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9 months ago
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EXCLUSIVE: It is exactly 13 years to the day that Ralph Fiennes’ feature directorial debut Coriolanus – in which he also starred alongside Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox – world premiered to acclaim at the 2011 Berlinale.
The Oscar nominee and Bafta-winning actor has since directed Rudolf Nureyev biopic The White Crow and The Invisible Woman about Charles Dickens’ secret mistress, alongside appearing in another 40 films including The Menu, No Time to Die, The King’s Man and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The Berlinale will support another first for Fiennes, this time via its European Film Market, as Cornerstone kicks off sales on the actor’s next directorial feature project, based on his first feature film screenplay.
Set against Fiennes’ native English county of Suffolk, the drama revolves around an eco-idealistic family, living on a farm in a beautiful natural landscape by the sea, whose fault lines are revealed when the daughter’s boyfriend joins them for the weekend.
Having grown up in London after fleeing the Ugandan civil war as an 11-year-old, he has never experienced this kind of privileged setting before.
He is given a warm welcome, but the mood shifts when a sudden act of violent racism at a local summer concert forces the young man and those around him to confront the uncomfortable truth of their differences.
Fiennes will be joined in the cast Additional cast by Indira Varma (Obi Wan Kenobi, Obsession), Charles Babalola (Mary Magdalene, Black Mirror) and Alison Oliver (Saltburn, Conversations with Friends).
The actor is currently appearing as Macbeth opposite Varma in Simon Godwin’s touring production, which is playing in London ahead of a run in Washington DC in April, so he will not be accompanying the project to the EFM.
He found time, however, to sit down with Deadline ahead of the market.
DEADLINE: This is an interesting subject. Can you put a bit more flesh on the storyline?
RALPH FIENNES: It’s about a small group of people whose lives are affected and upended by an act of random violence. I wanted it to be modern and I felt it should be implicitly about England. The characters come together in the County of Suffolk, which is a county I know well and have a very close affinity with.
There’s a Russian play called A Month in the Country [by Ivan Turgenev] about a young boy who comes to a rural setting and the effect of him being there. But apart from that very essential germ, everything else is very different.
It was just the idea that someone from one place comes into a particular kind of small family community. But in my screenplay, there’s an act of violence which smashes everyone’s supposedly tranquil or seeming seemingly contented lives.
DEADLINE: After directing three features from other people’s screenplays, what spurred you to write your own screenplay?
FIENNES: I’ve made three films and with each of them, I’ve been progressively more involved with the inception of the project. On The White Crow, written by David Hare, I was there from the get-go which was very exciting.
Before lockdown, I was on a film when I had the impulse to try to write something myself and that just kept building.
I don’t know quite where the story emerged from except that I’m interested in what goes on inside people that cannot be said. The galvanising force was the characters who crystallised. As they became stronger with their wants and needs, and aspirations or frustrations, there was the beginnings of a drama.
DEADLINE: Had your work as an actor and director prepared you for the task?
EXCLUSIVE: With Abi Morgan on Invisible Woman, she’d already written it, but I was very involved in the continuing evolving of that screenplay. And as I said before, The White Crow, that was very exciting to be there with David at the inception.
Of course, there are other screenplays that I’ve just been invited to be part of, and I’ve watched directors and writers take things forward but this started off as an experiment and the question, “Can I do this?”
DEADLINE: Your previous directorial credits have been inspired by real-life figures from the past, or literary works, what drew you to a more original contemporary tale?
FIENNES: Precisely those reasons: I had done one film rooted in Shakespeare, one rooted in the life of Charles Dickens, and another film about a Russian ballet dancer in the United States in the 1960s. I felt very strongly that whatever I was to attempt next as a director it should be contemporary, whether I was writing it or not.
I wanted to tell a story about things happening today between people. It’s not about contemporary issues, so much. They’re floating around but what interests me more is the inner lives of any individual and where does that become manifest in their life? How much can they own who they are, say who they are, confront who they are.
DEADLINE: At the heart of the drama is a young man who grew up in London having fled the Ugandan civil war as a child. Given the growing attention to representation and who tells certain stories, was there any concern about writing a character whose life experiences are beyond your own?
FIENNES: It’s an ensemble piece so there are plenty of characters the experiences of which I’m familiar with. I challenged myself to write somebody whose experience was not mine. I researched it and talked to lots of people who would reflect back to me.
The film is not about race, it’s about individuals. There are five different characters who’ve all got their different issues and he is one of them, even if he is a kind of centrifugal figure.
As an actor, I’m playing different people whose experiences I don’t know all the time. It defines my work as an actor. There’s a parallel for writers, writers write about experiences they do not have, they think, they imagine. The fundamental springboard for most literature is the act of imagination. We have to hold to that. Of course, people are challenging, “You can’t write about this or that”. I’m afraid I don’t accept that. We have the freedom to imagine. Our imaginations are free. This is our freedom and the freedom of our inner lives.
DEADLINE: Can you give any more details about the other characters?
FIENNES: That’s under wraps but the central motor is how can we own who we are. All the characters have a degree of that challenge in that they’re covering up things in their past and are not open about things that they’ve hidden. Some people seem quite integrated but there are things not answered in their lives.
DEADLINE: You’ve already set a number of the key cast. How did you pull that together?
FIENNES: I’m working with producer Gail Egan, who I’ve worked with many years ago on The Constant Gardener. We agreed that we ought to try to cast key characters as soon as possible. I’ve invited people who I feel that are right.
We’ve got Charles Babalola who is a very exciting actor, Alison Oliver, who’s thrilling, as you would have seen from Saltburn, and Indira Varma with whom I am currently playing Macbeth. I just have such a high regard for her. I’ve written one of the parts specifically with her in mind.
DEADLINE: When are you hoping to go into production?
FIENNES: This summer. There will rehearsals for people to get to know each other, to talk about the script, to listen to actors’ inputs, and to see what other ideas might emerge, which I can respond to in the script. I don’t think it’s good to play the scenes in rehearsal, because you want to leave that for the day of shooting. But it’s good to get your key actors together so that there’s a sense of who each other is. This is a film about a family and close friends so it’s important that the histories of the characters are discussed, and that all of us, the actors, know who we are and our story. And that will come from being in a room together.
DEADLINE: You’ve set the film in your native Suffolk. Is that an important element of the story?
FIENNES: The sense of the land is very important, the land of England, in this case, of Suffolk, and its coastline, and how people are on the land and the nature around them, that’s a key fifth key spirit in it. It’s the fields, the earth, the sea, the trees, the crops, the gardens, the whole thing that we live and breathe on.
If themes in the film are like different instruments in an orchestra. There’s a whole section of this orchestra which is about the land, our land, our England. Who we are day to day on it. With all the shit and the mess and the chaos and the politics and the social uncertainty, we’re existing on this earth, or this island. Who are we on this island? We’ve had this division of Brexit and the politics seem very uncertain. But really, it’s the earth on which we move and walk and live and breathe and go to school and go to bed on.
It’s more of a spiritual element as opposed to a social element about who we are on this land, on this earth of England.
DEADLINE: Do you have any sort of audience in mind for the film?
FIENNES: I’m excited when I feel any film out there is appealing to a broad group, whether they be young people, old people or into intellectual types, or I don’t know, young male teenagers. I’m doing Shakespeare at the moment, and we’re excited that a wide range of people are coming. We’re not doing Macbeth for a specific group. I want to the film to have a wide reach, for people to talk about it across generations, across the social spectrum.
