TIFF Interview: Christopher Hampton, Screenwriter of 'Atonement'

One of the best-received films at this year's TIFF, Atonement tells the story of a 13 year-old girl who, thinking she's doing something right, actually does something horribly wrong and starts a chain reaction of terrible events that will go on for several years. To say more than that seems unfair, since this is the kind of film that everyone should go into tabula rasa the first time, if at all possible. However, those who have read the highly-praised novel by Ian McEwan already know the ins and outs and can marvel at how delicately and faithfully McEwan's prose has been brought to vivid life on the screen. Christopher Hampton, the film's screenwriter who also penned Dangerous Liaisons, agreed to sit down with Cinematical at this year's festival and talk about the unique challenges of creating a film script that could capture everything great about McEwan's writing and working with Joe Wright, who is proving himself to be one of the most clever and talented filmmakers in the business today. Here's the interview.

Cinematical: Talk a little about the third part, the nursing section -- did you feel, as I did, that Briony paints herself a little too well in that part? When I doubleback after the ending, I look at that section suspiciously, like maybe she's taking liberties with the truth.

CH: The whole motivation of that nursing section -- which, by the way, I think is sort of the best written bit of the book, really exceptionally precise and well-pictured -- I think she throws herself into this job out of guilt. The book is about a life, her life, being ruined by the knowledge that she's ruined other people's lives. I see no reason to doubt her sincerity, although you're perfectly free to do so.

Cinematical: What were the major challenges of adapting the latter part of the book -- part three and the 1999 afterward?

CH: That was a particular problem that one had to find a solution, to find a way to crack it, and in fact what we wound up with was something that was the briefest of the many versions that we had done. You tend to elaborate, when you've got such a complicated thing to get over to an audience. Then we sort of thought, the shorter and more lucid and simpler we did it, the better it would work. But to answer your question about part three, in my original first draft, I had conflated the Dunkirk section and the hospital section. I had intercut, you know, gone back and forth between them. And at a certain point, I decided to go back to what the book does, which is keep them in sections. They are simultaneous in time, those two sections, so it was worth a try. But there's something about having the focus on each character, chapter by chapter, that works very well. Also, it works because Joe made the very smart decision ... there was a lot of talk about whether we could get one actress to do the child and the 18 year-old. You know, if we'd found someone, I could have upped the age to 15 or something, but of course it's not about a 15 year-old. So Joe was very clear about that, and that was a great help, that he said 'no, no, we're gonna have two different actresses.' So that also assisted the idea of focusing on one character at a time somehow.

Cinematical: Were there any instances where you wanted to make a substantial, tonal change to the material?

CH: No. First of all, I admire the book enormously. I just think it's one of the best books of the last few years. And I always think that if you respond to something as strongly as that, you better not mess with it. So, the changes or additions or stuff that's in the film that's not in the book is all of a very minor, textual kind. We really wanted to follow the line of the book and be faithful to it, which is pretty much what I did with Dangerous Liaisons as well.

Cinematical: I can imagine it would be challenging to adapt some aspects of McEwan's style, for example the way he toys with the reader as to the content of the letter, giving us Briony's interpretation of it and so on.

CH: Yes, and and we found a little way around, both with the fountain scene and the delivery of the letter scene, to echo the sort of elaborate thing with the book, which tends to tell you what happened and then tell you why it happened and then tell you why it happened in a different way than what one of the characters thought, and so on. We tried to find a way to loop round, in that sort of manner, but I must say, it's not his job to make it easy for an adapter. And he certainly doesn't.

Cinematical: Did you work closely with him on the project?

CH: I did talk to him a lot, actually. I showed him all the drafts, and he's very ... he's not intrusive. But he's very clear on what he thinks.

Cinematical: But is he up on film?

CH: He's done a lot of screenplays himself. He's done several screenplays himself. I don't think he has a love of it, but I think he knows about it.

Cinematical: Is it impossible for a film to carry across as much of a personal quality as a literary work, in your opinion? You're working with so many collaborators on a film that it seems that way.

CH: There are two things. One, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be as personal in tone as a piece of prose. But I think its the auteurs or the screenwriter-directors who can deliver a sort of truly personal piece of work, but you know, for me, given the experiences of the last couple of years, the film really has Joe written all over it.

Cinematical: How so?

CH: Because he goes at every scene in his own particular way and finds his own reasons for shooting. He's interested in some things and not interested in others. For example, I had envisaged a much more elaborate dinner party scene, which is interrupted by the realization of the twins. I could have imagined a much more, protracted ... and he said 'No, I'd quite like this to be very simple. I only want to do this, this and this, and I don't want to be going around the table and up people's noses. I don't want to do that.' So you say 'fine, we'll do it this way.'

Cinematical: When I first read the book, I imagined sort of a Peter Jackson take on it, with The Trials of Arabella sort of coming to life around her as she walked through the house.

CH: There were all kinds of things you could have done to deal with that dimension. The most obvious, of course, would be a voiceover. An authorial voiceover, maybe done by Vanessa Redgrave all the way through. I could have done that easily. In fact, I think I did do it in one of the drafts. But I think Joe thought it was more interesting to do it without a voiceover, and it is. So those were the sorts of debates that went on between us. Shall we do it completely in sequence or shall we mix it up? Shall we have a voiceover, or shall we not? Hundreds of decisions to make like that, and each one is quite important.

Cinematical: How many drafts did you go through?

CH: I'd done three drafts before I met Joe, and then I did at least five or six with him, but it was often a question of 'there's something wrong with these three pages, can we have another look at this particular section?' There was a lot of stuff that was written that was not in the shooting script, and a lot of stuff that was shot that's not in the final film.

Cinematical: Do you put a lot of filmic cues into your script, like for example, the big tracking shot?

CH: No, the big tracking shot was Joe's solution to a financial problem, which was that the budget was very, very tight, and I had written a sort of montage of different events. As they walk towards Dunkirk, they see the horses being shot, they see people destroying their vehicles, they see a chaplin burning papers. These are all images in the book that they see. And Joe said 'I haven't got the dates for this. Let's do it all in one shot. In that way, limitations are often quite productive of creative energy.

Cinematical: Right, like the shark in Jaws.

CH: Yes, exactly.

Cinematical: Did anything leap out at you in the finished film? A performance or a shot you hadn't anticipated?

CH: Well, I thought the acting was all remarkably good, and given that most of the actors are so young ... I think Keira and James McAvoy and Saoirse Ronan were all remarkable. They don't seem to put a foot wrong, there's not a false note. I think a movie is often really defined by the actors, which is an obvious thing to say, but the performances in something like this, a psychological drama, are so important.

Cinematical: When you were writing, were you always conscious of the fact that you were writing for this triangle of people who are all very, very young?

CH: Yes, I was, and for that reason I had no idea who was going to be cast in it. Sometimes you have an idea and you think 'This is sort of an Anthony Hopkins sort of part,' you know what I mean, and that gives you a context to write. Here, you're dealing with very, very young people and their problems and their rawness. I think it's captured very well in the film.

Cinematical: What do you think the finale is meant to convey to the reader, or viewer?

CH: In the book, I think it's a tribute to the power of fiction. In the film, I think it's a tribute to the power of storytelling. Vanessa suggests so many things. She suggests a life of austere dedication. She suggests that she's deprived herself of all the things that they never had, as an atonement. But at the end of her life, she sort of says 'well, it isn't an atonement, really, but it's the best I can do.' And it's something.

Cinematical: What are you working on next?

CH: I'm working at the moment on a film called Embers. I adapted it for the theater last year -- it's a Hungarian novel, written in the 40s. It's an enigmatic romance. I'm working with Jan Sverak, the young Czeck director who was here with a film yesterday called Empties. And it's set in Hungary, and we'll probably shoot it there.

Cinematical: When's it gonna go?

CH: Next year sometime. We're still finalizing the script, but it's going out to actors any minute. And then I'm hoping to do a film with David Cronenberg based on a play I wrote called The Talking Cure, about Jung.