Somehow Marie entered my soul. I really wanted the role
Rosamund Pike tells GEORGIA HUMPHREYS how she was determined to embody fearless reporter Marie Colvin in biographical drama A Private War – and show ‘a woman in all her complexities’
dis-junction between the two, can be troubling.”
Making the film involved a “long process of gaining people’s trust” for Rosamund.
“Actually, inadvertently, I realised I was put in a position of a journalist,” she continues, “because with Matthew Heineman, the director, I embarked on this series of trying to get as many people who knew Marie, and had worked with her, as possible (to talk to us), and at first met a level of resistance, because there’s a lot of suspicion around a Hollywood- isation of someone you love; you worry the person will be delivered back to you in a form you don’t recognise and there doesn’t seem to be any upside.”
But breaking down the barriers “so the tales you’re being told are not just the safe ones, but you get to the real stuff ” was rewarding, Rosamund adds.
It meant a lot to her when she saw all of Marie’s friends and colleagues from the Sunday Times at the London Film Festival screening of A Private War last October.
“I think people don’t always realise that as an actor, however sort of lightweight and vain we seem, the main objective is to disappear and focus intensely on someone else,” the thoughtful star suggests.
“And I think people don’t necessarily realise the care that’s going to be taken with someone, that you’re going to pore over every detail of their mannerisms; the way they walk, the way they hold a pen, the way they hold a cigarette, the way they hold a notebook, the angle of their head, the laugh – all of it, you’re going to be trying to embody.”
And embody she does. A Private War is a powerful piece of film, in which we truly get a picture of Marie as a complex person – one who was “so strong”, notes Rosamund, but also had inevitable moments of vulnerability.
“It doesn’t take away from the strength, it’s just that sometimes the very cost of exhibiting that strength and living that strength can be shattering to the nerves at another moment,” elaborates the actress, who has two children with mathematical researcher Robie Uniacke.
“Marie has a vibrant romantic life too and often that’s taken away from women who are smart and on film too.
“I knew that if the film got it right, here is a chance to show a woman in all her complexities.
“It’s a private war, isn’t it? It’s someone who went away from the pack into the most dangerous place on earth, but it’s also the cost of, when you’re at home alone, what you’ve witnessed and seen.”