Darkest hour
DARKEST HOUR | Director Joe Wright teams up with Gary Oldman for a personal and powerful portrait of British icon Winston Churchill.
Joe Wright’s Churchill biopic. Give him a cigar.
Hold on,” says Joe Wright, thumbing through his iPhone, “I’ll see if I can find it.” The British director behind Anna Karenina, Pride & Prejudice and Hanna is searching for some behind-the-scenes footage of his latest film, Winston Churchill drama Darkest Hour. “Back, back, back, back, back,” he continues, skimming through personal pictures and videos. “No, you can’t see that one… there’s Christmas, still Christmas… there you go.”
As the video plays, Teasers gets a unique glimpse into Wright’s methods. In the House of Parliament set, brilliantly mocked up by the director’s regular production designer Sarah Greenwood, several hundred extras – all playing MPs – are delivering a rousing chorus of The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’, before
Wright’s Churchill, Gary Oldman, walks in to rapturous cheers. Making sure the extras are “fully engaged” was vital, says Wright. “If you get them working, then you get the whole thing working.”
It certainly points to Wright’s attention to detail in a film that could so easily have been derailed by not one but two other movies this year. Already released is Churchill with Brian Cox – which, like Darkest Hour, deals with the newly appointed prime minister’s crucial early days in May 1940, just months after the outbreak of WW2 – and Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, which took the Tommy’s eye view of the Churchill-organised evacuations from the beaches in Normandy.
“It’s a very strange piece of timing,” says Wright, who previously touched on the Dunkirk evacuation himself with his famous tracking shot along the beach in his adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement a decade ago.
“I must admit I was nervous to go and see Nolan’s movie. I avoided seeing it until I’d finished the edit of ours. And was mighty relieved that there wasn’t an overlap and thrilled by the film. I think it’s a fantastic piece of work.”
This time, Wright wanted to avoid the beaches (and any clash with Nolan’s movie) and take us back to England, to the heart of government, where Churchill is forced to fight off political machinations from the likes of Viscount Halifax and Neville Chamberlain, who had just resigned as PM, pushing for negotiations with the Germans. “I wasn’t aware how close we came to making a peace deal,” says Wright. “I wasn’t aware that Churchill really considered it.”
While Nolan’s Dunkirk is very much an action movie, Wright’s film – scripted by Anthony McCarten (The Theory Of Everything) – is much more dialogue-driven. “I personally find the relations between humans far more tense, fraught and fascinating than guns and bombs and all of that stuff. I’m fascinated by how we relate to each other. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The level of suspense I felt when reading the script was dramatic and I was excited to try and achieve that.”
At the heart of Darkest Hour is a sensational turn by Oldman, who disappears into Churchill just as he did playing Sid Vicious (Sid And Nancy) or Joe Orton (Prick Up Your Ears) at the outset of his career. Spending threeand-a-half hours a day in make-up, Oldman carried around half his bodyweight in prosthetics, which had been designed by out-of-retirement genius Kazuhiro Tsuji (Looper) over a five-month period before shooting.
During this time, Oldman and Wright started working on the character – “Thinking about how he breathed and how he walked and how he spoke.” But it was on the day of the cast table-read that it really hit home. “Gary said, ‘You know what? I think I might get into costume and make-up.’ And he walked in the room and all the actors turned and saw him and literally gasped. Then we read the script, and he was just magnificent. Not all the choices were there yet but there was the essence of Churchill that was undeniable.”
Naturally, the intense Oldman took it to extremes. “Gary actually got stomach poisoning from all the cigars he had to smoke!” reveals Wright, who hopes that his lead gets the Academy recognition a performance like this merits. “I think he deserves the highest accolades, as an actor, for an overall career, that our industry can bestow. He’s an extraordinary artist and someone who is one of a kind really.”
Oldman isn’t the only actor on top form though: witness Kristin Scott Thomas as Churchill’s wife Clementine; Lily James as his courageous secretary Elizabeth; and Australian Rogue One star Ben Mendelsohn as King George VI, Britain’s stutter-afflicted monarch already captured on film by Colin Firth in The King’s Speech. Casting a non-Brit was key, says Wright, “so they wouldn’t come with that cultural baggage that so many British would have come with”.
With Winston Churchill frequently named the most important or influential Briton of the 20th Century in polls, Wright was keen to dig deep and examine the man behind that infamous V for Victory sign. “I wanted to reclaim him, take him down from the plinth, and examine the man. I think it’s very dangerous to canonise our leaders or celebrities. We need to address them as human beings and then we can learn from them.”
So what did he learn from Churchill, a man many considered reckless and booze-addled? “I learnt that he was deeply flawed, he made many mistakes and yet – perhaps because of or in spite of – he overcame those failures to achieve possibly the greatest service to Britain and democracy that any leader has shown.” In the darkest hour, he illuminated the nation’s indefatigable spirit. JM
ETA | 12 JANUARY 2018 / DARKEST HOUR OPENS NEXT YEAR.
‘I WANTED TO RECLAIM HIM, TAKE HIM DOWN FROM THE PLINTH, AND EXAMINE THE MAN’ JOE WRIGHT