Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig enjoyed her international breakthrough in 2000 with Italian for Beginners, a Dogme 95 film that was both a critical and box office success. Her first English-language film, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (2002), was a quirky meditation on life, love, illness, and death, set in Edinburgh; audiences who were able to appreciate its nuance were rewarded by the director’s next film set in the U.K., An Education (2009), which garnered three Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress for leading lady Carey Mulligan, and Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay for novelist Nick Hornby. For her latest movie, One Day, she has teamed with another British novelist and screenwriter, David Nicholls, who had adapted his bestselling novel about two university graduates, the well-to-do but aimless Dexter (Jim Sturgess), and the poor but driven Emma (Anne Hathaway), whose long relationship unfolds in vignettes that begin on July 15th of each year. It’s a funny-sad romance, and the kind of intricate work we expect from Scherfig, but it’s also her most mainstream movie to date. I caught up with the director recently when she was in town to talk about this Focus Features release.
Andrea Gronvall: The narratives of your films vary quite a bit, but the amount of attention you pay to tone in each movie sets you apart from a lot of other directors. Although well plotted, your movies are about a lot more than the mechanics of getting from A to B. The sensibility is a little melancholy, but with rich comic veins, which can also be dark. Are you consciously attracted to material with these facets?
Lone Scherfig: Yes. When it’s not in the material, I can sometimes add this sort of bittersweet-ness. I’ve done a lot of craft-oriented work—for instance, directing TV series, where you don’t have very much influence on the script, or the cast. Affection for the characters makes me sometimes move things in a slightly different direction than [what’s] written. I think it’s about how you view other people, and what it is that you like about other people, and what fascinates you, that gives you your voice as a director, maybe. But I keep saying that I want to do something that’s much more genre-oriented and stylized, and eventually I think I will.
AG: Well, you certainly already understand genre. An Education is a coming-of-age film, part of a distinct genre. One Day is a love story, although Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself is a little harder to categorize.
LS: [Laughing] Yes!
AG: What you would call Italian for Beginners?
LS: That’s a Dogme film. Dogme became a genre in itself. One Day is a love story, and none of the other films have love as a major theme, how love plays out over a long time. Dexter (Jim Sturgess), who is technically the main character, has to learn what love is, and to find it, and to suffer for it. I think because of its structure, it also becomes about time, and how you spend your time, and the unnecessary detours you go through. In terms of directing, it’s the time issue that makes it the most challenging, to make all those time jumps work, and be interesting and pleasurable to watch–yet not overpower the emotion, or make the film monotonous, but add to the flow, and add to, when you get to the last chapter, the feeling of “Oh, wow! All those years passed and I didn’t notice.”
AG: I liked where the story traveled in less than a minute from July 15th in a given year to July 15th in the following, as though you were indicating, “Okay, here’s what happened this year—nothing big. Let’s go on to the next year.” It’s an unexpected shift.
LS: And it makes it still more unpredictable that you don’t know [going in] that the rhythm is syncopated. It’s really important to keep an element of surprise and unpredictability. We tried out different versions, and I still don’t know if we ended up with the best one. I need some time away from the film, then go back and see it, and learn from it.
AG: How does working with David Nicholls, who adapted his own novel, compare to working with Nick Hornby, who was adapting another writer’s work? I don’t know anything first-hand about their personalities, but I imagine they are quite different.
LS: They are. They are sometimes compared, because they both have this combination of something that’s humorous and moving. But they are totally different! David has an acting background and that makes him good at writing dialogue that tastes good for the actors, but Nick is very musical, so he can achieve the same thing in a different way. They both make it easy for the actors to make things ring true, but they just access it from different angles.
AG: Let’s get back to the concept of time in One Day. In An Education, your teenaged heroine had nothing but time ahead of her. But in One Day, when we see Emma (Anne Hathaway) on her bike early in the film, we don’t yet know how this scene is going to connect us to the various stages of her life, and her relationships with Dexter, and others. And the coda at the end throws new light on their first night out together as university graduates.
LS: Because David has decided to go for that one date every year–which turns out to be a much more important date than you realize [initially]–that makes him tell the stories about all the other moments in their lives. He says, I’m not showing the day the child is born, I’m showing the first night of babysitting; because of that, he’s forced to cover the other turning points, because you don’t see the highlights of their lives. It’s more than a gimmick; it’s an opportunity to zoom in on moments that are at first sight unimportant, but then become meaningful in a bigger context–especially since the characters don’t know about this mechanism. It’s not like Same Time, Next Year. It’s not an annual reunion; it is just a construct to select moments of their lives. So, that was almost the best part of directing this film: that I needed to take out the big toolbox in order to make this work. Sometimes it’s the sound, sometimes it’s the tracking, or a dissolve, or music, or whatever makes each little sequence in the film connect the best to the next one, without being too loud.
AG: A word or two about your supporting cast: it’s lovely to see Patricia Clarkson as Dexter’s mom. She’s one of America’s most versatile actresses. And Rafe Spall [son of actor Timothy Spall] is spot-on as Emma’s smitten coworker. Why did you choose him for the role of Ian, the standup comedian?
LS: We saw a lot of people, and I just thought he was the right combination: someone who is not a comedian, so he gets that Ian is layered, and not just gets all the jokes. But there are a lot of good jokes in One Day, and if you read the book, there are more.
