HANNA directed by Joe Wright, written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr, with Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana. 111 minutes. An Alliance release. Opens Friday (April 8). See listing.
Action film Hanna is a serious departure for director Joe Wright, whose best-known credits are period pieces Pride & Prejudice and Atonement.
But Wright says he was ready for something new, even if he may have failed in certain ways.
That last bit is not the kind of thing you usually hear from filmmakers promoting their work, but the delightfully self-deprecating British director says he honestly had trouble finding the balance between the action, procedural and fantasy elements of his spy thriller.
Then he realizes how unusual that confession is. “Americans are always so good at selling themselves, and I’m always surprised by their ability to do that.”
Not that the movie won’t sell itself. The story of a teenager groomed to be an assassin has two great performances and a breathtaking pace, thanks to long-time collaborator Paul Tothill, his editor.
“The cutting room is in my house, so you can’t get much closer than that,” Wright says. “We sit next to each other for about seven months and figure it out. After being on set with 120 people a day, I get to be in a room with just Paul, and it’s a joy.”
Though Wright’s done a radical genre shift with Hanna, he’s got Saoirse Ronan on board again. The young actor, nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Atonement, has, according to Wright, really grown as an artist.
“It’s slightly frightening, to be honest, to work with such an extraordinary talent at such a young age. When we worked on Atonement, she was 12 and kind of wild and incredibly exciting but a little inconsistent. She has a much firmer grasp of her craft now – totally focused and completely dedicated.”
Good thing, too, because Cate Blanchett almost runs away with the movie, relishing the role of the baddie.
“She had a lot of fun with it,” Wright agrees. “It’s quite a campy performance, something she was almost scared of. I kept on pushing it further, enjoying the campery. It reminds me of a David Lynch role. I like the idea of playing with a character who’s an obsessive-compulsive control freak losing control.”
Wright credits his parents, who were travelling puppeteers, for nurturing the artist in him and says he wants to do the same with his son, born recently to him and wife Anoushka Shankar (Ravi’s daughter).
“To be brought up in an artistic environment demystifies the whole thing and encourages the imagination, be it literary, pictorial, musical or even mathematical.
“Let the imagination find its own expression. That’s the most important thing.”
Interview Clips
On shooting in Finland:
On intimacy between Hanna and her new girlfriend:
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