Director Joe Wright on Discovering Saoirse Ronan and Getting Gary Oldman to Become Churchill

British filmmaker Joe Wright’s big debut was 2005’s Pride & Prejudice. The film was a well-reviewed, sumptuous delight that revitalized the iconic Jane Austen novel and earned Keira Knightley her first Oscar nomination. Wright then went on to make three more films centered on women: Atonement,Hanna, and a second Knightley vehicle, Anna Karenina. Along the way, he ignited the careers of a slew of other actresses, many of whom have been in this year’s Oscar season conversations: Lady Bird’s Saoirse Ronan (Atonement); Mudbound’s Carey Mulligan (Pride & Prejudice); and Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps (Hanna).

Wright’s latest Oscar contender is the Winston Churchill film Darkest Hour, for which the director likely will see his current leading man, Gary Oldman, nab a nomination for his portrayal of the British Bulldog. It won’t be the first time the director has shepherded his star to worldwide acclaim; he did it for both Knightley and Ronan. But it will be the first time Wright worked so closely with a male actor for the prize—an action he orchestrated as a personal challenge to himself. “I’ve never got on with men very well,” he admitted in a recent interview with Vanity Fair. Wright’s father was 65 when he was born. He described him as a “wonderful man” but said that he grew up much closer to his mother and sister, and was more able to relate to their “emotional openness” than to his father’s “male guardedness.”

“As I grow in maturity, I’ve tried to develop my relationships with men,” he added. “It was a very specific choice to make a movie that was so male-centric, as part of that process.” Wright broke down his specific connection with actors, how his previous leading ladies have surprised him, and his close collaboration with Oldman.

Vanity Fair: You’ve made seven films in your career, four of which star women. Is there a through-line with these stories that link them in some way?

Joe Wright: They are all generally about someone who doesn't really fit in, someone who is a bit of an outsider . . . and how that person comes to a point of intimacy with other people. Be that Elizabeth [Bennett] and her growing intimacy and understanding of Darcy’s humanity [in Pride & Prejudice]. Be that Briony Tallis [in Atonement] in the way she manipulates others without really seeing them as fully rounded individuals, and how she grows to gain a kind of sense of responsibility for other people. Or Winston Churchill . . . and how he loves the people yet he can’t hear them. Through the course of the movie, he grows to a point of communion with them, where he can meet them and, in the end, become their very voice.

Gary Oldman initially was not interested in playing Churchill. What did you say to him to convince him to take on the role?

I said, “You’re good enough.” It amazes me when you have someone like Gary, who in my opinion is one of the greatest British actors of his generation, it’s amazing to discover that an actor like Gary is just as full of self-doubt and lacking in confidence as anyone else, as any other actor. . . . I thought that the process with Gary would be very much more about creating a space for him to do his thing. What I discovered was possibly the closest creative collaboration I’ve ever had, apart from Saoirse Ronan in Atonement.

You first cast Ronan in Atonement when she was 11. What were your first impressions of her back then?

We met many, many kids for that role. Then we were sent this tape of this little girl speaking in this perfect 1920s English accent. Immediately, she had this kind of intensity, dynamism, and willfulness. . . . When we got her to come over to London to meet and read with us, I was shocked to discover this little Irish kid who spoke with a thick Irish accent. I thought maybe there’d been a mistake. And then I sat down to read with her, and as soon as she started reading, I realized she was an extraordinary talent.

What do you think of her role in Lady Bird?

It’s a wonderful performance. . . . There is no sense of her acting and yet what she’s doing is incredibly skilled and technical, and at the same time accessing great wells of emotional truth. . . . She makes it look completely easy.

What was the casting process like for Carey Mulligan in Pride & Prejudice?

I was trying to create a family of sister . . . and Carey was 18, I think, when we met. She was this funny little thing who was very bright and obviously ambitious, and she was working in a pub at the time, in London. She had a sense of lightness and comedy that I thought would work well for that character.

She’d probably be embarrassed for me to say this, but she had never really been on a film set before. And I remember once she walked onto the set—the ball scene when Elizabeth first sees Darcy—and she burst into tears. It was really beautiful . . . lovely to see the whole process through her eyes and her kind of her naiveté.

When you cast these two women, did you have a sense back then that their careers would turn out as they have?

Saoirse was a foregone conclusion. Carey, you had a sense of it. It was a smart move that she went and did a bunch of theater after Pride. She was in The Seagull at the World Court and she didn’t immediately pursue high-exposure movies. Rather, she had some time to hone her craft. When An Education came along (it earned Mulligan an Oscar nomination), she was ready for it.

You also had a hand in Vicky Krieps’s career, casting her in her first English-language role in Hanna back in 2011. Has she surprised you?

Vicky’s just a lovely surprise. . . . She was playing more of a symbol than a fully three-dimensional character in Hanna. I know she was an extremely talented woman. And she has that kind of beatific quality. But to suddenly see her in a P. T. Anderson movie, that is a complete surprise, and a wonderful one.

I’m also interested in your casting choice of Lily James in Darkest Hour. Did your interest in her stem from a previous film?

I’d been a big fan of Cinderella. I can’t remember why I started watching it, but I was really moved by it. She has the amazing ability to bring the audience in. There is no barrier of character between the audience and her. . . . And that’s what I was looking for in Elizabeth Layton, someone who would bring the audience into this quite rarefied and obscure world of British politics. I needed someone who was going to be able to allow us that relatability to the world. I specifically chose her to be the person who first introduces us to Winston. We meet him with her.

You’ve said before that a lot of directors don’t like actors. Why do you think that’s true and why do you think you’re different?

I think it’s very useful to have done some acting if you’re going to direct actors. You understand how exposing it can feel—the vulnerability of that position. . . . The drama club was my escape [when I was young]. I spoke with this funny, sort of middle-class accent in a very working-class area, so I’d get bullied quite a lot. But in the drama workshops we were all equal, so I gained a kind of social acceptance in those workshops that I didn’t find at school.

People think that acting is a kind of magic alchemy. There is an element of that, but it’s also a craft and I think people don’t understand that. They are frightened by what they see as the unknowability of it. . . . Unfortunately, too many directors are, proportionally, male. I think they are afraid of emotion and, therefore, they don’t like actors because they are too damn emotional, which is ironic because what you’re asking them to do is work with their emotions. . . . I love actors.

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Nicole SperlingNicole Sperling is a Hollywood Correspondent for Vanity Fair.

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