Their Finest is obviously adapted from
a novel, what elements from the book were
key for telling the story; what
challenges did you face and adapting it
for the screen?
It's a very big novel
It has so many small stories and of course
we wanted as many of them to be in the
film but still the film should feel
light and easy to watch and with one
love story that is taking you from
beginning to end but underneath that you
get a lot of detail and fun and extra
little film clips and hopefully a lot of
information about London at that time.
Speaking of London the tube station was
featured quite a lot during the air
raids in the film, where do you find
these unique locations around the UK?
There is a closed-down tube
station in London near Charing Cross
Road which is really worth looking at
you can go there and you go hundreds of
steps down and it's sitting there
completely as it used to be, where people
lived and slept and were protected
overnight during the Blitz
That must be brilliant for a director.
Yeah! We even saw photos where people spent
Christmas there with Christmas tree and
everything underground it was very
touching and I think really important at
that time that the world's oldest tube
was there to help the people.
In terms of connecting to the past there's also a
lot of great archive footage used in the
film, how effective was it using real
footage to bring the story to life?
Some of the footage we found or the editor
has found for us that we, you know, the
aircraft and the some shots of London
but the some of it we've made up.
It's mock-up, there's a fake little documentary
film which is a portrait of an airline
like a propaganda film about
this RAF pilot but we got a lot of
knowledge from it and feature films at
that time the films of the early 1940s
are great and moving and completely
contemporary, some of them. They are great
to watch you can make in your own little
film festival at home.
Let's talk 'slop' what's the definition of
slop and how have things evolved since
the time that slop was used?
Slop was women's dialogue in films and they had
women writers in British filmmaking who
were just there to write what women
said to each other. There was a film
where the the dialogue was so phony that
people just booed the film out and it was
taken off the market and so they began
hiring women to write women's dialogue
and that is 'slop' and our story is
about a girl who starts out writing slop
and little by little, finds way into
actually writing the whole thing.
What role did the Ministry of Information
have to play during the war?
The Ministry of Information took up in senate house
that big white building and took
up, I think, the bottom eight floors
just fighting to communicate to the
people that they should keep calm and
carry on and not lose faith that they
could win this war because England - there
were moments where they were about to
surrender and because the Ministry of
Information kept pumping propaganda
films, radio, posters out to people...
anything from eat more carrots to send
your sons to war or start working in
the war industry for the girls.
That was really an important part of winning
the war, so it's fascinating to read about.
You mentioned, the fact, women
coming to work during the war. The men
were nervous that the women were
enjoying the taste of equality and might
not recede after the war, that's
mentioned in the film, what effect did
the war have on equality for women?
They learnt that they could do something, they
wanted to contribute and some
of them tasted blood and found out how
much fun work can be and I think
others were happy to come home and
the homemakers and not have to work as
hard as they did but maybe men changed
the way they looked at women because
they could see that they actually fought
and worked very very hard and so they
gained respect and self-respect.
Their Finest is sort of a tribute to filmmaking
whenever its most vital, so what do you
hope, you've already started talking
about audiences, what do you want them to
take away from the film?
I think some people will want to become screenwriters
I hope or will understand how incredibly
fascinating and attractive going to work
can be. They might also be inspired to
watch more films of that day, they might
understand London better, they might
believe more in love and in
companionship and they might get to
understand actors better.
There's something that this film
says about actors that I hope will make
people love actors more for
different reasons.
Was that interesting as a filmmaker to be making a
film with in a film?
Was that a new challenge for you?
Yes! I love films and always have so it's
easy to share something you love and
it's part of the joy of making films is
that you can give something to somebody
something you'd like to show you can
show to people or stories you like to
tell, there's a generosity to it.
It's really a great reason
to work for me.