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November 2017

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www.postmagazine.com 8 POST NOVEMBER 2017 BITS & PIECES LONDON — Rooney Mara stars in Una, a new film about a young woman's journey to reclaim her past. As a 13-year-old, Una ran away with an older neighbor, Ray (Ben Mendelsohn), who was later arrested and imprisoned for the crime. Fifteen years later, a photo in a magazine inspires her to track Ray down and confront him about their relationship and his intentions. Her surprise visit to his job at a warehouse, where she finds out he's changed his name and moved on with his life, threatens to derail her own stability. Una is based on Blackbird, a play written by David Harrower. More than 10 years ago, Benedict Andrews (pho- to left) directed the play in Germany. Years later, the story stuck with him, and when the opportunity came to direct a feature version, he saw it as the perfect time to take the leap into filmmaking, and his directorial debut. Andrews took time the night of Una's premiere to sit down with Post and talk about his experience on the film, and how both he and Blackbird made the transition to the big screen. You directed this story as a play. How did you get involved in the film version? "Well, I guess I'm quite interested — and I always have been — in the history of cin- ema. The role models for me are great, great directors who walked between and work between both worlds. Ingmar Bergman is a great example of it." Tell us about the play? "I directed Blackbird, the play, on which this is based, in Germany in 2005. So, 10 years before I made the film. And it really stuck with me. The producers had the rights for the play for quite a few years…and I still had a kind of really strong passion for this story, and a curiosity about how it might translate into film." Were you curious as to how a film would break from the limitations of a stage setting? "Yeah. For me, those limitations are good. They're wonderful. They belong to what the theater space is. You know we're all sitting in the same room together. The two char- acters are there. We are all sitting here. The lights go down and the curtains come up. That limitation is very creative for me. I like working with that limitation in the theater and I like creating within that fixed frame of the theater and exploring what that can do." What did you shoot on? "It was shot on the Arri and the DP [was] Thimios Bakatakis. I met with a lot of different DP and had good conversations, and they were all peo- ple whose work I admired and found highly original. As you probably know, he shot, amongst other things, Dogtooth for Yorgos Lanthimos, and he recently shot The Lobster for him, and also The Killing of a Sacred Deer. I also saw this beautiful Norwegian film he'd done called Blind." How long was the shoot? "It was shot in 26 days." How closely were you working with editor Nick Fenton? "Every single day I was with him… because it's my first film…he wanted every frame of the film to pass through me as well. So we looked at pretty much everything we had — every take together. We had an extremely — let's say 'experimen- tal' — approach to it…He said one thing he really appreciated was, most first time directors hold on to the script like a bible or life a raft for a drowning person, and they say, 'This has to happen here because it happened here.' And for him it was very liberating because from the first moment I said, 'Let's see what happens. What if we put this here?' So it was very, very creative." Music plays an interesting role in this film. Talk about working with composer Jed Kurzel and the goal, musically? "The goal in a way, [was] to honor and keep alive the ambiguity of their relationship, so any music that told you what to feel — as good film music often should — that was wrong for this film. It was to keep this ambiguous, emotional feeling, yet pulls the audience through and sort of keep the tension. He and I are very old friends. We were at drama school together, I directed him as an actor in several plays. He just did the score for the last Alien. And he's done the score for quite a few of his brother Justin Krezel's films — Assasin's Creed, Macbeth. In our first meeting he told me he felt it should be 'shimmering' and that it needed to be beautiful. I think he was the only person who said it should be beautiful, not just tense." Being so close to the story and the play, and this being your first time as a filmmaker, did the film ultimately turn out as you had envisioned? "It became that sort of thing that has to be a voyage of discovery. It's the same way I make something in theater — you put down very strong foundations. I put down a very strong aesthetic foundation with a lot of references for my team, both for photographs and showing them films, but you have to discover it at each point. "The one thing that I learned during the whole filmmaking process was, the film tells you what it wants to be. You have to listen to the film... So if it just looks like what you've already thought about when you're sitting at home and drawing funny little squiggles, half a year or a year before you make it, there's no point in making it." — By Marc Loftus UNA DIRECTOR BENEDICT ANDREWS Director Benedict Andrews Una was shot on Arri's Alexa. Post was completed in London. Editor Nick Fenton cut the film.

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