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Interview: James McAvoy
I will embarrass myself if I start talking about all the ways in which I love James McAvoy. The actor you probably recognize from The Last King of Scotland and The Chronicles of Narnia is making his first big Hollywood movie with Atonement, starring as Robbie Turner, the doomed lover of rich girl Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley) in pre-World War II England. He’s proved his talent in British films for years, but this may be the first time America sits up and says “Wow, he’s talented.” (And super-duper attractive, but hey, you didn’t hear that from me). McAvoy faced any number of challenges in making Atonement, from transforming his natural Scottish accent into a 1940s-era British one to keeping up with a five-minute long take on a very crowded beach. His genuine enthusiasm for the whole project, from his co-stars to the movies it draws its inspiration from, is evident. So is his devastating charm, but again, I said I wouldn’t embarrass myself.We’re all talking about the Dunkirk scene. We need to know everything about that. It was pressurized. It was fraught. It was a massive gamble. Joe really went out on a limb and thought, well, I can’t do what I want to do with this scene anyway. He decided, ‘I can’t get what I want to get. We can only have one day with these 1000 extras and then we lose them.’ Because we have more money than most British films but we didn’t have much money. So he had to go, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to be mad and really gamble big time, all in.’ He asked us what we all thought, and we all went, ‘Hmm, that’s not going to be easy.’ With his helming and his rustling and corralling and his ability to galvanize people, he had a crew and a cast who made it happen. Filmmaking is a miracle of collaboration. That one day was a microcosm of that experience. There were 1800 people involved, and any one of them could have screwed it up at any one time. The fact that we got a take when nobody screwed it up is incredible. It’s testament to his audacity. How did you achieve the chemistry between you and Keira? People always go on about chemistry like it’s separate from acting, and I don’t know that it is. We got on really well. We were both very serious about this film. We both loved these characters. We quite quickly cottoned on that we were on similar pages, and that we had similar views on what was going to work and what wouldn’t. It felt like we both had an ally, we both had someone backing each other up. Not that we needed it. It wasn’t like we were in the face of some tyrannical director who we didn’t believe in. We just felt supported. But also when you can have a good laugh with somebody, you can communicate with somebody, you can do that, you can start having chemistry I suppose. Did you have rehearsal? We had three weeks. Usually you don’t get even a week in British films. It’s not necessarily well-executed at all. I think film people don’t always know what to do with rehearsal time. It’s just a time that they can scrabble about and get people into costume and figure out what they’re going to do with their hair. But Joe grew up in a theater, so appreciates just how valuable that can be and what it can give you, if you’re willing to invest in it. What was it that struck you about this book or film? It’s a very emotional piece, and yet it didn’t, I think, seek any sentiment. It engages your intellect as much as it engages your heart. I can’t lie and say it never totally [breaks] your heart—I think if you’re willing to go there, and you’re the kind of person who wants that, you can totally break down at any point in the film that you like, especially towards the end. But I think the film is constantly asking the audience to come back from the brink. Just at the moment when it could have remained on a close-up of us going [fakes sobbing] it cuts back to the stirring of the teaspoons, which makes your brain click in a wee bit more. You go, ‘Oh, that’s clever.’ I think it could have been mush otherwise. And that appealed to me right from the beginning in the script. The script itself treated actors like we had a modicum of intelligence. It didn’t over-explain everything to us, and it didn’t over-explain everything to the audience either in terms of dialogue. To find a film that was so epic and sweeping and romantic and yet be intelligent was the best thing. Also the fact that it’s a very classic story but it’s told in a very contemporary, modern way. The structure’s really fucked up. It’s three parts, and it’s all different sections, and they’re very different visually, and it’s just brilliant. People are going to sit down and in the first five minutes they’re going to think they’re watching a Merchant Ivory film. And the word ‘cunt’ is going to come in and be like ‘Whoah! We’re not watching a Merchant Ivory film! Oh my God!’ I think that’s kind of brilliant. In the scene in the kitchen, where Briony comes to apologize, it seems your character is on the verge of exploding with rage. Did you do one where you exploded? This script is so brilliant, so brilliantly drawn. From a great novel, and Christopher Hampton did such a great job. I think we always knew where we wanted to pitch. Yeah, I think we tried to go a little bit more, and a little bit less. But we knew what we had to do, we knew what we wanted to do. That scene and the scene in the tearoom when they see each other for the first time in years after he’s come back from prison, were the two scenes that really made me feel like I could do the script and made me want to do the film. He is ready to explode. He is ready to kill her. I wish he had killed her. I find it really hard to forgive her. The scene that’s really pivotal to your character, and it’s really quiet, is the scene with Brenda Blethyn before the dinner party. Can you talk about working on it with her? We spent a long time, Brenda and I. Brenda is one of my favorite actresses, and she is just wonderful. We spent quite a long time talking about our relationship, as characters sometimes talking to each other in rehearsals. There was a whole beautiful story that we had that was created in the absence of dialogue. There’s real love between those two. I think they admire each other, and that admiration knows no bounds. I think they’re kind of in love with each other. They don’t just love each other, I think they’re in love with each other a little bit. That’s not necessarily what that scene’s about or what it explores, but that’s why it so full I think. There’s that thing-- your mother can’t help but be proud, and be terrified as well. I loved doing that scene. There’s nothing bitter about Robbie, which is remarkable. No, of course not. He’s kind of been patronized I suppose his entire life. But I think that’s what makes Robbie such an amazing person. It’s what makes him worryingly inhuman, not necessarily representative of the human race. I think he has empathy for everyone. He’s not bitter. In fact, he becomes somebody who gets bitter. He becomes somebody who is tainted, and strangely becomes much more identifiably human. When he becomes suicidal—being suicidal seems to be a more human trait than forgiveness and empathy. How was working with Saiorsie Ronan? She’s brilliant in the film. I’ll tell you what it is. When you’re looking for a kid you just look for somebody that can act. You just look for somebody who is natural, and you go this is the script, and they’re going to do whatever the fuck they’re going to do, but I don’t care as the filmmaker, because they’re incredible and they can be truthful, which is the hardest thing to find. So let you what you need to do, and all the other actors fit in, make it work somehow. And what’s incredible about Saiorsie, she’s not like that. She was twelve years old when she made this film, and she can imagine what it is. It’s not life experience that she’s drawing upon, but she can imagine what it is to be someone else, not just being her being natural in front of a camera. And I think that’s what’s remarkable about her. I’ve been really lucky I’ve worked with a lot of brilliant kids in my career. It’s something that I hope I get to do a lot, because it means I can have a lot of fun that I wouldn’t necessarily have. It was a great privilege being with Saiorsie. You’ve had good luck with movies based on books. Is there an advantage to you in working on adaptations? It depends, really. If you’re making something that’s incredibly faithful to the original, then yes, it is an advantage. Like Last King of Scotland was faithful in its essence, but my character was such a departure from Nicholas Garrigan in Giles Foden’s book. It wasn’t helpful to read the book—it got in the way, and I had to try and forget it, because it was so different. But in [Atonement] it was incredibly helpful. It’s an amazing source. Do you like doing films based on books, or does it matter? You know, it doesn’t matter. A good script is a good script. But if it’s based on a book and it’s faithful to the book, then it’s helpful to use a book. But if it’s based on a book and it’s not faithful to the book, then you’ve got to make a decision whether you back off or have that conflict with the director where you say ‘Well, in the book there’s this.’ They’re like ‘Well in the fucking script it doesn’t, so fucking shut up.’ In the Dunkirk sequence, how do you stay an actor in the midst of all the choreography and technical details of the long take? In a weird way that is being an actor. I never let go of that really. If you do, you mess up everybody’s day. The question is, or the question for me was, how do I maintain connection with all the technical marks I need to hit, while still feeling the emotion of that moment. You start to get a bit overwhelmed. Then you realize that’s you commenting on it, it’s not you living it. It’s not probably the way that every soldier felt, and it’s not necessarily the way that this soldier should feel. So you have to detach yourself quite a bit, otherwise the actor just goes ‘This is so big, and scary and horrible’ which of course it is, but that should be the reaction of the person watching it. I suppose—not to say that this job is in anyway like a soldier’s job, because they’re not-- but there’s a detachment that you have to try and achieve, I think. Otherwise a logistical nightmare of a scene like that would fail because actors wanted to feel it too much. How difficult was it to make the film feel like the period 30s and 40s movies? It was a joy to do that. Playing with styles is something that I try to do in every film. I don’t think an actor should go into every film with one technique. I think you should become the type of actor that’s required for the style of the film or the thing that you’re doing. So that requires you to change, and this was just an extension of that. It wasn’t the easiest thing that I’ve done. What I loved was that we did it together. We sat around a table with this many people at it [there are about 12 people at the table he’s speaking to] and we wouldn’t just go away home and work on our acting, we would do it together, so that the style of acting had a cohesive bond that made us feel like the film had a style instead of each actor standing out with different things. But it was an absolute joy. […] It was an artistic trait at the time, but it was also a social trait at the time, this lack of ability to express, keep things bottled up. So when you come to drama and you have that social constraint, you have a great potential, because things always come out in drama, even in that period. However, when they do come out, you fucking explode. That’s that excitement. I love that, I really love that. Quite often it’s hard. In real life these days you go ‘I quite like her,’ and in a couple of days you’re holding hands. God knows what else you’re doing. And then, it was just so different. It’s just so wonderful, the things that can’t be said. RELATED: james mcavoy, interview
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