Given
the recent explosion of acclaim for Sam
Mendes, fresh from his successes at London's
Donmar Warehouse, Royal Court Theatre director
Stephen Daldry has the unenviable task of
making a similar move to the big screen.
Daldry, however, hasn't gone the Spielberg
route, eschewing DreamWorks' big bucks for
the less pressurised patronage of Working
Title offshoot WT2 and a much more familiar
location.
Set in the north east of England, it stars
13-year-old newcomer Jamie Bell as Billy,
a young miner's son growing up in a working-class
area during the gruelling hardships of the
1984 strike. Peer pressure sends him to
a boxing club, but at the village hall he
stumbles on a local ballet class and becomes
fascinated
by the dancers. Afraid to tell his father,
or his picket brother Tony, Billy stops
boxing and enrols in the lessons, but secrets
prove hard to keep in such a small town.
It's a slight story, and Daldry makes no
bones about his reasons for making it. "I
knew immediately that I wanted to direct
this film by the simple fact that the script
moved me," he says. "It made me want to
read it again." To cast the part of Billy,
Daldry saw over 2,000 boys, and at one point
even began to think they'd have to abandon
the project. "It was a tall order to find
a child that could
dance as well as act who came from the north
east and had the right accent, and was also
the right age," says Daldry. "But eventually
we found Jamie, who completely understood
all the elements of the story... We found
our needle in the haystack."
With solid support from Julie Walters as
dance teacher Mrs Wilkinson and Gary Lewis
(My Name Is Joe), Daldry certainly
has the acting talent to make his transfer
to the screen. He's fully aware, however,
that the process isn't as simple as that.
"Filmmaking is a matter of trying to find
performances that you believe in and creating
images that
have emotional potency," he says.
"Unlike most theatre, which is rooted
in the recreation of authentic experience,
a lot of great movies are not about authentic
experience at all, but rather they operate
on a subconscious level the language
of dreams. That's the vernacular of films
you have to have a completely different
head on."
Damon
Wise
