I like how impossible Grace is. We want women written in a way we can
NNETTE BENING did not initially want to make her new film. The American Beauty actress mulled over the script for Hope Gap and decided against taking the part.
“I thought it was really strong and original, painful, very well-written, but I couldn’t make it work as a film because I thought there were too many words,” the 62-year-old says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, where she is seated in front of a huge painting of the inside of David Hockney’s studio by the artist Damian Elwes.
“The director, Bill Nicholson, had written me a beautiful and very thoughtful letter and talked about how it was based on his own life, and my instinct at the moment was ‘I cannot tell this man that I think there are too many words, that is rude and presumptuous, so the better thing to do is just to pass’.
“So I passed, and then about a week later I thought to myself, ‘That was so stupid, why did I do that? I should have just called him up’. So I did. I just picked up the phone and called him and told him my concern, and he said ‘Of course, don’t worry’. He’s a very charming man, and so we ended up meeting halfway in New York and we just went from there.”
The movie is based on the real-life experience of the British film-maker, who is best known as a writer for his work on Gladiator, 2012’s Les Miserables and Unbroken.
Bill was a young man when, after three decades of marriage, his father announced he was leaving his mother for another woman, triggering a family crisis with him caught in the middle.
“It’s the end of your world, when the gods of your world, which is your mother and your father, break up,” he says. “And you’re dealing with it for the rest of your life.
“When you’re a child in relation to your parents, you’re always a child, and here I am, at my advanced age, and I’m still a child in relation to my parents so the therapy never ends.
“I think I’m more detached now and I was able to see it in a cooler way, and that I think made me able to be more truthful, more honest and more hopeful.”
The film stars Annette and Bill Nighy as couple Grace and Edward, while The Durrells’ Josh O’Connor plays their son, Jamie.
“What is great about director Bill is it was always quite clear that, while he was inspired by his story, he wanted it to break out of being personal,” Josh says.
“He wanted to make it more universal and accessible, so in a weird way it never felt like I was under pressure to be accurate with how he was or how he responded.
“Much like my only other experience of playing a real person on The Crown (he plays the young Prince Charles), we are fictionalising a truth, we are taking it away from that world.”
For Annette, she appreciated the way Grace responded to the shocking news that her marriage was over.
Annette Bening and Bill Nighy play a couple splitting up in new movie Hope Gap.
talks to the film’s stars and writer/ director Bill Nicholson on whose life it is based
Bill Nighy is Edward, the husband ending a 30-year marriage and Josh O’Connor is their son Jamie, left, battling to cope with it all
“I like how impossible she is, I love that. I feel like this is what women have been complaining about in terms of storytelling, that we want women to be written in a way we somehow can identify.
“Not that every woman is like Grace, but she has these contradictions inside of her and she can be absolutely impossible and I can identify with that, I can identify with the idea that there are times that we have that response to things and
that’s human and that’s part of who we are.
“But I also thought it was really important that Bill Nighy’s character and his point of view was supported completely, that both points of view could be true and then that is great dramatic conflict.”
Caught in the middle of that conflict is Josh’s Jamie, who is left as a sounding board and gobetween for both sides.
“I always think that is the lifelong