Mike, the heartthrob
(Desmond Harrington)
is just as much at risk
|
One of the reasons it took Hamm so long to bring Burt’s novel to the screen was that no one seemed to be able to crack the adaptation. It was a good read, but making it into a good film was something else entirely. Finally, Hamm showed the novel to Lisa Bryer of Cowboy Films, for whom he had started making commercials. Bryer passed it to her head of development, Suzanne Warren. She, in turn, sent it to Ben Court and Caroline Ip, who had just graduated from the British National Film and Television School. And it was they who came up with the idea of two versions of the story: what Liz says happened, and what actually happened.
“All we took from the original book was the premise that a group of teenagers get locked in a bunker and there’s only one survivor,” says Ip. “What happens in the hole, the characters, their motivations, are all our own invention.”
Mike with good-natured jock Geoff (Laurence Fox, latest of the Fox acting dynasty)
|
“What was so clever about Caroline and Ben’s approach,” points out Hamm, “was that they focused on Liz. When she emerges, she is so traumatised by the experience that she’s in denial: she can’t face up to the terrible things that happened in the hole. So she becomes an unreliable witness: she begins to tell the story, but we realise half-way through that she’s blocked out the truth. She can’t deal with it. When the real story emerges, it’s all the more terrifying.”
The change was also part of what convinced Thora Birch - who had been inundated with offers after the Oscar-winning American Beauty and recently completed director Terry Zwigoff’s movie version of the cult comic, Ghost World - to take the role. The film is very much set in England, but any hesitation Hamm may have had about casting Birch disappeared when he met her. “She’s incredible,” he says without hesitation. “She can tell the truth and the lie in the same moment. There’s a duality to her, and there are always two ways of reading what she does.”
As for Birch herself, it was precisely the multiple personalities in Liz that made her go for the role. “Liz is several different people at the same time,” says the actress. “The first Liz we meet is the traumatised one who’s just survived a terrible incident and is almost comatose. Then we’re introduced to the Liz of the flashback: innocent, goody-goody, introverted, mousy, sensibly dressed - quite a baby.
|
“The fantasy version is Enid Blyton, about cooking bangers on the fire and telling ghost stories. The real version is more Marilyn Manson”
|
“At the same time, we see Liz as she behaves with Philippa, and again there’s something not quite right there. After that, Liz goes home and there are hints of another, more disturbed girl coming through. Those bits were the toughest to play, because I had to be very vigilant about how much to reveal. And then there’s the real Liz…
“It was a challenge every day: how much do we tell the audience? How far do we go? Those were the questions Nick and I would toss back and forth. The whole shoot was a continuous dialogue, and that was very exciting. It was a real stretch, because the character was constantly changing. In the end, I think Liz is as confused about herself as we are.”
|
