Golden boy

Atonement signals a(nother) bold step for British dynamo Joe Wright.

You can’t say Joe Wright has taken the lazy path. After wowing his art-school profs at London’s St. Martins College, he plunged directly into BBC miniseries work, mounting an ambitious saga of Charles II. When it came time to make his first feature, Wright chose one of the most revered novels in English literature—and, against all odds, emerged with 2005’s fresh, singularly inspired Pride & Prejudice, starring a reborn Keira Knightley. Wright was 33.

“I do feel a bit of pressure sometimes,” the director says from his car in Los Angeles. We’re supposed to be talking about Atonement, his adaptation of Ian McEwan’s historically sprawling, Booker Prize–winning romance, already the smart money for the night’s final Oscar. (It’s the one novel Wright could have picked that’s more daunting than Jane Austen.) But Wright is happy to be scouting locations for his third movie, to star Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. “The next one is what’s important,” he says. “It’s the work that counts. Honestly, I don’t really feel pressure from other people.” He pauses. “I think I must be creating it myself.”

Atonement will assuredly create more pressure for Wright. Prestigious without feeling “prestigey” and pulsing with several fine performances (particularly from Vanessa Redgrave, James McAvoy and the returning Knightley), the movie is exactly what studios want at the end of the year. Moreover, it’s the product of an uncommonly nimble mind, sensitive to McEwan’s literary conceits but also to the visual panache of cinema’s golden-age visionaries like Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean.

“Joe was so clear about what he wanted,” says adapting screenwriter Christopher Hampton, famous for his Dangerous Liaisons script. “And that’s always a relief, because I’ve worked so often with directors who say, ‘I don’t quite know what I need here, but there’s something wrong….’ Joe deals very much in specifics.” Coming on to the project after Hampton had already written a few drafts for departing director Richard Eyre (Notes on a Scandal), Wright insisted they start from scratch. “It’s not the greatest thing a writer wants to hear on the first day,” Hampton adds dryly. “But that’s basically what Joe did. He came in and kicked away the crutches.”

“It had obviously been written with another director’s vision in mind,” Wright says. “So Christopher and I went to some place in Italy where it was cold and wet and locked ourselves away. And we set about it from page one.” Part of that meant restoring McEwan’s splintered chronology. “That was one of the things that first attracted me to the book,” the director says. “It felt like a contemporary novel reflecting on sins of the past, rather than a novel that was merely inhabiting the past.” (The very meta Atonement spins its multidecade story out of a lie uttered by a young girl in monied, pre-WWII England, leading to incriminations, more fabrications, a doomed love and, ironically, another lie in the form of a best-selling novel.)

Other Wrightisms extended beyond the script to the shoot itself. Stylized acting (including many a struck pose and swoon) invokes an earlier,
pre–De Niro age. “The whole Method thing has become just an accepted truth,” Wright says. “And I don’t think Lee Strasberg has a monopoly on the truth.” There’s also the whole of the war’s Battle of Dunkirk—soldiers, tanks, thousands of wounded—in a single Steadicam shot, a much-rehearsed seven-minute tour de force that will bring to mind the way the director pushed his camera through Pride & Prejudice’s ballrooms. “I love putting on an event like that, a performance piece on the day,” Wright says, owning up to a showman’s background. (His parents cofounded London’s Little Angel puppet theater.) “It gets everyone’s adrenaline going; it really focused the thousand extras that we had on the beach. Maybe there is a bit of showing off in there as well.”

For somebody so undeniably enthusiastic about the filmmaking process, Wright conveys his fair share of wariness about awards talk. “I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t pay attention to it,” he admits. “Because one does have their childhood dreams. But it doesn’t preoccupy me that much. It’s nice for my mum.” In the event of Atonement’s success, Wright’s mind could be elsewhere—perhaps on that long walk to the podium. Perfect tracking shot.

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