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Never Let Me Go

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Friends Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley) grow up together at a seemingly idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. When they leave the school and the horrible truth of their true purpose is revealed to them, they must simultaneously confront deep-seated feelings of love, jealousy and betrayal that threaten to tear their friendship asunder.

 

Q&A with Director Mark Romanek and Actress Carey Mulligan

 

(Q): As a man who has made commercials that have made people buy all the stuff in this store, what’s it like to be in here?
 
(Mark Romanek): Oh I’m an Apple freak so I’m in here all the time.
 
(Q): Carey, what was your first meeting with him like?
 
(Carey Mulligan): We were in New York, we were here. We didn’t talk a huge amount, I don’t think. I wanted to do voiceover for the audition and we did another with an actress in ready Ruth’s character. It was kind of short and sweet really. You were quite quiet. I thought he was sort of a deep, dark American.
 
(Mark Romanek): You didn’t know that you had the part before we got on the plane. We were so blown away by “An Education” and we went “Oh my god; we found Kathy.” We were just praying that she would agree to do it, so when I walked in the room the audition was really not strictly necessary. It was a technicality. And it wasn’t really an audition. She read the voiceover, which was her idea, which no other actor suggested. And again, two sentences into it we got chills and that was it.
 
(Q): It’s such an interesting decision. What made you decide to pick the voiceover to do?
 
(Carey Mulligan): It’s like a self-indulgent actress thing where you sort of wallow in how beautiful it is and that you get to say those words. I loved it; I read it so many times and it was my kind of hook into the script and into the character, and it was one of the biggest reasons I wanted to play the part.
 
(Q): Had you read the book beforehand?
 
(Carey Mulligan): Yeah I read the book in 2005 when it came out. Actually this summer I read most of Ishiguro’s other books but I hadn’t read them up until then, and “Never Let Me Go” is the only one I’d read. And I’d always wanted to play Kathy and always knew that they’d make a film.
 
(Q): Did you? When I read the book I wondered this is so interior, so much about feeling and melancholy I kind of wondered where the movie was in it.
 
(Mark Romanek): Well I had read the book and just had a really emotional reaction to it. I was very engrossed in it and I really fell in love with the characters. There were many scenes in it that I did think were extremely cinematic. There were these iconic moments that I felt if you could string those together that certainly at the very least those scenes would be very powerful.

And then I read Alex Garland’s script. He adapted the script really beautifully and I saw that perhaps because he’s a novelist too he was able to kind of deconstruct and reconstruct the book in a screenplay form and he made it work. And I had the same emotional reaction to the script that I had to the book, which was a real clue to me that this could work. As long as I didn’t fuck it up it could work, and it was working on the page.
 
(Q): Had you seen “One Hour Photo” before you met Mark?
 
(Carey Mulligan): Yeah.
 
(Q): It’s another kind of deeply interior, basically built on one character’s melancholy. That must have been interesting to meet with that guy.
 
(Carey Mulligan): Yeah I loved “One Hour Photo.” And I wasn’t aware even of Mark’s other music videos and everything else that he’d done, so that was the one thing that I knew about him and that was exciting enough, without anything else. But Kathy I never felt was – I probably played it wrong – but I never thought of her really as melancholy. We were just playing our circumstances and allowing the audience to feel whatever they wanted to.
 
(Q): For me the key thing in both the movie and the book is the scene with you listening to the music. Just the way she really wraps herself in that music like a blanket. You must have felt just seeing it on the page that there’s a way to play it.
 
(Carey Mulligan): Yeah actually, that scene happens twice in the film. The film starts when we’re 12, so we have young actors playing us as children, and she’s given a music tape and she listens to it and this song becomes very important to her, and it’s “Never Let Me Go,” which is the title of the film, in case you hadn’t noticed.

So she listens to the song and then later on in the film Kathy then revisits the song and it’s sort of a mantra to her really, or something that she always reverts to for security. And that was one of the things we did with the little kids. Izzy, who played the young me, we sort of went into a room one day in the middle of the shoot and figured out how we were both going to do it and what it meant to both of us. So we listened to iPods and swayed around the room and did actory stuff.
 
(Q): You talked about the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which you brought to the look and ambiance of the film. Tell the audience a little bit about that.
 
(Mark Romanek): One of the main things the film’s about is how precious time is and how little time we all have and how the sad, inescapable fact is that we’re all going to live for a certain amount of time and then we have to go and that’s it. So there just seemed to be something about making a film that has this quality of science-fiction, where there wouldn’t be anything new and clean and futuristic in it but exactly the opposite; there would be the affect of time on everything.

I feel like there’s a hint of the Japanese sensibility in the way Kazuo writes; he was born in Japan. And so he mentioned it in an interview once that he was more influenced by Japanese cinema of the ‘50s and ‘60s than he was by other writers, and that was like a clue and a key for me. I said well let me immerse myself in that stuff and maybe that will be a clue to creating a kind of visual language for the movie. And I came across this concept of wabi-sabi, which is this idea that things that are broken and cracked and rusted and frayed and worn are more evocative and more beautiful than things that are new and clean, which is a very ironic thing to be saying in the Apple store. Things that are new and clean can be very beautiful too.
 
(Q): If you look at your film work and your video work that concept almost plays throughout your entire career.
 
(Mark Romanek): Each video was a different assignment, and some of them it was fun to explore that sort of thing and some of them actually were kind of clean. They varied quite a lot but I mean I like texture. I think of “Knife in the Water,” the Polanski film. You can smell the pipe smoke and the thicker weave of a sweater. There’s texture in the movie and so I try to get that in this film.
 

(Q): Carey, your physical posture differs from film to film and I wonder how you chose to physicalize this character.
 
(Carey Mulligan): I don’t know. I don’t know if I walk around and try to find my walk or anything. I think Katy’s quite a practical person, she’s quite a sensible person, and she’s sort of a workhorse, so it probably reflected that. But I don’t think I ever consciously think about it. I think people who are sort of driven or people who are passive have different ways of moving. I don’t know.
 
(Mark Romanek): I noticed something from the outside which really struck me, which is there’s a stillness in this performance. I remember there was one day when you were doing something very still and I found it odd and I went to this really cliché thing and made a suggestion about well maybe you should do this, and you kind of went no. And then when I looked at the scene again it was just such a brilliant choice, and she so often did so little and radiated so much that it ended up affecting how I shot the film. I started doing less. There was a goal to tell the story simply because Kazuo writes these very deceptively simple sentences. So I tried to shoot the film simply, but I was inspired by what I saw Carrie doing to go even deeper in that direction.
 
(Q): So you do make a distinctive choice and stick with it.
 
(Carey Mulligan):Yeah. Instinctive, though. I guess I always had this idea that she has these three friends and they grow up with them and they’re her only family, the only people she knows, and she has no desire to rock the boat. She’s not passive, she’s unhappy, but she’d rather be discontent and with them than completely on her own. It was always sort of more the feeling that she didn’t want to shake the air around her, and she doesn’t talk really, ever.
 
(Q): There’s a real watchful quality. She’s sort of taking in everything around her rather than trying to make an impression, which is what you’re talking about.
 
(Carey Mulligan): Yeah, and that’s what drew me to the character more than anything, because I had played Jenny in “An Education,” and been go-getter and had a very distinctive personality. I’ve done plays where I’ve been crazy and I’ve always been able to say lots of dialog and my characters have always been able to express themselves, and Kathy doesn’t really. She defers to everybody else’s emotions and she holds back, and she allows everyone else to speak first and puts other people first. The challenge for me was to see if I could make that engaging and not just dull.
 
(Q): For you, Mark that’s one of the things between “One Hour Photo” and this. You chose protagonists who don’t talk a whole lot.
 
(Mark Romanek): Well I mean on the page ostensibly maybe it seems passive in the literal sense that she doesn’t always drive the action or she’s reacting to things, but the way that Carrie made it not passive is that outward action isn’t the only form of action. There are interactions that are just as active, and the stillness radiated a stoicism and a strength that ultimately becomes a form of grace at the end of the film. And she’s also noticing things, and I tried to shoot it very strictly from her point of view not only in the general sense but she’s the only one getting point of view shots. So we’re seeing the world through her eyes maybe similarly to how Sey did in “One Hour Photo,” but when you see what she sees and you see her face you get inside of a person that way.
 
(Q): This is somebody who’s made a decision very early on about the way she wants to lead her life. She’s really emotionally mature compare to everybody else in the movie. Even though you are really young you decide to be an adult very early on, and that’s a very interesting way to play it because that’s not in the book at all.
 
(Carey Mulligan): We spent a lot of time with Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote the novel, over the last couple of days, so usually when we’re in Q&As I speak for Kathy and then I remember Kathy’s creator is sitting there and I feel like an idiot. But I always felt like that was there. These expectations that come in the film, the children grow up believing certain things about the outside world and I don’t think that she does. We have all these terms in the film, deferrals, and things like that, I don’t think she ever believes in them.

I think she’s accepted her fate from the beginning, and that’s sort of given her the ability to get up and carry on every day, and kind of freed her from it in a way. She doesn’t have to live with the expectation of things turning out okay. She’s accepted her mortality in a way the other ones can’t, so that gives her the freedom to keep calm and carry on.
 
(Q): I want to talk to you about the way you cast the other characters. There’s a yearning, almost a neediness, in all the other characters except for Kathy.
 
(Mark Romanek): I think the film is about our relationship to this fact of our mortality. I think each of those three characters have a different relationship to that fact. I think Tommy is going to try to scheme a way around it, so he’s sort of in his head about it. Keira’s character, Ruth, I think she’s very afraid of it and afraid of dying alone and that drives a lot of her action, whereas at an early point it seems as if Kathy’s arrived at a place of acceptance, which is one of the most moving things about the book to me and I hope we were able to transfer that into this film.
 
(Q): The way you play that is almost like an archetypal version of a Japanese concept to arrive at this point. It’s almost like Zen and I was really fascinated by it. I wonder if that comes from you doing stage work where you had to figure out where you are physically. Having watch you work to get ready for this you seemed to make physical decisions about a part.
 
(Mark Romanek): Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t like to look the same from job to job or play characters that are too similar. If you’re under the age of 25 and you’re female and British then you’re kind of limited. I’ve done a lot of corsets, and all of that affects your physicality. But I always felt that those costumes, regardless of period, were always different women, it was just the backdrop was a certain time and that could affect certain things, but they’re all still different characters.

But Kathy was my favorite character of everyone. The fear of living up to the expectation of the book and the fear of living up to the expectation of how people imagine Kathy, and we can’t possibly please everybody because everyone has their own imaginations. But because of all the qualities that she has that are so polar to me and to everybody I’d played I suppose, I had to kind of make some decisions at the beginning and stick to them, otherwise I think my fear would have driven me all over the place and it could have been a lot worse. 

(Q): So much determination in the character. You can see from the set of the jaw there as she’s listening to her talk.
 
(Carey Mulligan): I think the main thing with those three characters is they’re so terrified of losing each other that it kind of destroys them. The reason the wedge gets driven between Kathy and Ruth is because of the fear of Kathy being with Tommy, and there’s the fear of Ruth changing that drives a wedge between them later on. So it’s constantly this idea that they’re not going to remain the same as they were when they where children. So in a way, as much as they’ve matured they kind of remain 12 year olds in their territorial nature. They’re so afraid of the three of them splitting apart that they tear each other to pieces.
 
(Q): The one thing that happens faster here than in the book is you get a sense of despite those fears of being torn apart and those sexual tensions that exist, of them being a real family and you being the one who holds them together. I wonder how soon you were aware of that Mark, watching the actors work with that dynamic happening.
 
(Mark Romanek: Well one of the things we talked about in rehearsal is that the specific circumstances of these characters are that they’re raised in an institutional setting – a somewhat idyllic, but strange institutional setting – and they’re parentless. They’re guardians aren’t prone to making any sort of physical contact with them. What science-fiction element there is to the film is really just a metaphor. It’s not a science-fiction film; it’s a love story, and we didn’t want the behavior of the character to be alien or strange, we wanted it to be familiar. But there still had to be something about the fact that they had this particular circumstance growing up. They’ve just clung to each other so fiercely. They have little objects they’ve become attached to, like a cassette tape and Carrie’s character has a little turtle, but the three of them have become their family and become their whole world, and that’s the nature of the story that Kazuo invented too I think.
 
(Q): It’s been a while since you’ve made a movie. What were you thinking about in terms of what would be the framing of this?

(Mark Romanek: I tried to make several movies. I was making a cop movie with Tom Hanks, and I was going to do an adaptation of “A Million Little Pieces,” and I got involved in the “Wolfman” film with Benicio Del Toro, and just for various reasons those things didn’t work out. So I was busy trying to make a movie, it wasn’t like I’m so selective that I only make a film once every eight years. But each one is a new assignment and you start from scratch and you look at the thematic problems and the aesthetic problems that you have to solve and you group people together, so it’s a very collaborative experience.

I wasn’t brought on to this to be like the auteur of the piece; I was brought on to take part in a collaboration with Alex Garland, the screenwriter, and the two producers and the actors and all the crew. This was a delicate, odd, original story. It’s a brilliant book and it’s really not like anything else, so it took all of us everyday talking it through to find the solution to the various problems. But in terms of framing it, some of those ideas I talked about before, that the tone of the book seemed to be a hybrid of a Japanese sensibility and a British sensibility, and because I knew I knew that everything I was going to be pointing the camera at was going to be English it might be interesting for the framing of the film to have this quality of Japaneseness.

And I did a lot of research in Japanese cinema and other concepts of Japanese art and aesthetics, and tried to apply them gingerly to give them an original look. And not just for its own sake; hopefully that framing and that tone is enhancing the emotion of the story.
 
(Q): Because it is such an original world compared to the other things you did how did you prepare for it?
 
(Carey Mulligan): I really took everything from the book. We had two weeks of rehearsal, which is really rare for film. We sat around; we talked endlessly in terms of preparation, in terms of their physicality it always had to feel like they came from the same place that was really important. Keira and I knew each other really well; we didn’t know Andrew at all, so we had to get to know him first. My character Kathy narrates the novel, everything’s told from her perspective, she’s a pretty unreliable narrator. She’s dishonest with herself more of the time and therefore dishonest with the audience, so you kind of have to read between the lines, but she’s kind of transparent.

And what Kazuo Ishiguro does so brilliantly, which always breaks my heart, and same with “The Remains of the Day,” and when we were orphans, is he doesn’t write with sentiment, he writes these really diminutive little passages to talk about feelings and that’s as far as he goes, and in that it’s sort of tragic. So that’s where I took my cue from Kathy really, was belittling every feeling you have and just sort of going on. It was sort of the closing chapter of the book that made me understand who she was, and everything really comes together in the end. So every time I did a scene and I needed to know where I was I would go back to the book and just study it.
 
(Q): Mark’s talking about that stillness but you don’t really get that sense of her because her mind is constantly asking questions about what’s going on. You made decisions to keep a lot of that to yourself, which I was really fascinated by.
 
(Carey Mulligan): I always felt like she was an observer. She watches people. There was a part when she was like 12 years old and she says she plays this game with herself where she’ll stand in a window and look out the window at the grounds of the school she’s at and imagine there’s only her and like four other people. And so she’s the sort of person who invents these things and so I imagine that there’s always stuff going on in her mind. She didn’t have to fill the air with her own words; she doesn’t need to be heard. The only thing that Kathy ever really wants her whole life is to know that Tommy loves her, and everything else is not important and therefore not mentioned.
 
(Q): What did you see in “An Education” that made you think she was the perfect person for this?
 
(Mark Romanek: No one’s ever asked me that before. I think there wasn’t anything about the character or Carrie’s performance in that film that made me think she was perfect to play Kathy other than this general astonishment at how good she was and that you had the sense that if she wanted to play anything she would be great. She could have played one of the automobiles in the film. So it was just a general holy crap, this girl is astonishing. And I felt that she could resemble Kathy and that she was the right age and type and was English. It was a general astonishment and the rest of the world then was kind of astonished equally.
 
(Carey Mulligan): Besides the physicality you get a real sense of the specific emotional intelligence of this character. The way there are varying degrees of maturity and that to me made me think you could do that. You just bring something to this that I didn’t see in the book. Kazuo is extremely flattering about how he felt the performances in this film are so dimensional and so detailed that he learned things about the characters that he himself didn’t understand and didn’t know, even as the creator.
 
(Q): You focus mainly on the love story and the human condition and avoid the explanation of the scientific elements. Talk about the challenge of not showing the audience to focus mainly on the love story.
 
(Mark Romanek: If you ask Kazuo about this he’ll tell you that he only originally wanted to write a book about young people whose lives were going to be truncated for some reason. And the reason he wanted to do that is he felt he wanted to write a novel about this big idea, that we are all going to die, and when we can’t push that knowledge to the back of our minds anymore what becomes important in our lives and how do we decide that we’re going to spend our limited time. And that the science-fiction conceit of the film was something that came very, very late, and it could have been cloning, and at one point he considered that they were exposed to radiation.

He just wanted to take a human lifespan and as he puts it, concertina it into 25 or 30 years. He thought all of those very human themes about mortality would become more pressing and more dramatic. So we were never setting out to make a science-fiction film, that science-fiction idea was always like a delivery system for these bigger notions. And my emotional connection to the book, and I think most people’s emotional connection to the book is the love story. It’s the most relatable thing and perhaps the most engaging and engrossing aspect of it for a film, so we all collectively made a decision that we were making a love story. I had auditioned for the job too, and I think one of the first words out of my mouth were this is a love story, it’s not a science-fiction film, and I think that maybe was a huge step in them saying okay, maybe this guy could have this job.

And Kazuo in the book does not detail all of the technical details of how the cloning program works. There’s not a lot about the ethics of biotechnology or any of that stuff; it’s not really that important to him. And that’s why he doesn’t care that people go into the film and they know the little secret of the film that gets revealed in the first act, which is these are in fact clones. He wants that out of the way so you can engage with the film with your heart, not so much with your head.
 
(Q): His books are often about that collateral damage of people who live on the outsides of bigger societies and just have to make their own way. We get to learn a little about these worlds and the way people deal with it.
 
(Mark Romanek: Kazuo talks a lot also about that we all live in our little bubble and we only have a limited perspective really on everything, and a lot of his books are about when that perspective is jarringly widened for someone and they see the truth of their situation and have to confront all of their regrets and lost time. It’s very poignant themes that he’s working on in all his books.
 
(Q): Mark, when you read the book were there any images that stuck with you that we were determined to get in the movie? And as a parent now did you make any choices based on that that you wouldn’t have earlier?
 
(Mark Romanek: Yeah, there were a dozen really iconic images. The key image is really young Kathy holding onto this pillow listening to this old cassette tape of this song, “Never Let Me Go.” There’s a scene with a derelict boat on a beautiful beach, the boat’s been abandoned. Even things that aren’t so imagistic, but the scene when Tommy and Kathy go to ask their old guardians for a deferral so they can have more time together; that scene was very clear in my mind.

People say it’s a hard book to adapt and it’s very internal and everything, but if you read the book it’s filled with super cinematic set pieces and images. The thing about being a parent, it just changes you. I think your spectrum of emotions that you didn’t know you could feel get massively widened by having children and you sort of soften up a bit and you’re more in touch with your emotions, and I’m sure that affected how I did this film in some fashion. I’m certainly a different person pre-parenthood and post-parenthood.
 
(Q): Were there scenes for you, Carrie that equally affected you from the book that you carry with you?
 
(Carey Mulligan): Yeah, there were lines that used to stick in my head. There’s the one that I always wanted us to do but we didn’t have any time, the “Oh, it’s a shame, Kath.” There’s a bit in the book, there was no place for it in the film because once they’ve been to Madame at the end and they’ve discovered about the deferrals, after that we changed the novel very slightly in that Tommy then asked Kathy to not be his carer anymore, and in the film that’s different. And in that scene he says “I feel like we’re these two people standing in a river somewhere and the river’s raging around us and we’re trying desperately to hold on to each other but we can’t.

And it’s a shame, Kath because we’ve loved each other all our lives but in the end we can’t be together.” And it always used to just run through my mind and really kind of break my heart every time I thought about it and it always brought be back to the book. There’s another line in the scene where they’re talking about having a soul, and Charlotte Rampling’s characters says “We needed to see if you had souls at all,” and Kathy says “Why would anyone think we wouldn’t have a soul?” and the innocence of that question always used to haunt me. So it was more stuff that surrounded the scenes that we did have that would always stay in my head.

(Mark Romanek: I loved the image too of them holding on to each other in a raging river or something, but I feel like we kind of got a version of that.
 
(Q): That feels like basically the subtext of your performance.
 
(Q): For Carrie. Now that you’ve done a few movies based on books do you find that you really enjoy having all of the character’s thoughts right there in your hand, or do you think it takes some of the work out or makes it harder for you to make your own decision?
 
(Carey Mulligan): I love it. It’s more pressure when it’s a modern novel, because Jane Austen can’t bollock me. So with Kazuo when I met him I was terrified because I thought if I’m not everything or anything that you imagined when you wrote Kathy then how awful for you, and I could get fired, how awful for me. But I loved it. Especially with this, having a book to go back to, and especially one that has all that detail and is written so beautifully, and I loved rereading it. It’s a different challenge when you don’t have anything but it doesn’t mean you’re more inventive or less inventive.
 
(Q): There was a recent article by A.O. Scott in the “Times” about how tv might be surpassing film as a storytelling medium thanks to shows like “The Wire,” “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood,” “Mad Men.” I was just wondering how you feel about the fact that maybe tv is possibly changing the way people view movies versus tv.
 
(Mark Romanek: Yeah. I mean I think there’s a place for the scale of both of those things. There’s a long tradition of a story that can beautifully told in two, two and a half hours. I remember reading an interview with Stanley Kubrick where he was really excited about the notion of doing television simply because he didn’t have to try to cram everything in and nothing had to be left out. You could have everything and let it play out and be rich, and that’s what some of these very, very good shows are doing. It does seem like with HBO though that the level of seriousness and sophistication to not only the acting and the storytelling but the filmmaking is now like you’re watching a 30 hour film, and it does seem like a new thing and it’s exciting. I don’t think one’s better than another.
 
(Q): You’ve done a lot of television. In terms of preparation time you don’t get that in television. You wouldn’t get a two week rehearsal period.
 
(Carey Mulligan): I mean it depends. With television I always played supporting characters. I did a tv series called “Bleak House,” which is a Dickens thing that was six months shooting. You get to a point where you feel really, really comfortable in your character and sometimes that can be more fun. I wouldn’t want to do something continuously, but it’s nice to play a character to a point where you’re just intuitive all the time. I love doing tv; I don’t really see a difference.

End.