Iain Softley Interview, InkHeart

Posted by: Sheila Roberts

Director/ Producer Iain Softley has earned praise for his work on a wide range of feature films. In 1994, he gained widespread acclaim for his feature film directorial debut, "Backbeat," which he also wrote. The film told the story of The Beatles' founding band member Stu Sutcliffe and his intense and often stormy relationships with John Lennon and photographer Astrid Kirchherr, before Sutcliffe's tragic and untimely death. The film received a BAFTA Award nomination for Best British Film, and brought Softley a London Film Critics Circle Award for Best British Newcomer.

The following year, he helmed the visually arresting and culturally prescient thriller "Hackers," starring Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie in her feature film debut. Softley followed with "The Wings of the Dove," the 1997 film adaptation of Henry James' novel, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Linus Roache. The film earned a number of awards and award nominations, including four Oscar nominations and multiple acting honors for Bonham Carter.

Softley's next film was the 2001 sci-fi drama "K-PAX," starring Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges. He more recently directed and produced the 2005 supernatural thriller "The Skeleton Key," starring Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, Peter Sarsgaard and John Hurt.

MoviesOnline recently sat down with Iain Softley to talk about his new film, “Inkheart,” a fantasy adventure based on the best-selling book by Cornelia Funke that sends a father and daughter on a quest through worlds both real and imagined. Mortimer "Mo" Folchart (Brendan Fraser) and his 12-year-old daughter, Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett), share a passion for books. What they also share is an extraordinary gift for bringing characters from books to life when they read aloud. But there is a danger: when a character is brought to life from a book, a real person disappears into its pages. The film also stars Paul Bettany, Helen Mirren, Jim Broadbent, Andy Serkis and Rafi Gavron.

Iain Softey is an amazing director and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his new movie, “Inkheart”:

MoviesOnline: Would you call this a departure for you in terms of your work?

IAIN SOFTLEY: Arrival, more of an arrival, arrival in Inkworld, hopefully to be continued. I would say it's more of a development than a departure. I mean, it felt like it was in a way a development of some of the processes that I used on The Skeleton Key in terms of trying to do as much of the work in real locations as possible -- a combination of really creating an atmosphere by being in a real place and the benefit that an actor gets from doing things in a real environment. There were a little bit of special effects, visual effects in The Skeleton Key. I was just doing a little bit more, but there was quite a lot of on set action in The Skeleton Key.

MoviesOnline: Yes, Gena Rowlands will never forget it.

IAIN SOFTLEY: Yes, I know. Dear Gena. I wanted to make as much real stuff as possible in this movie. For example, the hurricane was mostly done with real on-set effects, massive wind machines, stunt guys strapped up, and walls being exploded and falling down around the actors.

MoviesOnline: That was all real then?

IAIN SOFTLEY: Oh yeah, medics standing by with lots of eye ointment for all the bits of grit that ended up in people’s eyes. When we were on the bridge at the big gorge, we were all wired up – the caribinos (?) and bungees and stuff – a hundred foot drop without any safety rails and all the running over the roofs in the town. We had structural engineers reinforcing that stuff. One of the things I did is I wanted to find out what it was and where it was that inspired the book so I went down there and I thought “This is great. We’ve got a film here.”

MoviesOnline: So what about the casting of Brendan? We’ve been hearing stories from Eliza, a little bit from Brendan, and now from Cornelia, what’s your version of it?

IAIN SOFTLEY: What did they say? (laughs) I was told that Brendan inspired the character of Mo. I thought that was a great idea for the role. Brendan graciously flew himself over to London when he found out that I was the director and said, “I want you to cast me as Mo in Inkheart. You’re the director. I don’t want to be in the movie if you don’t want me to be Mo.” I thought he was [perfect]. There was nobody else I could think of who could do it better. It was such a no brainer really if you’ve got the guy that inspired the role. I was delighted that he wanted to do it.

MoviesOnline: He’s a very American actor. I would almost say he’s very much like the actors from the 30s and 40s, like Gary Cooper and that type of actor. He’s like the new version of that.

IAIN SOFTLEY: I would say those are like the most Anglo of the American actors if you like. I mean, a lot of those actors actually were English.

MoviesOnline: What was it about the world of this story that appealed to you and made you want to bring it to the screen?

IAIN SOFTLEY: I just think the idea of this magical environment that existed in the present day. The idea that you can go to these places and you can imagine that there are these sort of medieval brigands in the hills. I think that’s what’s fun about going to those places and that’s what’s fun in the movies when you go somewhere – whether it’s somewhere in the middle of nowhere where there’s a little shack in the bayou where sort of a Voodoo woman lives. It’s the whole idea of the witch living in the wood. I think that’s kind of exciting for us – the idea that there are these fantastical, mythological characters that maybe are existing under the radar around us.

MoviesOnline: Is there a message to the story?

IAIN SOFTLEY: I think there are a couple of messages. One of the messages is that if people from different backgrounds can find a common goal and pool their resources, they are going to achieve more together than they will individually. There’s also the idea that the world of literature and storytelling is a world that you can kind of go into and experience it as an equally real but different parallel reality from our own.

MoviesOnline: The movie makes specific references to certain works and literary properties. Were you trying to create a tapestry where there were things in the movie that people might pick up that were references to books without directly mentioning The Wizard of Oz or the Hansel and Gretel house and things like that?

IAIN SOFTLEY: In the scene where Eliza does her trial reading in front of Capricorn, there’s Rapunzel, the Alligator (from Captain Hook), Toto, and there’s Ebenezer Scrooge, Cinderella, Huckleberry Finn, and the Mad Woman of Chaillot.

MoviesOnline: That was funny.

IAIN SOFTLEY: Yeah. That was a nice moment to do. I remember I told John Thomson, “Just look at the book.” The Shadow actually was a painting reference. I was gathering together references for the visual effects guys as to what I wanted as a sort of jumping off point for The Shadow. I collected together pictures of gargoyles and demons by William Blake and a number of paintings by the Spanish painter, Goya, particularly the massive Colossi, the giants that loomed over the battlefields. I thought that would be amazing. The landscape was rather like our landscape in northern Italy. It’d be fantastic if he just appeared over the mountain. So, that was really the inspiration and then I wanted him to kind of scale down. Originally, in the book, well, in the script actually, the finale takes place in an enclosed church and I wanted it to be in the open air so that we could have this massive scale and then he could kind of scale down.

MoviesOnline: What I really love most about the movie is that you took the time to go to these places, the effects are real, it’s not all CGI, and visually, it’s stunning. Is it cheaper to do it the way you did it? Or is it cheaper to do it with CGI?

IAIN SOFTLEY: I think it kind of changes all the time. I mean, there are certainly certain things that are much cheaper to do if you don’t use CGI. I mean, training Toto and Gwen, the weasel, there were no visual effects enhancement whatsoever.

MoviesOnline: The weasel played by 12 ferrets?

IAIN SOFTLEY: There you go! I think we just used 3. They prepared 12, but we actually used 3. That is definitely cheaper than doing this whole animated animal. There are certain things like set extensions that I suspect might be cheaper but very restricting in terms of how you shoot them. To actually be in an environment where you can spin the camera 360 degrees, it just means that there’s this arena that the actor can play in.

MoviesOnline: Well it brings it to life and you feel more a part of the film because you know it’s not an imaginary thing. I couldn’t help but think of sort of a Gothic Nazi rally at the end when Meggie arrives in her big white dress with the long train. Was it your intention to evoke Fascist Italy?

IAIN SOFTLEY: Yeah. Those references are in the book as well. And that’s also an area of Italy that was the stronghold of the partisans who were fighting the Nazis because it was in the mountains. Cornelia told me that being a German living in Liguria, even recently, there were a lot of anti-Nazi feelings still. I think that’s why it’s by the book and it’s part of the place, that there is conflict in parts of the world that is within living memory for a lot of people and maybe we should be vigilant about it. And, there are a number of references to not just Italian fascism but there’s a kind of sense of the French resistance versus the Nazi occupation. I was thinking that some of the look of that town has 40s, 50s, 60s kind of catch-all references from those periods of conflict in the late 20th century.

MoviesOnline: You did this movie here in the United States with New Line. They were the ones that made it originally and then Warner Bros. took it over and held it up for a year?

IAIN SOFTLEY: They didn’t. They held it up for 9 months.

MoviesOnline: I saw it last December at a screening in New York and I thought then it was supposed to come out in January.

IAIN SOFTLEY: It was never going to come out [in January]. The earliest it was going to come out was March. We finished the filmâ€¦the film was actually finished in the beginning of February, it was locked in October, so there was a locked version of the film in October, and not a frame has changed since October 2007. We had a preview that was very successful here in October. We came out and there was smoke in the sky in Santa Monica and we were wondering whether it was The Shadow coming out, but it was actually the fires in Santa Monica around 14-15 months ago. Obviously, what happens after you lock the movie is then you have a 3-month period of finishing all the visual effects. You’ve got to write the music to the cut film, do all the sound. We went to Abbey Road, we did the score, we did Eliza’s end song, and I delivered the movie.

MoviesOnline: Eliza sings at the end of the movie? That’s her?

IAIN SOFTLEY: Yeah. That’s Eliza and you can see the music video on YouTube and on the website.

MoviesOnline: How talented is that girl!?

IAIN SOFTLEY: Unbelievable.

MoviesOnline: Has your career gone the way you envisioned it since you did Backbeat? You’ve made some great movies since then. Have you been satisfied with the things you’ve done? Have you wanted to make more movies or less?

IAIN SOFTLEY: Yeah, I haven’t wanted to make less movies. I think I would have liked to have maybe made a couple more movies. Talking about the delay to this movie, when we were making it, we were told it was going to be the summer 2008, and then they moved it forward after that successful preview to March. There was a problem with March because Easter in the U.K. was split. The government had this thing where they didn’t have one Easter holiday, so then they were thinking actually March isn’t such a good time.

MoviesOnline: Wasn’t New Line then absorbed by Warner Bros.?

IAIN SOFTLEY: Yes. Warner Bros. So that was the reason for the delay, specifically that, and poor Warners got all these movies and said, “Well we don’t’ know what to do with them.”

MoviesOnline: So they gave Slumdog Millionaire to Fox Searchlight.

IAIN SOFTLEY: So all of them were moved to 2009 pretty much other than the ones that already had the campaign starting pistol. And, at one point, they were going to move ours back to September last year, but at that stage they hadn’t done the pipework in terms of the trailer. So then they looked for the time. They said they knew the U.K. generally wanted to go at Christmas and so it’s come out now. But that has been a case in point. That’s 6 months thatâ€¦

MoviesOnline: â€¦you could’ve been working on something else.

IAIN SOFTLEY: But actually at the time, I was adapting a French book that will be my next movie.

MoviesOnline: What’s that?

IAIN SOFTLEY: Trap for Cinderella. It was written by Sebastian Japrisot who did A Very Long Engagement. I was able to write during the time that I was checking prints, checking whatever. There’s other stuff. I think the bigger the movies you do, the more the supertanker takes to negotiate into port. There’s more people that have got to approve stuff. You know I did The Skeleton Key and K-PAX at Universal and there’s a bigger preview process than there is on a smaller movie. That all takes time. I’d love to make a movie every 18 months but other stuff happened in the meantime. I had another kidâ€¦

MoviesOnline: Congratulations.

IAIN SOFTLEY: â€¦with the same woman, I have to say, as the other two kids. She’s also a producer so we had to coordinate our work a little bit.

MoviesOnline: Did you know that Angelina Jolie would be as big a star as she is when you directed Hackers?

IAIN SOFTLEY: We always talked about it. I mean, that’s how I sold it to John Calley. I said “These guys are going to be movie stars.” And it’s not just Angelina.

MoviesOnline: No. Jonny Lee Miller.

IAIN SOFTLEY: Jonny Lee, Jesse Bradford, Matthew Lillard, and Marc Anthony, Mr. Jennifer Lopez, who was in the movie too.

MoviesOnline: How difficult was it to construct the meta-universe of this movie? Obviously you want to create a palpable reality where this reader exists, but at the same time you have these characters from books that are brought into that reality who are aware that they’re there, and then you have this additional level where you have a writer who is now aware that his characters have been brought to life. You did it very successfully. How difficult was it to juggle that without running the risk of overplaying it?

IAIN SOFTLEY: I think that it was things like we talked about [such as] what kind of effects would occur when the characters come out of the book, and I just had the idea early on that it’s like something out of the corner. Did I miss that person arrive or have they been there all along? I just thought that sort of thing had some connection with the way that people might experience everyday life so that it wasn’t a totally fantastical environment with stars appearing and puffs of smoke.

MoviesOnline: How did you get Helen Mirren to do this?

IAIN SOFTLEY: I was on the phone to her quite a lot when she was just beginning to enjoy the opening success of The Queen and I can remember one conversation I think that maybe sealed it for me. I was talking through the way that we could make the character here in the book [that] is written as a very angry, matronly figure into somebody that Helen wanted to be, and had to be, more intellectual and have this sort of fantasy life, and we were discussing this as I was in the car winding up the little hairpin bends on the way to scout one of these hilltop towns. There was this crazy guy on an old 1960s Moto Guzzi motorcycle following us. I said, “Helen, can I interrupt you. I’ve got this idea. You know that Eleanor hires a car and makes her way up to Capricorn’s villa. I think we should stick you on a motorbike.” There’s this guy right behind me, right? So she laughed at the other end of the phone and I think that was the moment that she kind of thought that this could be a lot of fun.

MoviesOnline: How has this film done in Germany and the U.K.?

IAIN SOFTLEY: It’s done very, very well in Germany which is understandable because this is sort of a German product, and it’s done very respectably in the U.K. and it’s still playing in the U.K. It’s still playing in Germany and it’s continuing. It was a very, very competitive Christmas. You know, Madagascar, Twilight, Bedtime Stories, Four Christmases, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and at the moment it’s actually outperforming those movies. But I think it was trying to nudge its head above them.

[Paul Bettany quietly enters the room behind Iain Softley and sits down unnoticed by the director.]

MoviesOnline: How was Paul Bettany to work with?

IAIN SOFTLEY: He was terrific to work with.

MoviesOnline: No, you can tell us the truth. We’ve heard stories about him.

IAIN SOFTLEY: (laughs) He was an absolute pain in the rear end. [Bettany suddenly stands up and surprises him] You should have told me he was there!

MoviesOnline: (to Bettany) Geez, that Number 1 haircut! I didn’t recognize you!

PAUL BETTANY: This isn’t a haircut. This is my hair growing back.

MoviesOnline: From what?

PAUL BETTANY: I was bald.

MoviesOnline: For Angels and Demons?

PAUL BETTANY: Angels and Demons? [starts crying] I’ll never be in that movie.

[Laughter]