What is it?
They've found her.
You know who I'm talking about, don't you?
We never talked about it in all the years that we've known each other.
And it's tainted everything.
You didn't know her.
No.
I didn't.
45 Years is very much the type of film that I've always been
particularly sensitive to.
It reminded me very much of the film
I did 15 years ago with Francois Ozon
called Under The Sand, which was the same thing, about a haunting.
It's about a very personal journey into your own psyche,
into your own emotional world.
Well, I read it on that.
And like that in an hour
and that was it. Fantastic.
There was nothing going to stop me from wanting to be in it
and having been really very pleased to have been asked.
Before I spoke to Andrew, I immediately then saw Weekend,
and then I knew where his vision lay in how he wants to expose
a story and then talking with him, the whole thing became...
It was such a happy moment.
And there was something incredibly powerful and immediate and evident.
It was just... It was meant to happen.
People would ask me, "Are you going to make a sequel to Weekend?"
I'd be like, "Yeah, I am. It's 45 Years."
And they're like, "Oh, great."
And I'm like, "But it's about a man
"and a woman and they're 70."
But it just made sense to me
to do one film about people in a relationship looking
forward about what this could be
and then someone looking back at their lives and their relationship.
People have this tendency to think that someone who's 70
has this completely different interior life
than someone that's 40 - I'm 42 now -
but, of course, they don't.
I'm pretty probably similar to what I was
when I was 20 and I probably will be when I'm 60
and then later on still and I think, talking to Tom and Charlotte,
they were just pleased to read a script that actually the characters
had an interior life, you know, and I think we kind of forget
that about people who are slightly older sometimes.
MUSIC PLAYS
Hand.
And then over the top.
Da-da, da-da, da-da.
It's like an archaeological excavation almost,
this relationship, because you go into your own experiences
of your own relationships, obviously, throughout your life
cos that's what we bring to characters and I didn't know Tom.
Obviously, I knew him through his work,
but we immediately came together
because that's what we were going to be doing, you know, making
believe that we were this couple so we bring our own experiences in.
I talked to them before we started about, like, this is
how I'm going to shoot it and sometimes it will just be, like,
the scene in the beginning when the letter arrives, it's just one shot.
I told them that we probably wouldn't cover it any other way and
it would all just be one scene and they got used to that very quickly.
I think it's still slightly unusual, maybe for Tom, for example.
You know, you expect, "Now is my close-up,"
but I think, in talking to him,
I think he loved the idea that actually he could play a scene
with Charlotte and they're actually in it together and what
I love about a two-shot is that you just can see the emotion on-screen.
He wasn't one for close-ups and there aren't many actually.
It's mostly two-shots and moving about and, you know, he has a
very good eye and he came up through editing, as David Lean did,
although he's rather different from David Lean.
And Charlotte's very naturalistic, you know.
When she says her lines, it's like you're talking to her, and I like
to be naturalistic even though most of my time, I've been on the boards.
Yeah, naturalism. Like acting you can't see.
Rather than acting you can see.
It's all right for Laurence Olivier because that was his genius
but, generally speaking, I prefer not to see it.
It's not about Tom, it's about Geoff, so Tom is presented to me.
Obviously, I knew him as an actor. Tom is presented to me
and that's the casting and I thought the casting was great
because we sort of, with Andrew, when he asked me
what I thought, and I thought, "This is fantastic".
And then I make him into Geoff.
And it so happens that Tom is a delightful character
so I could really love him.
But that's what we do.
But if he hadn't been a delightful character,
I would still have loved him.
There's something I want to tell you.
I'm sure I've told you before but it was a long time ago
so I could be wrong.
OK, go on.
I was her next of kin.
What do you mean?
Officially, I was her next of kin.
I'm sure I've told you this before.
Well, I think I would've remembered my husband
being another woman's next of kin.
Why?
We had one day together.
We read our scenes, went off and had a drink.
It was so well organised, the set, the cottage we filmed in,
we had a little place next door where we could rest.
We stayed in the same bed-and-breakfast.
We did our shopping in Tesco on the way back home at night.
It was quite clubby.
It really needed to be contained, this film.
I couldn't actually leave even when I went up to London a little bit
but in London, I couldn't really see people.
I couldn't really come out of it.
It needed to hold and we needed to hold on to that vibration somehow.
Other films, you don't feel like that but with this one, we needed...
There was something very fragile in there that needed to be protected.
You put them in a house together that you've decorated in a way
that looks like it's from a couple that have been
together for a long time
and you do all those little things that kind of suddenly make it
believable and I think, in cinema, you do believe what you see
and you know that they're married
and you know they've been together for a long time.
So you just take it and, obviously...
It's like little things.
I suppose we did talk about just little gestures and, you know,
where he sits and where she sits and where they sit around the table
and it's just finding those little, I suppose,
repetitious events that happen in life that you do
when you're with someone for a long time.
It's very like being at home because it's very...
The scene that always makes me laugh is when she says,
"Are you not going to the lunch?" "No."
"Why not?" "I don't want to."
It's just like me and my wife.
"But he's your friend."
"Oh, all right, I'll go."
HE CHUCKLES
Making me do things I don't want to do.
It's a wonderful place, location-wise, for an anniversary.
It's your 40th, isn't it?
That's an unusual one to celebrate.
My husband was ill and our 40th was cancelled so we had to rearrange.
Well, I must try and make this one super-special then, mustn't I?
And this really is a great venue for such an event.
So full of history, you see.
Like a good marriage.
I love to come into someone's life, see a snapshot of that life,
and then leave that life. That's how I like to do it.
Like, Weekend, obviously, is two days,
this is a week and my next film is, like, three months.
I like that kind of structure.
And it just kind of makes sense to me,
like, within the kind of stories that I want to tell, like,
I don't want to tell a whole life story over some fake
three-act structure type thing.
I think a director has a way about him
that makes the type of film that he wants to make possible
and he has a very specific way of getting into human beings, Andrew.
It's almost like he's the benevolent father figure almost,
he's just always happy, always around, always ready to listen
but never too intrusive.
But he's just hovering,
he hovers there and he directs you without directing you and
he allows you to be completely free but he's actually sort of thinking...
But again, you're contained.
So it's...
And as we were, a lot in this house,
it was like he was always sort of there but never really in the way.
For me, it's just like create something that feels pretty safe,
be friendly, talk about the characters,
open up to the actors
and let them open up to you and everybody's nervous.
Nobody really knows if they're doing the right thing and just,
like, muddle your way through it and create an environment that
feels supportive and trust that they can do it and allow them to do it.
I think sometimes people don't allow the actors to actually act.
You can't predict what anyone else will make of it
or how it will turn out.
All I know is I responded to the screenplay like I haven't done,
really, for...
Well, since I can remember.
It was out of the blue to be so affected by it.
Certainly, 45 Years gave me this playground.
I mean, it was just perfect for me.
I just thought, "Oh, my God, this is just
"so beautiful at this time of my life to have something like this."
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