Exclusive: It’s been exactly 13 years to the day that director Ralph Fiennes made his directorial debut Coriolanus – in which he also starred alongside Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox – had its world premiere at the 2011 Berlinale.
The Oscar-nominated and BAFTA Award-winning actor directed the Rudolf Nureyev biopic White crow And The invisible woman About Charles Dickens’s secret mistress, as well as appearing in 40 other films including The List, No Time to Die, The King’s Man, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The Berlinale will support another first for Finn, this time through the European Film Market, as Cornerstone begins sales for the actor’s next feature project, based on the screenplay for his first feature film.
Set against the native English county of Suffolk in Venice, the drama revolves around an eco-friendly family living on a farm amidst a beautiful seaside landscape, whose fault lines are exposed when the daughter’s boyfriend joins them for the weekend.
Having grown up in London after fleeing the Ugandan civil war when he was 11 years old, he had never experienced this kind of privileged environment before.
He is warmly welcomed, but the mood changes when a sudden act of violent racism at a local summer concert forces the young man and those around him to confront the uncomfortable truth of their differences.
Fiennes will be joined in the additional cast by Indira Varma (Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obsession)Charles Babalola (Mary Magdalene, Black Mirror) Alison Oliver (Saltburn, Conversations with Friends).
The actor is currently appearing as Macbeth opposite Varma in Simon Goodwin’s touring production, which is running in London before being staged in Washington DC in April, so will not accompany the project to EFM.
However, he found time to sit down with Deadline before hitting the market.
Delivery time: This is an interesting topic. Can you put more meat to the story?
Ralph Fiennes: It is about a small group of people whose lives have been affected and turned upside down by random acts of violence. I wanted it to be modern and felt it had to implicitly relate to England. The characters come together in Suffolk County, a county I know well and have a close connection to.
There is a Russian play called month in the country (by Ivan Turgenev) is about a young boy who comes to a rural setting and the impact of his being there. But apart from that very basic germ, everything else is completely different.
It was just the idea of someone from somewhere coming to a certain kind of small family community. But in my scenario, there is an act of violence that shatters everyone’s supposedly peaceful or seemingly content lives.
Delivery time: After directing three films based on other people’s scripts, what prompted you to write your own screenplay?
Venice: I’ve made three films, and with each one, I became progressively more involved at the beginning of the project. on white crow, By David Hare I was there from the beginning and it was very exciting.
Before lockdown, I was shooting a film when I had the drive to try and write something myself, and that just kept building.
I don’t know exactly where the story came from, but I am interested in what goes on inside people that cannot be told. The galvanizing force was the personalities that crystallized. As they became stronger with their desires, needs, aspirations or frustrations, there were the beginnings of drama.
Delivery time: Did your work as an actor and director prepare you for this task?
Exclusive: With Abi Morgan Invisible womanI actually wrote it, but I was very involved in the ongoing development of this script. As I said before, White crowIt was very exciting to be there with David at the beginning.
Of course, there are other scripts that I’ve just been invited to be a part of, and I’ve watched directors and writers take things further but this started as an experiment and asking, “Can I do this?”
Delivery time: Your previous directorial works were inspired by real-life figures from the past, or literary works. What attracted you to a more authentic contemporary story?
Venice: Precisely for these reasons: I’ve directed a film rooted in Shakespeare, a film rooted in the life of Charles Dickens, and another film about a Russian ballerina in the United States in the 1960s. I felt strongly that whatever I tried next as a director had to be contemporary, whether I was writing it or not.
I wanted to tell a story about things that happen today among people. It’s not about contemporary issues, so much. They walk around but what interests me most is the inner life of an individual and where that manifests itself in their life? To what extent can they acknowledge who they are, say who they are, and face who they are?
Delivery time: At the heart of the drama is a young man who grew up in London after fleeing the Ugandan civil war as a child. With the increased interest in representation and who tells certain stories, has there been any interest in writing a character whose life experiences are further from your own?
Venice: It’s a piece of music so there are a lot of characters I know. I challenged myself to write for someone whose experience is not my own. I’ve researched it and talked to a lot of people who might consider me.
The film is not about race, but about individuals. There are five different characters who all have their own different issues and he’s one of them, even if he’s kind of a centrifugal character.
As an actor, I play different people whose experiences I don’t know all the time. It defines my work as an actor. There is a similarity between writers: writers write about experiences they do not have, think about, and imagine. The basic starting point of most literature is the act of imagination. We have to stick to that. Naturally, people challenge, “You can’t write about this or that.” I’m afraid I don’t accept that. We have the freedom to imagine. Our imagination is free. This is our freedom and the freedom of our inner life.
Delivery time: Can you give more details about the other characters?
Venice: This is unknown but the central driver is how we can own our identity. All of the characters have some degree of this challenge in that they are covering up things in their past and are not open about the things they have hidden. Some people seem completely integrated but there are unanswered things in their lives.
Delivery time: You’ve already hired a number of key actors. How did you put that together?
Venice: I’m working with producer Gail Egan, who I’ve worked with for many years The constant gardener. We agreed that we should try to choose the main characters as soon as possible. I have invited people who I feel are right.
We have Charles Babalola who is a very hot actor, and Alison Oliver, who is hot, as you can see from SaltburnAnd Indira Varma, who I’m currently playing with Macbeth. I have such great respect for her. I wrote one part specifically with her in mind.
Delivery time: When do you hope to go into production?
Venice: this summer. There will be rehearsals for people to get to know each other, talk about the script, listen to the actors’ input, and see what other ideas might come up that I can respond to in the script. I don’t think it’s a good idea to act out scenes in rehearsal, because you want to leave that for the day of shooting. But it’s good to get your main actors together so that there’s a sense of each other. This is a film about family and close friends, so it’s important that the history of the characters is discussed, and that all of us, the actors, know who we are and our story. And that will come from us being in a room together.
Delivery time: You shot the film in your native Suffolk. Is this an important element of the story?
Venice: The sense of the land is very important, the land of England, in this case, Suffolk, its coastlines, and how the people are on the land and the nature around them, that’s the fifth major spirit of it. It is the fields, the land, the sea, the trees, the crops, the gardens, everything we live and breathe on.
If the themes in the film are like the different musical instruments in an orchestra. There’s a whole section of this orchestra that’s all about the land, our land, England. Who we are day by day on it. With all the nonsense, chaos, anarchy, politics and social uncertainty, we exist on this earth, or this island. Who are we on this island? We’ve seen this division over Brexit, and the politics seem very uncertain. But in reality, it is the land on which we move, walk, live, breathe, go to school and sleep.
It’s more of a spiritual element than a social element about who we are on this earth, on the land of England.
Delivery time: Do you have any type of audience in mind for the film?
Venice: I get excited when I feel like any movie out there appeals to a wide range, whether they’re young or older or hipsters or, I don’t know, young teenage males. I’m doing Shakespeare at the moment, and we’re excited that a wide range of people are coming. We don’t Macbeth for a specific group. I want the film to reach a wide audience, so that people will talk about it across generations, across the social spectrum.