Atonement

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Release Date: December 7th, 2007 (limited)

Starring: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Brenda Blethyn, Vanessa Redgrave 

Directed by: Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice)

Premise: The drama spanning several decades about a fledgling writer, Briony Tallis, who, as a 13-year-old, irrevocably changes the course of several lives when she accuses her older sister's lover of a crime he did not commit.

[matt35mm]

Ooh, that book is on my summer reading list.  I didn't even know they were making it into a movie.

I'm looking forward to it!

[matt35mm]

Okay, so after reading the book (which I highly recommend), and rewatching the trailer a couple of times and being nearly roused to tears, this is definitely my most anticipated movie of the year.

It's not that the trailer is particularly well cut.  It's actually kind of a mess.  And the poster is fairly ugly, also.  But the images from the film, when paired in mind with the words from the book, were so strong.

I've also re-watched Pride & Prejudice and have come to really respect Joe Wright, and I felt that Keira was very good under his direction.  The film seems to be very well cast, and the screenplay adaptation was by Christopher Hampton, a very respectable writer.

In short, I've raised my hopes so high that this movie will have to invent a new meaning to greatness in order to not crush me.  A bonus for me is that I'll be in England when this opens in September there, so I won't have to wait until December!

[mogwai]

An "Instant Classic" Opens Venice Film Fest

The Venice Film Festival opened Wednesday night with several critics predicting that the opening-night film, Joe Wright's Atonement, will not only capture the festival's Golden Lion award but numerous Oscars as well. Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter describes it as "an instant classic" and predicts it will capture "rapturous audiences and major awards." Writing in the London Daily Telegraph, David Gritten praised the film as "a triumph" and forecast that the film will garner numerous awards, especially for stars Keira Knightley and James McAvoy's "impeccable performances" and for Wright's "bravura direction." Gritten concludes: "Truly, here is a British film worth celebrating." Nevertheless, Gritten and other critics question the commercial viability of the movie. Gritten remarked that it "might prove a little too rarefied for large mainstream audiences." Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian wrote, "It is clever, sophisticated: though perhaps multiplex audiences might find it a little too tricksy." Comparing the film to Wright's earlier Pride and Prejudice, Christopher Tookey in the Daily Mail wrote that while that film "was accessible enough to involve a mainstream international audience, I have my doubts about Atonement's ability to do the same." Nevertheless, he remarked, "the film is always gripping." Geoffrey McNab in the Independent calls the movie "a formidable achievement" for director Wright, adding, "The strength of the film lies in its extraordinary visual imagination and in the intensity the young actors bring to their roles." In the Times, James Christopher comments that Knightley's performance gives her "a tilt, at least, at an Oscar nomination." However, he goes on to call the film itself a "grim slog."

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[matt35mm]

That trailer sucked.  It tells too much and makes the whole story seem more pedestrian than it really is.

[MacGuffin]

TIFF Interview: Joe Wright Talks To Cinematical About Directing 'Atonement,' Working With Ian McEwan and His Next Period Film

Here at the Toronto Film Festival, I had a chance to sit down with Joe Wright, one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. For the last two years I've been saying good things to everyone I know about his most recent film, a loose and lively adaptation of Jane Austen's classic Pride & Prejudice, and now I'll be able to change the subject to the joys of his new picture, an adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement. If you're at TIFF like me, don't miss out on an opportunity to catch a screening of Atonement -- it's the best film I've come across at this year's fest, and it's sure to be a tough competitor come Oscar time. During our conversation, Joe and I talked about his unique directing style, which among other things utilizes stream-of-consciousness techniques, and we talked about the challenge of adapting a novel that was shortlisted for every book prize imaginable. Joe and I started by talking for a few about what we've seen so far at the festival -- he recommends Control -- but eventually I hit the button and got us down to business.

RS: Have you seen the Ken Loach movie yet? It's good.

JW: No, I haven't.

RS: It's got a social relevance angle, but it plays like a thriller. Very tight.

JW: Okay, that's exciting -- I love Ken Loach.

RS: One thing I wanted to mention about the movie version of Atonement, and the book, is that I'm not sure I buy Part 3 -- I think we're dealing with an unreliable narrator at that point. Obviously she's giving us certain key facts, but also sliding in a very dramatic Florence Nightingale story. Do you buy Part 3 on its merits?

JW: I do. I do because of the research that we did. I was very fascinated by the role St. Thomas plays. St. Thomas has a very personal role in my own life, and so I was interested in the history of that hospital, the oldest hospital in London. And it's where Florence Nightingale originally formed the first nursing training, etc. And I was very interested in the history of it, and through research and talking to various people about nursing during the war, I discovered that these kids, basically ... these 18 and 19 year-old girls were there and were employed to nurse these dying men. For instance, during the blitz when bombs were falling all throughout, especially areas close to the river -- the German bombers would just use the reflection of the water to guide their aircraft -- they would take everyone, take all the patients they could down to the basement, to the air raid shelters, but then those patients that couldn't be taken down there, one nurse would be left in the ward with bombs falling all around her, to hold the hand of these dying men. I found that incredibly moving, this heroism shown by these kids, basically. It happened, and that was your duty. I find it fairly inconceivable for young people now to understand the sacrifice those girls made.

So as far as Briony is concerned, for a start I don't think she would have had a choice. But I do think she showed heroism. I think Briony is incredibly strong in some ways. It always upsets me when people say they hate Briony. Which people do -- some women, especially -- do hate Briony by the end of the movie. I feel very close to Briony and I feel like she's the character I'm probably closest to.

RS: It would be such a completely different story if she were 17, instead of 13.

JW: Absolutely.

RS: And by casting Vanessa Redgrave in that pivotal third incarnation of her, it says to me that you did want absolute credibility there.

JW: Yes, absolutely. I think at that stage in her life she has to be utterly true and honest and right.

RS: The book, at some point, explicitly references Woolf's notion of a "crystalline present" and that was striking to me because I've picked up that thread in your work, perhaps most noticeably in the two very similar openings of your two films. Do you think a lot about formalizing those ideas in your work?

JW: I do. Not necessarily in the context of Virginia Woolf or literary ideas, but my medium is film and I explore things and ideas with the tools that I have and am interested in, as its put, the crystalline present. I'm interested in consciousness, basically. Trying to capture consciousness on film. And I think film is probably, to me, one of the best mediums for doing that. And also, I was trying to find cinematic equivalents to McEwan's prose, to the book. These lyrical passages are reflected in the kind of long, steadicam shots, and then these very staccato, elliptical cuts. I tried to capture those passages where he becomes more.

RS: At one point, speaking through Briony, he makes the pronouncement that character and story are dead and the journey of the mind is the way forward, but I see a contradiction there, because he's also very concerned about telling a great story, as are you in your works. You have to balance.

JW: Absolutely. He's ... I think McEwan is an extraordinary writer and certainly one of the most important, if not the most important British novelist. But his books do want to be read. They're not ... that's one of the things that's so good about him. He does create great stories -- you're interested in turning the page. They're not just musings, contemplations, meditations on consciousness. They're good plots. So he's got kind of a contradiction, I completely agree with you.

RS: In the same way he 'wants to be read,' your shot compositions are very deliberate – they 'want to be seen.' Think of all five Bennett sisters standing up at once in Pride & Prejudice, or that three shot on the boat in Atonement, with Keira posed in just such a way. Obviously you put much thought into those shots, but to what end? Is there something you're expressing through form?

JW: Yes, absolutely. To me, every decision has an impact on the reader. [laughs] I'm getting a little mixed up this morning. On the viewer's understanding of the story you're telling. So, just in the way that McEwan would consider how he constructs a sentence, I consider how I construct a shot. That's what I've got to play with. So I am very ... I try to be aware of what I'm doing. I try to be in the crystalline present, myself. Having said that, I often don't have an intellectual reason for choices. Most of my choices come about through some kind of intuition or instinct, and if I need to, I'll post-rationalize them, intellectually, afterwards. But generally, they come about just by feeling.

RS: By the way, everyone's been talking about why you chose Anthony Minghella for that small part in the end, and what you're trying to say with that.

JW: Oh, I just couldn't work out who the f*ck to cast in that role!

RS: It's a little curious. I mean, do you consider him a contemporary influence?

JW: I consider him a friend. We've known each other a little while, and when I was coming close to feeling like the script was ready, I showed it to Anthony and Anthony asked me lots of awkward questions, some of which I could answer and some of which I couldn't. So he was kind of an influence in that respect, but that really had nothing to do with casting him as the interviewer. I just literally couldn't think of who to put in that role and I didn't want to get some kind of day-playing actor who would be nervous around Vanessa, basically. And at the same time, I didn't want to get Melvin Bragg or some TV personality who might take up too much space. It was all about Vanessa, basically. It was all about finding someone who wouldn't be inhibited by Vanessa and that she'd feel comfortable with. I see the job of directing as being one of creating the right atmosphere, creating an environment where people can realize their full potential. So, it was a matter of creating the right atmosphere for Vanessa.

RS: Is that why you tend to bring back actors you've worked with – because that hard work is done, on some level?

JW: Yeah, to some extent that's true, and also I just like working with people I know, you know? It's true of everyone behind the camera -- most of my crew are people I've worked with at least once, and more often many, many times since my early TV work. And the acting department is another department, as far as I'm concerned. Obviously one of the most important departments, but it's just the same. It's our little family, and we all grow to love each other, and then you want to spend more time with them.

RS: We talked about the back and forth with Minghella, but what about McEwan? Did you have that with him?

JW: Very much so, yeah.

RS: How long did that go on?

JW: All the way through. I had to get his agreement to direct the film, so I met him, very nervously one lunch time when Tim Bevan proposed me as director and we had a ... I was terrified. I'm always very inhibited by extremely clever men. I find them terrifying, but we very quickly slipped into ... I was there to learn from him, basically. One of the most exciting things about my job is that I get to meet these extraordinary people and maybe get to learn a thing or two. So, I was there to learn from him and once he understood that and once he also understood that I was interested in ... the challenge I was setting myself was to make a totally faithful adaptation of the book. I found that an exciting challenge ... and he kind of warmed up and we got on very well. Every draft of the screenplay I would send him and he'd send notes or we'd have a conversation and I'd go round to his house and sit and talk to him. He was extraordinary.

RS: Was the faithfulness necessary to get his approval?

JW: No.

RS: I mean, you took liberties with Pride & Prejudice.

JW: Pride & Prejudice was actually, I think, a more difficult adaptation, just because there's so much plot. More has to be cut. I loved the book. I thought the book, to understate it, 'worked.' So I didn't see why one should try and fix it. So my challenge, really, was to see if it could work. I had this idea that you could actually make a totally faithful adaptation of that book, and everyone thought that was kind of crazy. There's a kind of received wisdom that writers, adapters always say, which is 'at some point you have to throw the book away.'

RS: Right.

JW: And I'd always say, 'Oh, yes of course.' I'd take that received wisdom and say 'Yes, of course, you have to throw the book away, yes, yes, yes, of course.' I even found myself repeating it occasionally. Then, on this, I suddenly questioned that. I thought, well, why do you have to do that? The book is almost perfect, so why would I want to throw it away?

RS: Your next project, The Soloist, is quite a departure. Are you nervous about leaving Englishness behind for a while?

JW: I am, yes. But it's the story of two outsiders and so I kind of hope that I can bring an outsider's point of view to it. I always feel pretty schizophrenic when I'm walking through Los Angeles. And it's a film about a schizophrenic, so I thought that was apt. But also, it's a period film. The period happens to be 2005, but I'm treating it as a period film and I'm bringing ... maybe even a few of the British cast. So, it's a big challenge for me, this next one.

[MacGuffin]

[Pubrick]

movie better atone for that stupid tagline.

[picolas]

This Winter, Someone's Got Some Atoning To Do

[MacGuffin]

Joe Wright on Directing Atonement
Source: Edward Douglas; ComingSoon

Two years ago, director Joe Wright garnered a bit of attention for his 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, but that now seems fairly miniscule to the scrutiny that's been put on his every move since it was announced that he would direct Christopher (Dangerous Liaisons) Hampton's adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement, a gripping hard-to-label story about a mistake in judgment made by a young girl named Briony Talis that stays with her for her entire life. It stars James McAvoy and Keira Knightley as young lovers who are split apart by Briony's decision while they're all very young, sending McAvoy's character Robbie to the French front during WWII, though it takes a different approach to the normal war-time romantic drama we've seen before.

Atonement is a far more challenging film in terms of scope, tone and pacing than Pride & Prejudice, but Wright has proven that his first film was no fluke as he's imposed a visionary direction to McEwan's novel to create a riveting film notable for the three performances that make up the three stages in Briony Talis' life, played by newcomer Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai and acting legend Vanessa Redgrave.

ComingSoon.net had two chances to speak with Wright, both times outside the U.S., the first time we sat down with him for ten minutes at the Toronto Film Festival, where the film had its North American premiere, and then once again in London at the film's official junket. Both times we didn't have nearly as much time as necessary to really get into the head of this exciting filmmaker, but we did the best we could.

ComingSoon.net: So you're back working with most of the same team, back with Keira, but making a completely different movie.
Joe Wright: I really like the thing of having a company of actors and I like the company atmosphere, so it's important for me to work with the same people. It makes me feel safe, and we kind of understand each other.

CS: I assume you had a bigger budget this time around.
Wright: Not really. Well, about $4 million more.

CS: That's still a lot, but it looks like $50 million more.
Wright: Right, no, no, no, it's a budget of $30 million.

CS: That's pretty amazing, especially when you consider things like the tracking shot on the beach...
Wright: Yeah, I mean a lot of the budget went on that, but it was only one day we had to shoot it, and that's in a way why I did that tracking shot, is 'cause I had one day to film that whole scene and thought that maybe the best way to do that was to concentrate on the rehearsals all day and then use the last 3 hours of the day to shoot. It was partly financial constraints that led to us shooting it in that way.

CS: How long did it take to set everything up though?
Wright: 12 hours... well, the art department had been there for six weeks beforehand, so they'd been getting it all set for six weeks and it was a fairly big job.

CS: It looked it. I remember talking to Alfonso Cuaron, who told me that it took them ten days just to set everything up for that big finale in "Children of Men" and then one whole day of filming once they had it worked out.
Wright: We didn't have that luxury.

CS: Can you talk about how that idea came about?
Wright: It started off as a bit of a joke really. I had a problem which was that I only had one day with all of those extras, and we couldn't afford any more, and the sequence was originally written as a montage and I wasn't sure how I was going to cover that amount of shots in a single day and have continuity of light and "magic light" and all that kind of stuff, so one day in discussion with Seamus (the cinematographer), I sort of jokingly said, "Why don't we do it as a single Steadicam shot" and everyone laughed. "Ha ha ha, what a wag!" and then I went home that night and started thinking about it, and asking myself the question quite seriously. I reread the passage from the book and it's a really lyrical passage, so it seemed like the right way to do it, so the next day I went in and told them and they stopped laughing. It was something that we prepared very closely for but the heroes of that day were the extras who really gave their heart and soul to the dignity of the moment and also the camera team and the Steadicam operator who just did an extraordinary job. But it was an amazing thing to have 1,300 people focus on one five-minute section.

CS: Was this movie something you already had in the works as you were finishing up "Pride & Prejudice"?
Wright: I was finishing "Pride & Prejudice" and "Pride" was the first story I ever told with a happy ending. I was kind of fascinated with happy endings and what they were for, what their purpose was, so while I was finishing "Pride," Tim Bevin came to me and said, "We've got this project 'Atonement.' Have you read the novel?" And I hadn't, so I read it quite quickly and immediately said, "This is what I want to do next." It spoke to a lot of the issues I'd been thinking about in terms of storytelling and happy endings. There was a script that Christopher Hampton had written with the previous director, Richard Eyre, and I read that script and didn't feel that it was in line with the film I wanted to make, and felt like I needed to get some ownership of the material, in a way, creatively. So we started again, and what I was interested in doing was a very faithful adaptation to the book. We literally kept the book on one side and the script on the other and we slowly worked through it, and that's how we came up with it.

CS: I haven't read the book yet, but is the structure similar with the non-linear telling of stories from different viewpoints, such as the fountain scene?
Wright: The structure is practically exactly the same. That's some of the stuff that I was most fascinated by, and I can imagine that was the stuff that had been pulled into the more linear structure by the previous director.

CS: I think it's a movie that you have to see more than once to really appreciate.
Wright: I hope so.

CS: One of the things I really liked was how some of the visual parallels you drew between Briony falling into the water and the fountain scene. Was a lot of that referred to in the book with literary parallels?
Wright: Some of them. Some of them not. The water motif of Cecelia wasn't in the book and that was something I kind of developed intuitively really. I didn't intellectually think "Oh, I want to do a water motif with Cecelia," it just kind of developed. It's a funny thing when you're designing a film. You have certain images in place and then it starts to, almost like painting, you're balancing the composition if you like.

CS: When people heard that Keira was making another movie with you, we automatically assume she's going to be the lead, but it's really more about Robbie and Briony even.
Wright: I think certainly that Briony is the lead character, although actually, it's played by three different actors, but Robbie/James has the most screen time, and so maybe he's the front filling.

CS: The casting of the three actresses as Briony is something that leaves a lasting impression, because it's more than just the hair style that makes them seem like the same character. Each of them show the same characteristics as the character. Did you film one of them first and then have the other two watch and modify their performance to that?
Wright: Yeah, I did. Most importantly, I cast Saoirse Roman first, before the adults, and normally—I think I'm right in saying this—when you're casting a character who's seen also as a child and an adult, you cast the adult first and then try to find a child that looks like the adult and also can act. I knew that would be a tall order, because they're not that many kids that can act. So I cast Saoirse first, and then based my cast on her, although I always kind of had Vanessa in mind. I always hoped that Vanessa would work, and then we did rehearsals with the three of them where they all played silly games of copying each other's movements and walking the same way. All three of them together, and it was really interesting studying the ideas of development of personality and expression. It was a very strange three days with those three, and then I did shoot all of Saoirse's stuff first and then exactly as you suggest, I showed both Romola and Vanessa what Briony... and I only showed them Briony's point of view of any scene, so they never saw the fountain scene from Robbie and Cecelia's point of view and they never saw the library scene from their point of view. They only saw stuff that Briony would have seen.

CS: Vanessa is one of those actresses who you could put in a movie and do a monologue and suddenly, even a great movie is elevated that much more.
Wright: Absolutely, I totally agree. You could have her read the phone book and she'd make it fascinating.

CS: You always had her in mind for the part?
Wright: Yeah, I'm just a huge fan of hers, always have been. I worship the water she walks on, and so I hope that I'd be able to work with her. I often work with people that I would want to have conversations with. It's an excuse for me to spend time with people, and she's someone I wanted to spend time with.

CS: Had you seen some of James' other work before casting him as Robbie?
Wright: I first saw James like seven years ago, in the theatre in London, which was actually the first job he ever did when he came to London, directed by a friend of mine, and thought he was stunning then. I've always been very much aware of what he was doing, and thought he was an extraordinary talent.

CS: It's amazing that he could still play fairly young characters...
Wright: He is young!

CS: Even so, when he first shows up on screen, I was surprised, because I've seen him play teenagers and high school students, and though he's young, he can also play the world-weary person and you don't see too many young actors being able to do that.
Wright: I always liked the description in Ian McEwan's novel of Robbie having "eyes of optimism" and I felt that James has eyes of optimism.

CS: I also love the score on this movie and how a lot of sound effects were incorporated into the music. Was that something you wanted to do for a specific reason? Can you talk about that?
Wright: Yeah, the typewriter is an idea that I came up with during the development of the script and wanted this sense of an omnipresent author of the story you're watching, and so, that typewriter kind of developed at that stage. Dario (Marianelli, the composer) took it on and took it to places that I hadn't imagined, but a lot of the score was written before we ever started shooting, so I was playing the score to Saoirse as she was acting scenes or running around the house, she actually had the music playing, so she could get into the rhythm of the scene.

CS: Was this the first time you'd worked with kids this extensively?
Wright: Yeah.

(At this point, Joe Wright's handler said "Last question" forcing us to wait to ask him more about this until we talked in London weeks later—see below)

CS: What about your next movie? Are you going to start that fairly soon?
Wright: "The Soloist" we start shooting in January, and that's kind of quite daunting, but exciting. Jamie Foxx is starring with Robert Downey Jr., and it's kind of about sanity and homelessness in Los Angeles. It's a period film, it's set in 2005, which is a very specific period and I'm looking forward to going on the adventure of shooting in downtown Los Angeles.

And here's some more with Joe from the London junket for the film:

CS: Can you talk about the vision you had for the film between the sound effects and the flashbacks and that incredible tracking shot?
Wright: I don't know. "Vision" is a difficult word, isn't it? When I read the book, I kind of saw a film happening as I read it, and it was a film that I felt very desperate to realize. It kind of got under my skin. I felt like I knew how to make it and yet at the same time was terrified by the challenges posed by it, so there are certain tentpole moments if you like, and then through the process of discovering. Every time I thought I knew what the book was about and thought I understood the thing, something else would come and hit me from the side and I'd realize that I was only just scratching the surface, and the book revealed itself to me, layer after layer after layer, so it was a wonderful process of learning basically. So it developed, and the sounds were something that were inherent in the beginning, the typewriter was an idea that came quite early, and that led to staccato rhythms in other places, but it was always trying to find cinematic equivalents to McEwan's masterpiece really. So it was all from the book. The challenge was how do you find this equivalent devices to tell this story.

CS: Christopher Hampton said that he'd been working on this for some time but it was good you had a very clear vision of what you wanted to do.
Wright: There was an initial idea, which was to stay faithful to the book, but tell the story as faithfully and clearly as you can. Don't try and mess with it, don't try to fix it. It's a masterpiece, it's not broken, it doesn't need fixing. That was really important, and what I found, the draft that existed before I came on had done away with the three-part structure, had done away with replaying events from different points of view, and what I found interesting was the modernity of that structure, and how it felt like a very contemporary film... and indeed is a very contemporary film. It's set in the present and then looks back at a destructive past, but all of those things I felt were there in the novel and just needed to be realized as I say in cinematic form.

CS: As a follow-up to my question two months ago, can you talk about the challenges of doing scenes with lots of kids or young actors? You haven't done much with kids before, had you?
Wright: One of my first short films, which was the film that kind of spring-boarded my career in television involved a kid of eight, and you've got the fallback position of the fact if you get a kid to do absolutely nothing and then cut to a shot of a couple having sex in the library, then cut back to a kid doing absolutely nothing, you're going to project all the fear and all the misunderstanding onto that kid's face. So I knew I had that fallback position, and this was obviously also the experiments of Eisenstein and Wertoff. It's montage, so I knew I could fall back on that, but then I met Saoirse Ronan and Saoirse just came and blew me away. She's the most talented person I ever met in my life, inherently so, and taught me more about talent than anyone else really. She's just got a weird acting gene. It's quite freakish. Her father is an actor. They live in Ireland and her father had heard there was a film being made on "Atonement" through his Dublin agent and put her on tape, they made a little tape together, of Saoirse doing some of the scenes and sent it over to us. This tape arrived and we watched it with due diligence and suddenly, it was like a revelation. Then I met her and was like, "Why are you putting on that weird Irish accent?" It was strange. She could just do it, playing Briony, and she's totally unlike Briony in every way. She's very sociable, she's very warm, she's very, very funny. She kind of has a strange intuitive ability to understand what the atmosphere is and what the mood is and respond accordingly to make it better. She looked after me, really, and yet she's similar to Briony in one respect and that's that she has an extraordinarily strong imagination, and that imagination allows her to empathize with other people and to empathize with the character she's playing. Her performance is an act of empathy, which is great, because it means that there's very little mopping up for me to do afterwards as well. It's not a matter of her dredging up emotions from her past. She hasn't got any past. She's had a very happy life, but what she does is imagine it, and that's extraordinary I think.

CS: Is it true that originally you wanted Keira to play Briony?
Wright: Yeah, I imagined that Keira was the same person that I'd met on "Pride & Prejudice." You spend all your time editing and looking at these people in the cutting room and so I kind of imagined she was that person still I think, and therefore wasn't sophisticated enough to place Cecelia, but then she turned up at the Toronto Film Festival in this dress and suddenly, she developed into this woman, and that was kind of extraordinary, and I wanted to try and capture that change and realized that she was perfect for Cecelia.

CS: Can you talk about the '30s/'40s conventions you brought back in the movie in terms of the strong, silent women as personified by Cecelia?
Wright: One of the things I found most interesting in our experiments in rehearsals was playing with the dialect and the accent and learning about the fact that people think of '30s dialect as clipped consonants, and actually, that's true, but also they shortened the vowels a lot, and the vowels is where the emotions are held, which is why Americans often sound very emotional because they have very long vowels. That sense of no space for emotion meant that Kiera had to express emotions in different ways with physicality and with her eyes, and that was good fun to play with.

CS: Are you going to be able to start "The Soloist" in January as planned?
Wright: That's happening. We have the script ready. Susannah Grant delivered the script like on the Saturday before the strike started on the Monday.

CS: Have you found the locations in L.A. where you're going to shoot?
Wright: Yup, I've been in L.A. for nearly two months now and we're in the process.

Atonement opens in select cities on Friday, December 7.

[Sleepless]

They were ment [sic] to atone...

[matt35mm]

Of course I had to see this as soon as I could.  It opened yesterday in limited release, and I found one theater that was playing it.  It was difficult to find the theater and it was raining pretty hard as well, but I would not be stopped.

My only real problem with the movie is that it wasn't long enough.  I won't talk about it in very much detail until at least some other people have seen it, but the movie condenses 4 years into 2 hours.  It's remarkably faithful to the book, and very well paced.  So all the events in the book make it to the movie, and it doesn't, for the most part, feel rushed.  That was quite amazing.  However, for me, it didn't have the sheer weight of the novel, due to it being only 2 hours.  I think the story demanded at least another half-hour, or could have been a very powerful 3-hour movie.

I'm eager to see it again, though.  It's a beautiful movie.  It captures very perfectly the detail of the book, and I heard a few audience members remark on that as they left the theater.  It very much feels like the novel come to life, with added visual poetry.

The more I watch the movie on its own terms, the more I'll come to love it, I'm sure.  I'm very curious what people who haven't read the book will think of it.

[polkablues]

I'm very curious what people who haven't read the book will think of it.

In short: I loved everything that you loved about it, and missed all of the problems you had with it.  Best of both worlds.  And of course, not knowing about the ending beforehand, it caught me by surprise and hit hard.

This really is an astoundingly haunting and deep film.  Joe Wright has become a director I'll always keep an eye out for, after catching me completely off guard with Pride & Prejudice and then following that up with a movie as powerful as Atonement.  He has such a strong visual sense, but also has a rare aptitude for theme and motif, and simply has a talent for wrenching emotions out of the audience, though never in a cheap, manipulative way.  Great, great movie.  Everyone should see it.

[Gamblour.]

Haven't seen this film yet, but these reviews make me want to. Joe Wright has an interview on NPR from this past week, you can probably search www.npr.org and find it. Very good discussion, he talks about meeting the author of Atonement and how his dyslexia influences his work.