again we're playing the scale." "This shot is all about the big screen." "It's all about seeing the film at a cinema." "Seeing that beautiful face, enormous, talking directly to us." "But what sense of hope, or satisfaction, could a reader derive from an ending like that?" "So, in the book, I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life." "So here's her testament to happy endings." "...evasion..." "I used to think that happy endings were a sign of weakness or evasion." "And I've changed my mind since making Pride and Prejudice, and certainly since making this film." "Happy endings can be a sign of strength." "Strangely enough, this location is near Eastbourne, which is where Arabella, from The Trials of Arabella, the play that Briony wrote as a child, ended up." "So that, again, the whole thing has come full circle." "She's come back to a kind of fairytale belief in happy endings." "That she started by with happy endings with The Trials of Arabella, and digressed and went on a journey of stark realism, and then came back to happy endings at the end of her life." ""The adult returned to the child" kind of thing." "And that's heaven." "He's a cunt." "They're all very nice people." "He's a lovely man." "He's an extraordinary man." "I was very scared of Ian McEwan when I first met him." "I was scared of his intelligence." "Jane Frazer is a goddess." "She's the one that keeps everything together whilst filming." "James is just wonderful." "In Keira's contract it said that..." "No, I'm not gonna go there." "Saoirse Ronan, she's one of the..." "She's totally unlike her character, Saoirse." "She's incredibly warm, incredibly loving, really good fun, little kid, and yet, she could play this extraordinary, cold, detached little character." "Peter Wight has been in everything I've ever done." "Those two, I hope, will be in everything I ever do." "As with those three." "Seamus McGarvey, I've known for about 10, 15 years now." "But this is only the first film that we've ever got to work together on." "Sarah Greenwood, I've worked always since my first TV work." "And Paul Tothill was with me since Charles II, since my last TV work." "Jacqueline Durran is a genius, who used to work with Mike Leigh." "And in fact, still does." "Ivana is from the former Yugoslavia." "Dario is from Italy." "I hope I always get to work with Dario." "Nick Angel was the person that the character in Hot Fuzz was named after." "At-one-ment." "Well, I'm not gonna tell you all about all of this lot, 'cause there's too many of them, and I've got to go." "Thank you for watching." "Thank you for taking the time to watch this, and I hope you enjoyed it." "I hope you got something from the film." "The making of this film was by far the most enriching and exciting creative journey of my life." "It's all about communication, and I hope I communicated something to you." "Okay." "Bye for now." "Lots of love." "Bye-bye."