In the first press conference of this year’s London Film Festival, we find out from Director Mark Romanek the pressures of making a very British movie, screenwriter Alex Garland on how he adapted the book and novelist Kazuo Ishiguro on why the screen adaptation of his novel ‘Never Let Me Go’ was a “wonderful revelation”. Attending cast included Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Ella Purnell and Isobel Meikle-Small who all spoke about their roles and what attracted them to this screenplay.

Garland on adapting the screenplay and Romanek on his responsibilities towards adapting the book:

Garland: We always returned to the book and referred to it and discussed it and were motivated by it.

Romanek: We all bonded in a common   a love for the book and in the goal of trying to do justice to it and tried to transfer what was so moving about it on the page without messing it up. We all did it in a collaborative fashion too.

Garfield on his attraction to the material:

I think it’s very rare that you find a script that is s so full of what it is be alive, to be human, the struggles that we continually go through and this massive existential question mark and I think as actors you search that kind of meaningful material and when it comes along you feel it immediately. There are terrible scripts and there are good scripts and then there are scripts and stories like this one. And I think that none of us hesitated in being part of such a beautiful story.

Mulligan and Knightley on the appeal of the story:

Mulligan: I read the book when it came out and I loved it and I always loved it first and foremost as it’s a love story about people that want very simple things from life and can’t get them. Keira and I did Pride and Prejudice together and we’ve done lots of adaptations of Dickens and Austin where the author’s not around to tell you if it’s rubbish and so this was doubly-intimidating because we had Ish (Kazuo Ishiguro) with us and you want to be everything he imagined when he wrote it And there are people who have read the book recently or currently and are in love with the book so there’s more pressure but from reading the script and knowing who else was going to be doing it, I felt like we were all on the same page and we were going to make the same film and we were all so in love with it. We were the biggest fans of the book and still are.

Knightley: I hadn’t read the book. The first thing I knew about it was the script that came through my door and I thought it was a completely unique piece, I’d never read anything like it. I then started to talking to friends and saying ‘I’m thinking about doing this film’ and tonnes of them were saying it’s their favourite book. One said a terrifying thing and said ‘it sums up our generation’, which now having read the book I find a bleak prospect. Once I read the book, I saw that it was something completely astonishing and unique and it’s really exciting to be a part of something like that.

Ishiguro on seeing his novel adapted for the big screen:

I felt I learned a lot about the story from watching film, in particular the performances of the actors. In a way, there’s only one of me when I’m writing a book and I can’t pay attention to all these characters and what they might be thinking and so on, so here’s a situation where you have very creative, highly talented, highly intelligent actors pondering for hours and days about each character They’re bound to find new things and interesting discoveries, so for me, it was a wonderful revelation watching the early cuts. I think I’ve learned a hell of a lot about this story and I think that’s how it should be. I don’t think this story should be a fixed thing, fixed at the point of a book.

Meikle-Small and Purnell on their roles:

Meikle-Small: We did a week of rehearsals with the other actors which was nice because we got to bond with our older characters, it was quite daunting because everyone was raving about Carey and I didn’t want to disappoint everybody by being a bad younger her so I felt quite pressured! So I tried quite hard to try to be her.

Purnell: It was quite daunting to fill the younger selves of the actors and to do our parts and their parts justice. I finished the book a few days before my second audition and it made me want the part of Ruth more because after reading the size I auditioned with, I thought Ruth was such a complex character and the kind that you have to break down to understand.

Meikle-Small: The older characters actually acted out the younger scenes with us, I think it helped them build the memories and I think it really helped me because we got to discuss what we thought Kathy would be like and we would make decisions and characteristics that Kathy would have.

Mulligan, Knightley and Garfield on taking inspiration from the book:

Mulligan: The script was perfect and we didn’t change a line from the first draft I read in February last year to what we shot. We had a great environment to work in. Mark (Romanek) had a copy of the book with him all the time and I had a copy of the book with me – we all had the book with us and would always refer to that. Especially for me, the whole book is narrated by my character. It’s great to go back to for ideas, we could do three takes and act badly or get bored with yourself then find one line in the book that would inspire you to do different, so I was looking at the book a lot of the time.

Knightley: It always incredibly helpful to have such rich source material. The story wasn’t told from the point of view of my character so I sort of filled in the gaps, but it was all there in just a few sentences. Just one sentence about Ruth and it just would trigger something and spark off a whole thought process which actually explained a lot about the character and discussing it with everything.

Garfield: I think across the board, everyone was deeply reverent to the source material, Kazuo’s novel and whether he liked it or not, I think he gets a little sick of how reverent we were and are still, we kind of like bow when he enters the room and it makes him very uncomfortable [laughs]. I think we all had the same intention and that intention sprang from Kazuo’s story.

Romanek discusses the pressure of making ‘Never Let Me Go’ under the presence of novelist Ishiguro and how he ensured the setting was authentically English

I was starting with a really beautiful adaptation by Alex, it seemed really sold and well thought out and I had the same emotional reaction to the script as I did to the book. I tried to not start every morning waking up and feeling crippled by doing justice to this book. I tried to focus on the tasks at hand because it just isn’t a constructive way to think about it.  This was a very collaborate process. I wasn’t brought in to behave like the ‘auteur of the piece’, whatever that means. The quality and authenticity of Englishness… I feel I have an affinity for English things, I spent a lot of time here, I went to school here briefly and I’ve lived here on and off. I thought about Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm which depicted my childhood and adolescence in the suburbs of Chicago and I thought it was unbelievably authentic, and he’s Taiwanese. Sometimes someone from the outside has that perspective on things… I was helped enormously by the all-British crew whenever I was slipping up!

Romanek on the visual approach to ‘Never Let Me Go’:

Initially it’s just an intuitive thing, you picture the images and you picture the tone of it. On the second reading of the book I felt like I could clearly see the film. Then I read in an interview that Kazuo was influenced by Japanese cinema. That sent me on a journey to immerse myself in Japanese cinema and arts and aesthetic. I tried to overlay some of the Britishness with the simplicity you see in some of the writings – it’s an extremely deceptive simplicity. There’s a beauty to how he writes, the truths in the film can be quite disturbing. It would be too blunt if it was a naturalistic, kitchen sink kind of film. I wanted it to be quite beautiful so we all worked together to make a very romantic and aesthetically pleasing film that’s delivering these very disturbing truths about our condition.

Knightley on playing a complex and villainous character:

It was great. I thought the character was fascinating, for me it was study of jealousy and fear and I think she commits great harm and I thought it was an interesting thing trying to get into her head. I didn’t like her and its tricky playing people you don’t like and trying to find a way to empathise with them and that was challenging and very exciting.

Garfield and Mulligan on playing such emotional content:

Garfield: I think it’s easier to cry than to make people laugh. Do you know what I mean? It’s much easier to go on set and cry a bunch then be funny. That’s all I have to say…

Mulligan: No, it is, it’s always harder to maintain raw enthusiasm and joy than to go into a really dark place. For us really it was about trying not to cry all the time, I cry all the time; it’s my modus operandi. I was trying to, hold back, we were watching each other, we didn’t want to portray tragedy or observe our circumstances we just wanted to live with the circumstances we had, so it was like Andrew said it’s harder to do all the sort of happiness in life than it is to do the sadness.

Ishiguro on the themes of the book and screenplay:

From the inception of the story, I wasn’t interested in a story about the triumph of slaves over a cruel system. I was interested in trying to find something that paralleled our natural human lifespan and how we couldn’t really escape from the fact we were mortal and the fact that we would all move from childhood to adulthood to old age. The question was ‘what’s do human beings do? What’s most important to human beings when they realise time is running out?’ Is it embedded in human nature to seek revenge on old enemies? What do we want to do in that situation when time is running out? I think the story was trying to put a positive light on human nature. To try and say as convincingly as possible that people would actually when they feel their trapped and their time is running out that the things that become important are things like friendship and love. If someone feels they did the wrong thing towards somebody close to them, they’ll want to put it right before it’s too late, if two people have loved each other all their lives but haven’t acknowledge it, they’ll want to acknowledge it even if only for a short time. These are the things that come to the top of the priority list for human beings, maybe not some of the other things we might think in our more cynical moments, that was my intention and I believe that the people who made this film wanted to say the same thing as well, the emphasis is on how people come to accept their fate.