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THE SKY’S
THE SKY’S
THE LIMIT
THE LIMIT
From Notting Hill
to a Chilterns’ tragedy.
Director Roger Michell
on filming Ian McEwan’s best-selling novel Enduring Love
The last thing director Roger Michell and produc- er Kevin Loader really want to hear is how memo- rable you – and probably almost everyone else who’s read the novel – think that opening chapter is.
So, to the latest excited query, Loader groans (again): “Everybody says, ‘Oh God, that’s the book with the best first 30 pages or so of any book I’ve ever read.’ You then immediately think, ‘Oh God, we’ve got to live up to that...’
Michell retorts, with a predictable though polite weariness, “The worst thing is when everyone comes up and says, ‘Oh, I love the opening of that book...’ or, ‘it’s my favourite ever’.
One’s reaction is: here’s someone else who’s going to hate the film because we’ll never be able to live up to the movie they were running in their head when they read the book.”
For those who haven’t read Ian McEwan’s seventh novel, Enduring Love, which was first published in 1997, the fuss is all about the graphic and chilling description of a tragic bal- looning accident that takes place on an otherwise idyllic summer day in a beautiful tuck of the Chilterns.
The scene is being recreated with uncanny accuracy under almost cloud- less blue skies on a slighting sloping field with a breath-taking north-west vista on the late John Paul Getty’s Oxfordshire estate.
The first fortnight of a nine week autumn schedule has been allocated to this epic mood/plot establishing sequence of Enduring Love, the latest collaboration between Michell and Loader whose joint credits include The Buddha Of Suburbia, My Night With Reg and, most recently, The Mother.
Adapted from McEwan’s novel by Joe Penhall, the film stars Daniel Craig and Samantha Morton as a couple whose lives are dramatically and dras- tically affected not just by the accident but also the unwelcome intrusion of an obsessive young man (Rhys Ifans), who also witnessed the balloon incident.
Loader, who like his director is kit- ted out in shorts on another balmy day during the back end of a long hot
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