Post by sgev1977 on Jan 19, 2019 22:26:26 GMT
And Collider’s interview with James Graham:
collider.com/brexit-writer-james-graham-interview/#images
When I spoke to Benedict Cumberbatch about this, he told me that he didn’t really need much convincing to take on the role because he’s such a fan of your stage work, and he was intrigued by the script and loved how it read. How do you feel about the work that he did, in bringing this portrayal to life? What most impressed you about his performance?
GRAHAM: Well, he’s one of our greatest actors on stage and screen. I’d never worked with him before, and I don’t mind admitting that I was a little bit starstruck, but not because of his fame, just because I think he’s generally really brilliant at what he does. He brings such an intellectual, cerebral, quality to all of his roles, but also has an intuitive, emotional intelligence. He understands what gets under the skin of people, and his biggest fear was that the film would portray Cummings as actually villainous and as someone that the film might judge. Benedict cannot play that. You can’t play someone, if you feel there is no empathy, no compassion, and no understanding for that person and what motivated them. He was constantly trying to interrogate that. Wherever possible, we worked on the script together with the director, Toby [Haynes], who always wanted to check in on that, to make sure that we were being fair and getting under the skin of this guy and trying to understand what he was doing, even if people disagreed with him. We wanted to do the most generous interpretation we could, of someone who at least 50% of our country thinks has destroyed the prospects of the nation.
GRAHAM: Well, he’s one of our greatest actors on stage and screen. I’d never worked with him before, and I don’t mind admitting that I was a little bit starstruck, but not because of his fame, just because I think he’s generally really brilliant at what he does. He brings such an intellectual, cerebral, quality to all of his roles, but also has an intuitive, emotional intelligence. He understands what gets under the skin of people, and his biggest fear was that the film would portray Cummings as actually villainous and as someone that the film might judge. Benedict cannot play that. You can’t play someone, if you feel there is no empathy, no compassion, and no understanding for that person and what motivated them. He was constantly trying to interrogate that. Wherever possible, we worked on the script together with the director, Toby [Haynes], who always wanted to check in on that, to make sure that we were being fair and getting under the skin of this guy and trying to understand what he was doing, even if people disagreed with him. We wanted to do the most generous interpretation we could, of someone who at least 50% of our country thinks has destroyed the prospects of the nation.
You had a first draft of this film stolen and leaked online, which must feel like a huge violation for a writer.
GRAHAM: That’s the right word. I don’t want to be over dramatic about it, but because it was something that I was still working on, I was playing around with it and being a bit mischievous, and there were bits that I hadn’t researched yet. It was like someone had come into my house and gone through my drawers because it felt very exposing, especially the absolute surrealness of Steve Bannon reading it and responding online. You go, “What the fuck is Steve Bannon doing in my bedroom, reading my stuff?” It felt incredibly weird, and it was upsetting, but it also made us all realize that the responsibility to get this right, given the level of scrutiny, was something that we had to live up to.
When you’re stuck in a situation like that, where it would be bad enough to have something like that happen, at all, but it’s even more horrible when it’s not a true representation of the work and people are commenting on it, how do you get through that, deal with it, and move past it, to keep working on the project?
GRAHAM: I suppose the one thing that I was frustrated at was that I normally take great pride in trying to sensitively introduce the idea of work about difficult issues into the public imagination. For example, I’ve got a play opening on Broadway in the spring, which we did here [in the UK], last year, about Rupert Murdoch, and it’s about very difficult subject matter, for some people, so you try to control how you introduce that into the world. What frustrated me was that we had incredible talent on the film, all of whom felt very keenly and very sensitively about the benefits of doing a film about Brexit, and we wanted to be very delicate in how it dealt with certain issues. The appearance of the leaked script and the descent that it caused created an image around the film that felt like we were being quite opportunistic and quite careless, and that wasn’t the feeling on set. Every day, we’d all sit around, talking about different scenes and the right way to introduce certain ideas into the film. So, that was upsetting, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter what I feel. What matters is how good the film could be, and how useful the film could be to a domestic audience, but also to an international audience, in making sense of what is just absolutely unprecedented in its madness.
GRAHAM: That’s the right word. I don’t want to be over dramatic about it, but because it was something that I was still working on, I was playing around with it and being a bit mischievous, and there were bits that I hadn’t researched yet. It was like someone had come into my house and gone through my drawers because it felt very exposing, especially the absolute surrealness of Steve Bannon reading it and responding online. You go, “What the fuck is Steve Bannon doing in my bedroom, reading my stuff?” It felt incredibly weird, and it was upsetting, but it also made us all realize that the responsibility to get this right, given the level of scrutiny, was something that we had to live up to.
When you’re stuck in a situation like that, where it would be bad enough to have something like that happen, at all, but it’s even more horrible when it’s not a true representation of the work and people are commenting on it, how do you get through that, deal with it, and move past it, to keep working on the project?
GRAHAM: I suppose the one thing that I was frustrated at was that I normally take great pride in trying to sensitively introduce the idea of work about difficult issues into the public imagination. For example, I’ve got a play opening on Broadway in the spring, which we did here [in the UK], last year, about Rupert Murdoch, and it’s about very difficult subject matter, for some people, so you try to control how you introduce that into the world. What frustrated me was that we had incredible talent on the film, all of whom felt very keenly and very sensitively about the benefits of doing a film about Brexit, and we wanted to be very delicate in how it dealt with certain issues. The appearance of the leaked script and the descent that it caused created an image around the film that felt like we were being quite opportunistic and quite careless, and that wasn’t the feeling on set. Every day, we’d all sit around, talking about different scenes and the right way to introduce certain ideas into the film. So, that was upsetting, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter what I feel. What matters is how good the film could be, and how useful the film could be to a domestic audience, but also to an international audience, in making sense of what is just absolutely unprecedented in its madness.
collider.com/brexit-writer-james-graham-interview/#images