MCN Columnists

By Andrea Gronvall andreagronvall@aol.com

The Gronvall Report: Kevin Macdonald Gets to the Heart of How I Live Now

No doubt about it: young adult novels are proving fertile hunting ground for movie adaptations. Most studios would kill for the grosses from Summit Entertainment’s blockbuster franchises built on Stephanie Meyer’s “The Twilight Saga” and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy. But even when a big-budget adaptation like Ender’s Game has a softer-than-expected opening, judge the film on its own merits (and whatever you feel personally about novelist Orson Scott Card, just think back to the 2007 movie made from Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass and you might agree that Ender’s Game is a far more successful adaptation).

Kevin McDonald

Kevin McDonald.

So it was with a sense of anticipation last month that I attended the Chicago International Film Festival’s special presentation of How I Live Now, based on Meg Rosoff’s award-winning YA novel, and directed by Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland, State of Play, Marley). A speculative fiction set in England during an unspecified time—it could be the future, or it could be any day now—the Magnolia Pictures release is intimate, hypnotic, and chilling, a coming-of-age tale combined with a romance and a war adventure.

Saoirse Ronan (Atonement, Hanna, and Wes Anderson’s upcoming The Grand Budapest Hotel) stars as Daisy, a troubled, surly American teen sent by her father to spend the summer with cousins in the English country home where her late mother used to stay. At first indifferent to the charms of rural life, Daisy holds herself apart, but as World War III nears, she bonds with her younger cousins Isaac (Tom Holland) and Piper (Harley Bird), and even more closely with the eldest, Eddie (George MacKay), with whom she falls in love. When war breaks out, at first they’re all fine–the front seems so far away. But eventually the conflict spreads to their region, and Daisy finds herself fighting not just for her life and Piper’s, but also for the boys, who’ve been lost amid the chaos.

 The first act of the film is idyllic; the second, dystopian. And yet, the film has an evocative poetry even in its toughest scenes, thanks in no small part to the cinematography of Wim Wenders’ collaborator Franz Lustig (who also made the fascinating documentary 2, or 3, Things I Know about Him, about the adult children of a former Nazi). How I Live Now is a movie whose appeal will not be limited to younger viewers, and I was delighted to get the opportunity to talk to Macdonald about his vision.

 Andrea Gronvall:  I usually shy away from personal questions, but I have to ask you:  do you have children of your own? Because your movie really gets what kids are like–fragile and tough at the same time.

Kevin Macdonald:  Yes, I have three kids, aged 6, 9, and 11—so two of them are roughly the age of Harley Bird when she made the film. I suppose the central thing for me is that the world we live in now is a world full of anxiety. We don’t know who we can trust, or where the next attack is coming from. What we lose sight of is how anxious this makes our kids. I grew up during the Cold War, when the Soviets were identifiably the enemy. Today violence can come from anywhere, and we’re often helpless to stop it.

AG:  Much of the film’s power derives from the fact that most of the evil occurs offscreen.

KM:  The idea of the apocalypse has been debased because we’ve seen it so many times before in movies, often involving huge explosions. I wanted instead to focus on the relationship between Daisy and Eddie. I’m surprised how many people have found the film disturbing; their imaginations are engaged and working them up.

AG:  The screenplay is by three writers, Tony Grisoni (In This World, Red Riding Trilogy), Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland, Brideshead Revisited), and emerging playwright Penelope Skinner. One of the movie’s most affecting sequences—the children’s experience of widespread fallout after an atomic bomb devastates London—is a perfect example of how less can be more. Was it always scripted that way?

KM:  Yes, it was. The idea was to show how their pastoral, wonderful idyll is suddenly so rudely interrupted, but they don’t really know what’s going on; at first they think the ash is snow. It shows how the world appears to children. They’re not following the news; they don’t necessarily know or understand the scale of the tragedy, but they come to an acceptance of it. That sequence is also the big turning point in the movie, where you may have thought the story was going in one direction, but now, maybe not quite halfway through, it’s headed in another.

HOW I LIVE NOWAG:  As original as the film is, it’s also within an established tradition of British cinema, those wartime dramas about ordinary women who join the labor force or work farms, or about London children who are sent to the countryside for safety. I’ve always admired that about the British, how they retain their humanity and carry on in the face of disaster.

KM:  The power of love helps you survive. Daisy at the beginning can’t feel love, but when she comes to love this family, she finds enormous strength. [As for British war movies,] John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987) is a lovely film based on his memories of growing up in London during World War II. For the child at the center of the movie, the Blitz is a wonderful time, a magical time. When a bomb drops on his school, he doesn’t see it as a disaster; he’s thrilled that he doesn’t have to go to school! It shows how differently a child can perceive the world than the adults around him.

AGHow I Live Now was your first experience working in digital, yes? How would you categorize it?

KM:  It was a pleasant one. Before production, I did go back and forth trying to decide whether to go with film or digital. Really, it was mostly for financial considerations that I chose digital, but it gave me a lot of freedom. We used the ALEXA M and the ALEXA Plus, as well as the Canon EOS C300. The flexibility that comes with being able to shoot 40 minutes without changing the magazine was especially useful in working with child actors. And the little handheld Canon allowed us tremendous freedoms in shooting; a lot of the first part of the movie was shot with it.

AG:  The color is so dreamy; these cameras are very good in low light levels, especially when the weather proves uncooperative. But I just want to get in one last comment, about the original score by Jon Hopkins, which is as lyrical as many of the visuals. Thank you for your time, and I wish you well; you and your team have made an extraordinary movie.

KM:  Thank you.

How I Live Now is in theaters, on demand and on iTunes.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon