Last week, Lucinda Syson came to Bio Skandia in Stockholm to meet Swedish actors.
Thirty had been selected for speed meetings with four international casting directors. Syson arrived with ‘Batman Begins’, ‘Wonder Woman’ and ‘Children of Men’ on her CV, which is enough to make seven minutes in a room feel shorter than seven minutes.
‘Children of Men’ turned twenty this week. Alfonso Cuarón directed it, Emmanuel Lubezki shot it, and nearly every discussion of the film eventually reaches the same destination: those long takes where the camera keeps moving after any reasonable production would have called lunch.
The casting gets less attention, even though it changed the film before Lubezki had anything to point a camera at.
This year the Oscars finally added an award for casting, after spending nearly a century apparently assuming actors wandered onto sets because somebody had left a door open. Cassandra Kulukundis won the first one for ‘One Battle After Another’.
Cuarón has always treated casting as part of directing actors. His advice begins with the obvious bit people somehow manage to skip: find the right ones.
On ‘Children of Men’, the people they found kept changing the characters.
Clive Owen was already haunting the script before anybody had offered him the role.
While Cuarón and co-writer Timothy J. Sexton were developing Theo, the exhausted civil servant at the centre of the film, they referred to him as ‘the guy from Croupier’. They meant Owen, whose performance in Mike Hodges’s 1998 film had given them the shape of the man they were writing.
Cuarón assumed the studio would want somebody bigger. By the time casting began, the studio wanted Owen too. Every now and then Hollywood ruins a perfectly serviceable fight by agreeing.
Owen then started questioning Theo on the page. Sexton has described a scene where Theo is kidnapped and discovers that Julian, his estranged wife, is behind it. The script gave him years of stored anger. Owen asked whether a man who had been apart from his wife for eighteen years would really still have all that fury polished and ready for use.
They changed the scene.
Cuarón later described Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Caine as co-writers because of conversations like that. The Writers Guild credits did not expand accordingly, presumably because there are limits.
Caine had been floating around the script even earlier. Cuarón and Sexton called Jasper ‘the Michael Caine character’ while they were writing him. When they actually hired Michael Caine, he decided Jasper, an elderly political cartoonist growing cannabis in the woods, should owe something to John Lennon.
During a costume fitting, Caine reportedly changed his posture and voice so completely that his wife entered the room and asked where he was. By then the casting process had probably made its point.
Clare-Hope Ashitey arrived without that baggage. She was young and largely unknown when she was cast as Kee, the refugee whose pregnancy becomes the most important fact left on Earth. Cuarón has said they searched across about twenty countries and opened the role beyond its original description rather than letting a character note decide who could play her.
Ashitey was from London.
Cuarón liked that she stripped sentimentality out of Kee. The character could easily have become The Pregnant Woman Who Represents Hope, capitals included. Ashitey made her funny, abrasive and occasionally tired of everybody around her. She also helped stop the relationship with Theo from turning into an instant surrogate father-daughter story.
Being chased across a collapsing Britain is already a lot to ask of two strangers. The screenplay did not also need them to become adorable.
Syson has said that she does not expect an actor to arrive at the first audition carrying the completed character around like hand luggage.
She looks at what she calls the actor’s ‘raw material’: whether the person has the right instincts, whether they listen, whether there is something a director can work with. Costume, makeup and the other actors come later. Arriving with the entire performance nailed down can be a little like bringing curtains before anyone has decided where the windows go.
‘Children of Men’ shows what happens when that process works.
Owen spends much of it in an old coat looking as though the end of civilisation has mostly made his commute worse. Moore gives Julian enough presence that you assume the film has bigger plans for her. Caine takes one of Britain’s most recognisable faces and turns it into a retired radical living in the woods with a vegetable garden, cannabis and increasingly limited patience for the government.
Ashitey has the least accumulated movie-star history of all of them, which helps when the entire story eventually has to stop and pay attention to her.
Change one of those actors and the character changes with them. Once that happens, scenes start moving too.
That is what makes Stockholm’s Casting Sessions more interesting than the usual industry event where everybody sits on a stage and explains that collaboration is important. The Stockholm International Film Festival and Swedish Institute brought Syson, Frank Moiselle, Nathalie Chéron and Tanja Grunwald to Bio Skandia so thirty Swedish actors could sit opposite people who cast international productions before anybody has spent £40 million discovering that the lead does not work.
No red carpet. No premiere. Seven minutes in a room.
Most of those meetings will probably amount to nothing. Casting contains a spectacular amount of rejection because so does acting.
But ‘Children of Men’ is twenty years old now, and you can still see what happened when the right people entered the room.
The long takes are easy to admire because you can see the camera doing something extraordinary. Casting disappears once it works.
Owen asked whether Theo would really still be that angry after eighteen years, and a scene got better before Lubezki ever rolled the camera.
