The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Actress Saoirse Ronan and novelist Ian McEwan team again in the adaptation of the acclaimed novella ‘On Chesil Beach’
Southern California News Group
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.