EBB & FLOW
About halfway through the film On Chesil Beach, the actress Saoirse Ronan had to mime playing the first violin part of Beethoven’s Razumovksy quartet, a piece renowned for its difficulty. ‘We got a young violinist whose hands matched Saoirse’s to crouch behind Saoirse and thread her arm right round the fret, so it looks like it’s Saoirse’s fingers playing, while Saoirse concentrates on the bowing,’ explains the author and screenwriter Ian McEwan, who adapted his novel for the film. ‘And between each take these two young women would burst out laughing.’
For McEwan, more used to sitting alone at his desk, his head in the world of a novel, to watch a young actress bring his character to life was electrifying. Ronan was always key to his adaptation of On Chesil Beach. ‘She’s so protean,’ says McEwan, and was, he always thought, ideally suited to the role of Florence, the young violinist who falls in love with and marries the budding historian Edward in the summer of 1962. Britain is on the cusp, society gear-shifting towards openness and sexual liberation, and yet Edward and Florence, on their wedding night in a claustrophobic Dorset hotel, are still restrained by the old inhibitions, the total inability to express what they mean or feel. ‘Later on in that decade, human relations got warmer, it got easier,’ says McEwan. ‘This was the last moment of its time.’
McEwan often draws on moments like this – singular events on which a whole life turns, a scene that can sum up a decade. Years ago, a much younger Ronan played Briony Tallis in the film of Atonement, another McEwan novel that hinged on a brief episode of disastrous sexual misunderstanding. The connection between the two roles is evident, but Ronan also carried over the ability – seductive to a novelist – of being able to play interiority. ‘Saoirse can bridge that gap,’ said McEwan. ‘You can almost see the thinking. She’s great at silence, turning away from someone’s remark.’
Music also smoothed the transition from page to screen. The movie is full of the jarring tastes of Florence and Edward, of string quartets and Chuck Berry, accompanying lingering shots of landscapes – the Dorset coast, the golden stone of Oxford, the woods and valleys of the Chilterns, all of which have resonance for McEwan. He lived in Oxford for 17 years, and has been hiking in the Chilterns for most of his adult life. He even took the film’s director Dominic Cooke there to show him precisely where to shoot certain scenes in the film.
But the process of adaptation also had its challenges. McEwan doesn’t always write the screenplay for his own novels, but in this case, he says, ‘I didn’t want anyone else to do it.’ The story was too intimate, too delicate. He accepted that he needed to be more literal – making more explicit, for example, the idea that is only suggested in the book, that Florence was abused by her father (played to sinister perfection by Samuel West). And then, of course, there is the ‘demotion from playing God’ as he puts it: no longer in creative isolation and total control, the writer has to collaborate, a film the product of multiple moving parts. ‘Movie-making is always a sort of controlled panic,’ says McEwan, which he makes sound faintly thrilling after the lonely omnipotence of writing. The loss of power is offset by the gain of the extraordinary experience of seeing people you’ve only imagined live and breathe: ‘This sense that this is what it would be like to be there,’ he says. Still, as the movie makes its way out into the world, he’s happy to return to his desk. ‘It’s quite pleasant actually,’ says McEwan genially. ‘I don’t have to talk to anyone about anything.’
‘On Chesil Beach’ is released in cinemas on 18 May.
By SOPHIE ELMHIRST
The author Ian McEwan
reveals the challenges and rewards of adapting his On Chesil Beach for the screen