'An Education' set visit with Alfred Molina

Nick Hornby has written the screenplay for a 1960s-set film based on the early life of journalist Lynn Barber. Wally Hammond reports from the set in Bloomsbury, where Alfred Molina is playing the buttoned-down father to Carey Mulligan‘s wayward daughter

‘Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.’
‘Annus Mirabilis’, Philip Larkin

I’m part of a madding crowd trying to peer through the small windows of the slightly tatty, maroon 1960s Bristol that keeps gliding in and out of the forecourt of the 1920s Bloomsbury Service Station in Store Street, WC1.

‘Who are those people?’, asks a passing Belgian tourist. ‘Are they real or is it a film?’ I tell her that they’re shooting ‘An Education’. ‘That’s Alfred Molina in the back of the car talking to actress Cara Seymour.’ She doesn’t recognise either of them, but admires the pretty girl’s elegant frock and period beehive.

‘That’s the star, Carey Mulligan with Peter Sarsgaard,’ I tell her, giving her a quick CV – ‘You might have seen her in “Doctor Who” or “Northanger Abbey” or “Pride and Prejudice”.’

It all looks so polite and English – but in reality, in the teacup proportions of that fancy little roadster, a storm is brewing. This is the first time that Nick Hornby has written a screenplay not based on one of his own novels, and it’s a fictionalised, gently morally probing version of the evocative, sexually candid and rebarbative short memoir published in Granta by journalist and doyenne of interviewers, Lynn Barber.

Hornby has changed the names, but he’s kept most of the facts and poignant period conundrums: Jenny, a 16-year-old schoolgirl preparing for Oxbridge at a ‘posh’ London suburban school in 1962, having allowed herself to be wined, dined and seduced by an older man – flash-talking Bristol-driving, Rachman-esque property developer David (Peter Sarsgaard) – finds to her dismay that her parents, rather than protect her from him, spy a potential husband. It may be a comedy of errors, but in the scene I’m watching, Jenny’s confusion, disappointment, frustration and fears are reducing her to tears.

A woman bounces over. It’s the director, Lone Scherfig, the 49 year-old Danish director of ‘Italian for Beginners’ and ‘Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself’.

She looks sprightly in sneakers and is sporting a Russian Garbo hat to fend off the April evening cold.

‘I don’t know if you have read the script, Wally,’ Scherfig explains, ‘but I’m directing Alfred and Cara as Jenny’s parents in this scene, and they’re being taken out to dinner for the first time – by Jenny and Jenny’s lover David.

‘I try here and there to make it quite moving. Every time I read the script and rehearse it I see more layers in it. And more moments when you can make people laugh. Sometimes we go for it, sometimes we steer clear because the emotion is more important.’

Finola Dwyer and her co-producer Amanda Posey – Hornby’s long-term partner – are keeping an eye on the shoot. The first assistant director is barking commands about the tight schedule as a relaxed Scherfig gets the cowboy-hatted cinematographer John de Borman to do one more take of Jenny’s nervy paramour buying petrol.

‘It’s not a comedy. It’s a coming-of-age, with a sting in its tail,’ adds Dwyer. ‘But it’s a drama first, a love story.’ Posey agrees: ‘Jenny’s living a bland suburban life from which she wants to escape. But her choices reflect the choices girls make throughout the ages.’

Dwyer tells me the ‘bright lights, big city’ scenes where David shows Jenny the glamorous world beyond her suburban Twickenham home – shot at the Walthamstow dog track, at Charlie Chan’s casino, the nightclub scene in Café de Paris – are already wrapped.

‘It’s set in a very interesting time, where England was growing out of the war years. The ’60s were yet to happen.’

Meanwhile, Molina is still in the back of the cold sportscar, buttoned-up in his conservative pinstripe. It’s 1am when we talk, him de-robed in a Winnebago. ‘The script made me laugh’, he tells me. ‘It’s a very sad story but there is some very funny stuff in it.’

Molina is very complimentary about the delicacy and insight of Hornby’s script. ‘Jack is an Englishman, of a certain class and period of time. That is eminently recognisable. The generation that came out of the war spent those years fighting for something they thought they’d earned. And suddenly it’s 1962 and it’s all disappearing. Everybody’s going: “Fuck that! Who wants that?” It must have been tough.’

‘For my generation – and Nick Hornby’s – music was the biggest thing. The next Beatles single was like the next message. You studied the lyrics, pored over the album cover. Music was everything. And life without music could be a very, very silent life. I think that’s the kind of life he, Jack, leads.’

I ask him if the thinks the film will play in America. ‘The film’s not really about being English, it’s about being out of touch with what your family needs. And I think that is something that happens everywhere. I don’t think the Brits have got a monopoly on dysfunctionality,’ he says, giving
a hearty laugh.

‘An Education’ will be released next year.