tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

Atonement, Hallam Foe, Control. Three up and coming films from the UK that feature some of the most exciting young actors today. But the filmmakers are also making waves, in their own rights! Let's see what they're up to - and what they're saying:

"In a lot of films, the sexual side is relatively disconnected from the narrative; you can easily cut to 'after' without losing anything. But in almost everything I've done, something is going on with the characters beyond bodies touching each other, and that's why you focus on it." David McKenzie, director Hallam Foe.

"Stephen Daldry [the director of Billy Elliot] watched it and said, 'You've just made a romcom. You may not realise it but you have,'" admits McKenzie.

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Hallam Foe (Jamie Bell) has transgression aplenty, reports the Guardian, but it also has romance. When Hallam falls for Kate (Sophia Myles), Mackenzie's directorial eye looks away. "In terms of his scenes with Kate, it's all rather sweet and I deliberately don't show stuff. One of my favourite scenes is when they play a word game that is obscene in one way but coy and sweet and romantic in another." He's not bashful about letting tenderness into his films. "If I have made a romcom, then I'm delighted because it feels like it's mine and I've been relatively honest with it. We went to great lengths to make it original, even though it is, I guess, a coming-of-age romcom." Or, as one US distributor said in private: "You've made an Oedipal romcom."

Hallam Foe first came to the attention of McKenzie when his former flatmate, Peter Jinks, revealed he was writing a book about a "misfit on the rooftops". McKenzie leapt on it and, after the novel was published, co-wrote the script. "The character Hallam appealed most of all. It's an ugly duckling story. I can identify with being a misfit," he says. "It's a story about leaving home, and that's a fairly universal thing. I know Hallam is a weirdo but I hope people are going to go with him. At that age we are all a little bit uncomfortable with ourselves and we are all a bit weird. Actually, I think we go to our graves being a bit weird. What makes us individuals is our discomfort with things."

McKenzie is not remotely patronising in his praise for Bell, now 21, who has, he says, "a huge future ahead of him". Bell spent much of the intense, six-week shoot suspended from wires above the grey grandeur of Edinburgh's Old Town. "Edinburgh is a sort of gothic fairytale city and it can be a gothic horror city as well. It lends itself to that rooftop world," says McKenzie. "If you set Hallam Foe in Manhattan, Hallam would have to be Spiderman."

[ See our Film Feature on Hallam Foe ]

Speaking of Jamie Bell, /Film recently announced that they had received a mysterious letter:

"I received a postcard in the mail addressed to “/Film”. It had no mailing address on the front, and the back is black (seen above) and reads “be at the scene of every story.” Little type on the bottom of the card reads “find out how 10/10/07. anywhereispossible.com”

[ See our Film Feature on Jumper or visit the site /film is talking about ]

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It’s a weird thing that people say: “Great books make bad films and bad books make great films.” I had that paranoia running around the back of my mind. But the problem is that I don’t have much choice. When a piece of material gets its claws into me, I’m at its mercy. However much I try and talk myself out of doing something I can’t really help but do it. So that’s how it was with Ian McEwan’s spectacular novel. It just got under my skin and all those kind of concerns had to be dealt with." So says Joe Wright when asked if it's daunting to adapt such a popular, well-respected book.

"I think the book is very visual so I therefore tried to make an almost literal adaptation of the book. When we got to a passage in the book like Robbie in the cellar, for instance, and there’s this little sequence that talks about going back to before it all happened, we literally ran the film backwards! We were very literal about it. Most of the changes that happened did so for financial reasons rather than creative ones. The book works obviously, so we tried to be faithful to it. I kind of had faith that the film would work too if we stuck to the truth of the novel.

With a lot of adapted novels, the catchphrase they all have is kind of, “at some point you need to throw the book away”. I always used to nod my head and pretend to understand what they meant. But I think you only throw the book away if it’s rubbish, so we never did that. We kept the book by our side throughout the whole process. Obviously, you have to cherry pick a bit. I also think a lot of literary people presume that literature and the written word has a monopoly over internal truth and I personally, as a dyslexic, don’t agree with that. I think, to me, the films of Fellini or Bergman or the great classical masters of the medium spoke just as much truth as Tolstoy or Dickens. It’s just another medium, so anyone who thought that the book was un-adaptable was probably under estimating the power of film."

[ More of Atonement from our Film Features section ]

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"A lot of people assumed that I just shoot in black and white, but actually that’s not the case - I shoot a lot of colour photography. But my memory of Joy Division is very black and white. If you look at the visuals that are available of Joy Division, especially stills, I would say it’s almost 99% black and white. The reason being that in the 1970s and early 1980s, all the important music magazines were printed in black and white. A band had to have a hit to be photographed in colour for more commercial publications, but a band like Joy Division had no hits (yet). Also, their record sleeves were black and white, and the way they dressed was quite grey-zoned. So, I felt this was the right way to think of Joy Division, " says Anton Corbijn of his latest feature.

[ More of Control from our Film Features section ]