A STORIED REUNION
Actress Saoirse Ronan and novelist Ian McEwan team again in the adaptation of the acclaimed novella ‘On Chesil Beach’
Ian McEwan didn’t know Saoirse Ronan before she was cast as a 12-year-old in the 2007 adaptation of his novel “Atonement,” but the talent and intelligence with which she brought to life the role of Briony onscreen — work that earned her the first of three Oscar nominations — forever changed the way he considered his own creation on the page.
“What she in effect did was entirely kidnap the part,” McEwan said by phone from London recently. “I cannot open the pages of that novel and see any sentence about Briony without seeing Saoirse now.”
For Ronan, now 24, that film and its source novel also left a lasting impression, and a decade later helped bring her and McEwan together for a second collaboration, adapting his Booker Prize-nominated novella “On Chesil Beach,” which opened recently in some markets.
“It had been such a special moment in my life, and I had come to know Ian a bit throughout making the film,” she said of “Atonement” from the same Soho hotel from which McEwan had called. “So I got to read his work a little bit more as I got a bit older, and one of the ones that I loved was ‘On Chesil Beach.’ “
That novella, which by coincidence was published in 2007 as “Atonement” arrived in theaters, eventually reunited McEwan and Ronan. However, it wasn’t at all clear that they would meet again for the movie, given its subject matter (a sexually naive British couple on their wedding night in 1962), Ronan’s age when plans for the movie first were made, and delays in its development, during which Ronan’s increasingly busy career kept her occupied with films such as “Brooklyn” and “Ladybird,” both of which also landed her Academy Award nominations.
“Even when I was writing the screenplay years back, I thought Saoirse Ronan would be ideal for this,” McEwan said. “But at the time she was too young; she was about 17, I think.”
Ronan says she recognizes the same issue — Florence, the female lead in “On Chesil Beach,” is 22, not a huge distance from 17, but enough that it wouldn’t work.
“But I always had my eye on it,” she said. “I always sort of kept an eye on how it was doing, and were they going to put it into the works or not. And it just so happened that when they were ready to go, I was the right age.”
“On Chesil Beach,” both book and film, is framed by a period of a few hours in the awkward and ultimately tragic wedding night of Florence and Edward (Billy Howle), with their lives as individuals and then a couple told in flashbacks. Both are overwhelmed with anxiety for the events to come, Edward more with desire, Florence more dread.
“I was very much drawn to an idea I had out of nowhere of what it would be like to follow a couple of young sexual innocents into the moment when they’re suddenly alone after their wedding party
and the confetti and all the rest of it,” McEwan said. “And out of that came ideas of looking for social context and expectations about sex, and what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman in this particular time.”
While 11 of McEwan’s novels or stories have been made into films, he didn’t adapt “Atonement” and has said he typically prefers not to be part of that process. But with “On Chesil Beach,” he felt compelled to take charge of its transformation to the screen.
“I could see many ways in which you could make a terrible movie with this,” McEwan said. “Because it’s very intimate, it has complex characters, it’s a very tender story, I worried that it might end up, if I had no control over it at all, as either slightly pornographic or comic or generally exploitative.”
Once at work on the screenplay, he says, he came to enjoy it, creating some scenes he says he might have included in the book if he’d thought of them at the time, and finding ways to turn the interior dialogue of Florence and Edward that dominates the novella into dialogue they could speak in the film, directed by Dominic Cooke, an acclaimed theater director making his movie debut here. There’s still much said through the nonverbal acting of Ronan and Howle, which had long been one of the reasons McEwan says he’d thought of her for the part even when she was too young to be cast.
“Saoirse is an actor who can really give you a sense of an inner life, without having to write the inner life out for her,” he said. “There’s something about her silences. Something about the way she listens to things, as well as the way she speaks and projects. It’s very rich, rich in sort of immediate human meaning, and I think the same is true of Billy.”
Ronan said she knew from reading “On Chesil Beach,” and eventually the screenplay, that Florence would reveal much of her interior life without words, and that was more than fine with her.
“I love it. I love not having to speak,” she said. “My favorite thing, to just rely on body movement and your face instead. I think in general it’s more realistic. There’s so many situations you find yourself in where you say nothing, or you don’t express everything that’s in your head, and I love getting it out onscreen.”
It’s something the 24-year-old says she’s learned in the course of life in which she’s grown up in front of a camera.
“It’s brilliant to have this sort of secret silent language, and use that as a way of telling a story without really having to use words,” Ronan said. “I think there’s a great power that can come with it, you know? It’s a responsibility, as Spider-man would say, but you can get a real freedom when you don’t have to rely on text and you can use everything you have, your body or eyes, to tell a story.”
And while you might think the novelist and screenwriter might be a little bit attached to the words he put down, McEwan says that’s the opposite of his experience with “On Chesil Beach,” largely because of the talent of Ronan and Howle, especially during the film’s pivotal scene, shot on the titular beach.
“Our rehearsals really did concentrate on the beach scene, and I was very happy to start taking lines out simply because I could see we didn’t need them,” McEwan said. “Enough interiority was coming through in the expressions and general ability to play these roles by the two young actors.”
Ronan says she’s happy that she aged into the role of Florence, part of the transition that took her from teen roles in films such as “Hanna” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” into young adult characters such as Eilis in “Brooklyn” or Nina in a new film adaptation of the Anton Chekhov play “The Seagull” that also opened this month. Her interest in playing closer to her own age actually might have steered her away from playing her most recent signature role, she said.
“With ‘Ladybird’ it was funny,” Ronan said. “Because I had made that transition, there was a moment where I thought, ‘Oh, should I play a teenager again? I don’t know if that’s something I should go back and do.’ But it ended up being this story that, even as when we were making it, it was so relatable to everyone for so many different reasons.
“Every character was so well-written and rounded out so well that people could take a little piece of it for themselves, which I loved,” she said. “That’s all you can ever sort of ask for.”
Maybe, though McEwan has one more wish beyond that, given his deep admiration and appreciation for the young woman who’s now brought life to two of his characters.
“So very lucky for me to have had two works with her,” he said. “I hope we’ll work together again on something. Don’t know what yet, but she really is immensely, immensely gifted.”