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THEUNLOVED
AS AN ACTRESS SAMANTHA MORTON HAS BECOME USED TO REGULAR CRITICAL BOUQUETS, INCLUDING A PAIR EACH OF BAFTA AND OSCAR NOMINATIONS FOR HER WORK IN FILM AND TELEVISION
Photo main: Molly Windsor as Lucy; above: Director Samantha Morton with Molly Windsor; below right: scenes from The Unloved
ow, at 32, she’s begun to earn a Nwhole lot more for her first venture
behind the camera, as director of Channel 4’s acclaimed film, The Unloved, which is likely to feature
strongly in the TV awards season next year. According to one critic, it’s an
“ethereally beautiful, achingly sad, and painfully honest look at the life of an abused, eleven-year-old girl who has recently been taken in to care [which] would suggest that the actress’s time spent in front of the camera may have been merely an apprenticeship, served in order to bring us this wonderful, sensitive filmmaker with a delicate touch to rival Terence Davies - a masterpiece.”
The Unloved, inspired by Morton’s own painful encounters with the care system as a child was filmed entirely on location in her home town of Nottingham and stars newcomer Molly Windsor as 11-year-old Lucy alongside Robert Carlyle and Susan Lynch.
Although the story was Morton’s, she was clear from the beginning that she didn’t want it to be an autobiography and she didn’t want to write the script.
Instead, she wanted to work with a writer who would be happy to collaborate with her, who would listen to her ideas and formulate them into a script. At the time, producer Kate Ogborn and Channel 4’s Head of Drama Liza Marshall were working with writer Tony Grisoni on Red Riding.
He seemed the natural choice, having collaborated with a number of refugees to tell their story in Michael Win- terbottom’s In This World. Ogborn introduced the pair, and Grisoni was immediately captivated by Morton’s story.
To light the film, she chose Tom Townend whom she’d first met on Morvern Callar, on which he done some operating when she was the star.
Explains Townend, who started on The Unloved just 10 days before it was due to begin filming: “I didn’t really know what to expect working with her as a director but as it turned out, she’s very confident, clearly drawing on her experience of having acted in more than 20 films.”
What, for Morton, were her directorial and cinematic influences when she set out on the project?
“To be honest,” she reveals, “I am so totally immersed in a character when I am acting that I didn’t draw directly on any one director but what influenced me more than anything was what not to do.
“I have worked with directors who were scared of actors and with a film like The Unloved with children it was very im- portant that the young actors had 100% of me and we were very prepared.
“Films like The American Friend or The Man Without A Past inspired me as they had such a sense of space and time and they don’t force the story too hard. I think now we are used to very fast edit-
ing and narrative-packed stories which can be brilliant but in a story about a young girl who is bordering on autistic I felt that I didn’t want it to feel like an adult script or direction had been imposed too forcefully – it needed to be more natural and believable than that.” QUENTIN FALK
The Unloved, which aired on Channel 4 earlier this year, was originated on 35mm Fujicolour ETERNA 400T 8583 and ETERNA 500T 8573
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