“People are calling me a veteran now,” Joe Wright laughs. “Which is just weird. That’s something you say about directors in their 60s.”
Fair point. Joe Wright is still only 42. This counts as old for a professional basketball player, but, at that age, many great directors were only getting into their strides. An intense man with the traditional good looks that once helped sell shaving cream, Wright has, however, already fought his way through a daunting sequence of troughs and peaks.
The last time we met, in 2007, his adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement was emerging to acclaim. Since then, he's received brickbats for The Soloist (a misguided Robert Downey Jr vehicle) and hurrahs for Hanna (an action thriller with Saoirse Ronan) and Anna Karenina (featuring old pal Keira Knightley). Now, he lunges for the family market with a sideways take on J M Barrie's Peter Pan. In the interim, he got married to sitar impresario Anoushka Shankar – daughter of Ravi – and had two sons.
How’s it been?
"It's been an amazing and beautiful experience," he says. "It's all been interesting. The Soloist coming after Atonement was a bruising experience. And then your very own Saoirse Ronan saved me by giving me the script for Hanna. That re-invigorated me. I got married. I had kids and those kids inspired me to make this film."
I guessed as much. The economically titled Pan looks like the sort of film directors make when they have children about the place. Bearing an uncertain relationship to the source material – Garrett Hedlund's Hook remains a benign figure throughout – the picture begins with Peter as an abandoned child in the London of the Blitz.
“It was very much inspired by my son,” he says. “I saw myself in the character and saw my son super-imposed onto that. He’s a young guy in search of his mother. That felt like a personal story.”
Childhood
Ah, the Wright childhood. All profiles of Joe Wright spend time pondering the delicious intelligence that his parents ran a puppet theatre in Islington. You could hardly imagine a more promising environment in which to ferment film-making skills.
“Well, it felt very normal for me at the time,” he says. “But I think that’s probably right. The puppet theatre dealt with archetypes and I often deal with archetypes in my work. I do have a love of beauty and poetry and that probably comes from the puppet theatre too.”
He pauses to politely exchange a latte for an iced coffee. Then the flow recommences.
“But what’s also important is how that magical mystical world came in contact with 1970s London. The reality of the city was far from romantic or mystical. It was quite a harsh place. Two influences were coming together. It was Powell and Pressburger coming together with Alan Clarke and finding some sort of peace. Ha ha!”
That makes a sort of sense. Joe Wright's feature debut, a hugely popular version of Pride and Prejudice featuring the rising Knightley, may have been a period piece, but it had an unexpected grit that did gesture towards dirty realists such as Alan Clark.
So how did a bloke who left school without any GCSEs end up directing a high-profile Jane Austen adaptation at just 32 years old? He eventually ended up in Saint Martins College of Art and then shimmied towards directing work at the BBC. But it sounds as if there were a few lost years.
Bumming around
“There was a period of bumming around,” he laughs. “I was at the Anna Scher school for a while. That’s where I met Kathy Burke and others.”
Ah, the alma mater of so many EastEnders actors? "Yeah, if I'd got into Grange Hill I might have been on EastEnders by now. Ha ha! That was after normal school. I left without any qualifications because I was dyslexic. I bummed off school. I did bits of acting. I smoked some pot. I watched a lot of movies. Then my father was hit by a stroke and that gave me at jolt at 18. It was a wake-up call. I felt I had to pull myself together and I realised you didn't need any formal qualifications for art school."
Wright has a daunting confidence that fairly fills up the room. It is not altogether surprising that he managed to convince the BBC to put him behind a camera so quickly. In 2003, his work on Charles II: The Power and The Passion helped that series to a Bafta win. Impressive stuff. But what finally convinced Working Title Films that he could handle Pride and Prejudice?
“I have no idea,” he laughs. “But I had one really good idea, which I pitched to them. I said Elizabeth Bennett should be played by an 18 year-old. This is about young kids falling in love. It needed youthful exuberance. In the past it had always been 30 year-olds pretending to be virgins falling in love for the first time.”
The partnership with Knightley was fruitful for both actor and director. She held Atonement together and was an impressive Anna in Wright's endlessly interesting Anna Karenina. "We're both dyslexic. So our brains work in a similar way and I just deeply love her. She's like sister to me," he says.
Traumatic
Neither Keira nor his other great mate Saoirse were on hand to offer any assistance during the making of The Soloist. I was interested to hear him willingly admit that the experience was traumatic. Starring Downey Jr as a homeless violinist, the film – loaded with expectations following Atonement's seven Oscar nominations – ended up being kicked around the release schedule before receiving mixed (though not terrible) reviews. We hear that, in Hollywood, you're only as big as your last film. His comments seem to confirm that.
“Yes, it was difficult,” he says. “There was this horrible accusation that it was Oscar bait. I was actually trying to make an Alan Clark film in Hollywood. We employed 500 members of the homeless community to make a social-realist movie and people didn’t really want that from me.”
So how did the loss of confidence manifest itself?
"We'd had amazing success with Pride and Atonement. I'd go into a party in Hollywood and people would be all very nice and then you have a film that doesn't do well and people literally turn their backs on you. But that doesn't matter. What matters are your pals in the pub back home."
With Pan polished off, Wright is confronted with a period of working from home and taking care of his two young sons. He also tells me that he will be producing his wife's next LP. Does he know how to do that?
“No. But you try and approach everything as if you don’t know how to do it and you discover how to do it along the path.”
Wise advice.
Pan opens next week
