Driving ‘Mortal Engines’
The Hobbit Mortal Engines, Lord of the Rings
What was it about Philip Reeve’s work that inspired you to adapt it to the big screen?
Back in 2006, when I was first tipped off about these books, there were four (now there are eight).
So, I sort of just read them as a fan because somebody told me they were really great. And even though the idea of traction cities was interesting, what really inspired me were the characters.
Mortal Engines is the story of Hester Shaw and Tom Natsworthy and the characters they come across along the way. The backdrop is fantastic, but it’s the characters that jump out at you when you read these unbelievably good books.
What is Hester Shaw like?
Hester is so antisocial and feral and damaged, having been raised by a psychopathic robot. She is not a well-adjusted person, and she has never had a relationship with a real human being since her mother died when she was a child.
So she is carrying that sorrow and pain, and she wants to kill the guy who murdered her mother – all she has been thinking about for 15 years.
Her story is about someone who has to find the humanity in her that she never knew she had, as it has been denied to her by how she was raised by this robot.
What can you say about Tom Natsworthy?
That he is a cheery, funny, social and optimistic glass half-full kind of guy. But he ends up being ejected from the city, landing on the ground outside London with Hester. And he doesn’t know how to survive, because he was born and has lived all his life on a traction city and has never set foot on the ground.
Tom is like a fish out of water, freaked out to be on the grass. And the only person near him is someone who is incredibly dangerous and who actually doesn’t like him at all! That’s how the relationship begins.
What made Hera Hilmar the right actress to embody Hester?
Hera, like her character, is a bit of an enigma – with that classic Ingrid Bergman type of mystery about her.
She knows Hester and is the sort of reserved person in her natural self that understands that character.
It’s interesting to have a complex, powerful villain like Thaddeus Valentine, played by Hugo Weaving, confront them.
I love working with Hugo. And Valentine is interesting because I think the best villains believe they are doing the right thing. The worst are the ones that are villains all the time.
But Valentine is not like that at all, as he actually believes that what he is doing is the best decision to make. He thinks he is doing it for the right reasons, and in his mind he is being practical. So he pushes the story in places that make it dark
The attention to detail in the movie is extraordinary.
If you are making a movie in a time you are not familiar with, and that in some way is fantastical, you never want to talk down to it or make it trivial. In creating a society very different to ours we took a lot of care in putting in all the detail we could to make it believable.
We tried to not to trivialise it simply because it was all made up, but actually tried to create the most believable world we could.