An Education (2 page)

The good people at BBC Films, however, saw something in the script - either that, or the desperation in our eyes - and funded the development of
An Education
, which meant paying me to write another draft, and giving Amanda and Finola some seed money. The meeting we had with David Thompson and Tracey Scoffield went the way no conversations of this kind go, in my experience: as we talked, their professional scepticism was replaced by enthusiasm and understanding. This is supposed to be the point of meetings, from the supplicants’ point of view, anyway; but in my experience (and probably in yours, too, whatever your profession), nobody who was previously doubtful is ever really open to persuasion or suggestion. The fact that the thirty minutes or so spent talking to David and Tracey wasn’t a waste of time is more remarkable than it should be.

I didn’t need money to write another draft of the script, of course; I am well paid in my other profession, and there’s very little to be earned in British film, especially at this early stage. But money has a symbolic value, too. We all needed some indication that others in the industry felt as enthusiastic about
An Education
as we did, otherwise we could be pretty sure that any future energy poured into the project would run right through it and down the drain. BBC Films gave us a sense of purpose. They were not in a position to fund the film, but they could help us get the project into shape so that others might want to.

In the original piece, and in the film itself, our herione’s seducer produces a banana on the night he wants to take her virginity, apparently because he thinks it will result in ease of access. It was a strange and revealing detail that I wanted to keep, because it indicated something of David’s gaucheness.

At a BBC script meeting, David Thompson, then head of BBC Films, started to muse aloud about this particular scene.

‘The banana,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Could it . . .Would it work?’

He directed the question at Amanda and Finola. They shifted uncomfortably in their seats. There was a silence.

Jamie Laurenson, one of the executive producers, cleared his throat.

‘I don’t think . . . I don’t think it would be a peeled banana,’ he said.

‘Ah!’ said David. ‘Unpeeled! I see.’

We moved on, gratefully.

It helps to attach a director to the project, too, for exactly the same reasons. Beeban Kidron read whatever was the most recent draft, liked it, met to talk about it, and then worked with me on the script for the best part of a year. (These years slip by, so it’s a relief to remember that other things were happening while
An Education
wasn’t being made. I wrote my young adult novel
Slam
, and my third son was born; Finola was off making the HBO drama
Tsunami
. We have something to show for that time.) I loved working with Beeban, who lives round the corner from my office and could therefore meet within five minutes of receiving an email, if she was around; it was through talking to her, thinking about what she needed from the script as a film-maker, that I made several important improvements to the script. Certainly Jenny’s complicity in many of David’s deceptions, her willingness to manipulate her parents, came out of my work with Beeban; we took as our cue Lynn Barber’s admission, in the original piece, that when she witnessed ‘David’ stealing the map, she didn’t do anything about it.The decision we made during that time made the script more morally complicated, and the film is the richer for it.

Beeban and I had a cloud hanging over us, however. She was attached to another movie which, like ours, had spent a long time in development. Eventually it became apparent that she couldn’t do both, that they were going to clash, and reluctantly (I think and hope) she decided to go with the project which had predated ours. We were back to square one.

We talked to several more directors after Beeban’s departure. Most wanted to develop the script further, which was fair enough; the trouble is that no two directors could agree on the route we should be taking. One young director even wondered whether the whole 1962 thing was a red herring - had we thought of setting it in the present day? No, we hadn’t. I was particularly keen to work with a woman director - yes, I had female producers to keep a watch on Jenny as she developed in the script, but the value of a woman director who could work with our young actress on set would, I felt, be incalculable - and when Lone Scherfig, the Danish director of
Italian for Beginners
, expressed an interest in making the film, we all wanted to listen to what she had to say. Lone turned out to be smart about the script, endlessly enthusiastic, and with an outsider’s eye for detail; after she’d taken the job, she set about immersing herself in the look of 1962 England, its clothes and its cars and its cakes. We were lucky to find her.

So then we were four: Amanda, Finola, Lone and I. And, for some time, we’d been talking to casting director Lucy Bevan. I’m quite often asked how much input I have in the various processes of film-making - ‘Do you have a say in the casting, for example?’ And though I’d like to claim credit for just about everything, the truth is that I simply don’t know enough about actors (or directors, or editors, or designers, or composers) to contribute to these decisions in any meaningful way. How many young actresses did I know capable of playing the part of Jenny, for example? None at all. What about male actors for the part of David? Well, there was Colin Firth, of course, who I knew from
Fever Pitch
. And John Cusack (
High Fidelity
), and Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult from
About a Boy
, and the guy with the haircut from
No Country for Old Men
; which I’d just seen, probably, right before I was asked for my opinion . . . OK, not one of these was right, but they were all I could think of. Lucy Bevan’s job is to read a script and come up with scores of imaginative suggestions for each part, and she’s brilliant at it. On the whole, it’s best that the casting director, rather than the writer, has a say in casting.

Every now and again I’d say, ‘Oh God, you can’t ask
him
.’ Not because the actor in question was bad, or wrong for the part, but because it seemed to me insulting and embarrassing to offer it to him. Lucy, Amanda and Finola were ambitious for
An Education
in ways that I could never have been, which is why we ended up with Alfred Molina, Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike, rather than, say, me, my friend Harry and my next-door neighbour.

We were helped immeasurably by Emma Thompson agreeing to play the headmistress at an early stage: she gives any project an aura of authority and potential excellence. It was Lucy who knew about Carey Mulligan, of course - she’s been in
Bleak House
and
Pride and Prejudice
, and those who had worked with her all talked of her phenomenal talent. But when I was told that they were thinking of casting a twenty-two-year-old as sixteen-year-old Jenny, I was a little disappointed (my exact words, Amanda tells me gleefully, were ‘Well, that’s ruined it all’); it would, I thought, be a different kind of film, with an older and as a consequence more knowing girl in the lead role. But when I saw the first shots of Carey in her school uniform, I worried that she looked too young, that we were involved in a dubious remake of
Lolita
. When Carey’s mother visited the set, she told us that Carey had always cursed her youthful looks, but here they worked for her: I cannot imagine any other actress who could have been so convincing as a schoolgirl and yet so dazzling after her transformation. And, of course, she can act. This was a huge part for any young actress - Jenny is in every single scene - but I don’t think one ever tires of watching her. There’s so much detail, so much intelligence in the performance that it’s impossible to get bored.

My only contribution was a small panic when I’d watched her audition on DVD - she was so clearly, uncannily right that I was concerned when I heard she hadn’t yet been offered the role. And yet this small panic, expressed after producers and director and casting agent had seen the audition, and long after she’d been cast in other high-profile productions, is easily enough for me to claim that I discovered her; so I will, for years to come.

‘Oh God, you can’t ask him,’ I said. Well, they’d already asked him, and he’d already said he wanted to play the part of Danny. Arrangements were made for the care of his dog.

A couple of weeks before shooting, I was asked to talk to him about a couple of lines in the script. He called me at my office and told me that, much as he admired the writing, he wouldn’t be able to play the part. He hoped we’d be able to work together on something else. Confused, I called my wife and told her that, as far as I could tell, Orlando Bloom had just told me he wouldn’t, after all, be playing the part of Danny. Amanda spoke to his agent.

‘No,’ she said. ‘There has been a misunderstanding. ’ (It was clear, I felt, from the tone of her voice, who had misunderstood whom.) ‘He just wanted to talk to you about the script.’

I replayed the conversation in my head. We already had a wonderful cast lined up, but Orlando Bloom’s fan club would, it was felt, help the box office of a small British film no end. How had I managed to drive him away, in under three minutes? What had I said?

‘He’s going to call you at home later,’ she said.

Don’t mess it up, she didn’t say. But that’s what I heard anyway.

He called that night, and we had exactly the same conversation. I strode around our kitchen, listening to Orlando Bloom talk about his regret and sadness, while I made throat-chopping gestures at my wife. As I wasn’t doing any of the talking, she could see and hear that I wasn’t doing any of the damage, either. I have no idea what any of it was about - why he’d turned us down, why he’d said yes in the first place, whether he’d ever intended to do it, whether it really was Orlando Bloom I’d been speaking to.

Incredibly, the brilliant Dominic Cooper stepped in almost immediately.

In the strange world of independent cinema, everyone - director, writer, cast, producers - proceeds on the basis that the film will be made, even though there is still no money with which to make it. If it’s not make-believe (after all, we were all being paid to pretend, which children aren’t), then it’s a particularly committed form of method acting: we were inhabiting the bodies of independent film-makers, thinking their thoughts at all times in the hope of convincing someone that this was who we were. And eventually somebody believed us. The American financiers Endgame Entertainment liked the script and the cast and the director; this, together with the not insubstantial contribution of the BBC, was enough to enable the film to happen. So suddenly we were all sitting around a table, reading the script out loud to see how it sounded. (I say ‘we’ because I read, too - Alfred Molina couldn’t make it, so I played the part of Jenny’s father, Jack. This I did by shouting a lot.) I have been to a few read-throughs, and if they go well, as this one did, they are completely thrilling, not least because this is the only time that the script is read from beginning to end in its entirety, so it’s the only chance the writer ever gets to listen to his words in the right order, in real time. The film isn’t shot that way, and scenes get chopped, or never shot in the first place . . . For the writer, the read-through is the purest, most fully realised version of the script, before the actual film-making part of film-making gets in the way.

At one point in the afternoon, Matthew Beard, the brilliant young actor who plays Jenny’s first boyfriend Graham, got a laugh from the word ‘hello’; there was no such laugh in the script, and you suddenly see the point of a cast - while at the same time, of course, slightly resenting their talent.

I wasn’t there much, so don’t ask me. I had just started a book (
Juliet, Naked
, available now in all good bookshops), and wanted to make it longer; and in any case, being married to the producer of
An Education
played havoc with childcare arrangements. Some directors like to have the writer on set, but Lone didn’t seem to need me much, not least because she was so gratifyingly determined to be faithful to the script as it was written. And in any case, any questions she might have had could always be asked via Amanda, who could pass them on, quite often late at night or over breakfast. Lone was always perfectly warm and friendly if I did show up, and actors are always interesting people to waste time with. But that’s what filming is, time-wasting (even, most of the time, for a lot of the people directly involved); past experience has taught me that there is really no other way to characterise it. Our budget was tight, so everyone had to move fast, but this still meant that several hours a day, literally, were spent moving lights around, or re-arranging furniture. In the words of Homer Simpson: ‘I’ve seen plays that are more interesting. Seriously.
Plays
.’ All a writer can really do is marvel that an activity so solitary, so imprecise and so apparently whimsical, can result, however many years later, in the teeming humanity of a film set.

I was struck, in Lynn’s original piece, by ‘David’ coming to find her in Oxford; it seemed like an appropriate ending for the film. And yet any event that happens after the main timeline of the script’s narrative was always going to seem more like a coda than a climax - I can see that now, but it didn’t seem so obvious during the writing nor the shooting of
An Education
. We shot the scene, and included it in all the early edits, but it never really worked: it didn’t give the actors enough to do, apart from restate their positions with as much vehemence and/or self-delusion as they could muster. The actors, meanwhile, had effectively found their own ending.The bravura performances of Carey and Alfred Molina during the emotional climax of the film, in which Jack talks to Jenny through her bedroom door, and reveals that he and Jenny’s mother had learned that the trip to Oxford had been a con trick, were enough, we felt; that, plus Jenny’s smile to herself when she receives the letter from Oxford (a moment that wasn’t scripted - it was something cooked up on the phone during the shoot). It all works, I think. But if you needed any further proof that film is a collaborative medium, here it is. That ending was created by Lone, Carey, Alfred and Barney Pilling, the editor. And me, I suppose, although not in the way I had intended to create it.