Jon Amiel, Director of “Creation”

Jon Amiel insists he never wanted to make this story. Creation, the new-in-theaters picture chronicling the story of Charles Darwin and his masterwork, On The Origin of Species, is everything Amiel never wanted to direct – a period piece, a biopic, et al. But when a compelling story presents itself, Amiel knew enough to abandon any misgivings and pursue the dramatic story line.

Featuring a star-studded cast anchored by Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, Amiel held some promising cards in his hand to play during the six-week shoot. Yet it was the honest, tender story of Darwin as father and husband that drew Amiel in the deepest, and it’s to those ends that Creation largely unfolds. Here, Amiel tells SSv about the unexpected journey required to helm the project, how Bettany and Darwin are practically kin, and the beauty (and rarity) of working with an intelligent leading man.

SSv: Before you were approached with the story, what most about it appealed to you?

Jon Amiel: Well, I should be honest and say that before I was approached by my friend, the writer John Collee, with Randall Keynes’ book, which is now called Creation, I had no great interest in Charles Darwin than the average person. My first response was, ‘Absolutely not!’ I had no interest in making a biopic. I don’t even like them. Chronology is not plot, so the fact that someone led an interesting life does not an interesting movie make. I had no desire to make a documentary, one of those reverential pictures of some latter-day saint. I didn’t even particularly want to make a period film.

So it was with great skepticism, honestly, that I started reading Keynes’ book. What changed my mind really was Darwin himself. It wasn’t so much what anybody had written about him, but it was in his letters and diaries and the correspondences between him and Anna Darwin. It was in the recollections of his children about him as a father that increasingly changed my mind. Firstly, I had no idea that this was such an emotional man. He’s so often held up as this remote, distant figure with a huge beard. It never occurred to me that he was young once and was quite handsome, and actually looked quite identical to Paul Bettany.

SSv: Really?

Jon: Yes, he was extraordinarily a very contemporary kind of father. He was very hands-on with his kids. Very laissez-faire with them – didn’t care what they wore, let them run wild, greatly believed in playing with them and looking after them when they’re sick.

So I started to get to know this completely different human being from anybody that I’d expected by the great edifice that is Charles Darwin. Not only did I come to like him, but I gradually grew to even love him. I think he was truly a beautiful human being. In his relationship with a child, I saw lessons for all parents. In his relationship with his wife, Emma, I saw inspiration really for all of us who deal with… we might have fundamental differences with our spouses, and yet we can with love and understanding and a little compromise come to a happy and peaceful co-existence. The relationship between Charles and Emma gave me something inspiring for us all.

SSv: With everything that was admirable, was there something that personally resonated with you the most?

Jon: Yes, it was really Darwin’s relationship with Annie, his 10-year-old daughter, that first drew me in. She died when she was 10 and she was his absolute utter darling. Her death completely devastated him. I think in the account of that relationship, reading the things he wrote about her, the letters he wrote to Emma and she to him while Annie was sick, the incredible personal care and attention he put into Annie’s medical care… in all of that, I saw the nuclear reactor, in a sense, that could drive a film.

SSv: Your reluctance to want to take this on, as you said earlier, is so interesting, but did you find that an advantage in some ways? In other words, not wanting to make a period piece or biopic, did that help you approach this as an outsider of sorts?

Jon: Yeah, I think so. When John Collee and I first sat down, we sat down to say all of the things we didn’t want to do. I was very vociferous about that. I listed all of those things. Having said that, we made a few choices that were so liberating to me as a filmmaker. I didn’t have to tell the story in a linear way, because to me, chronology was very limiting in Charles’ story. Choosing instead to focus on one year of his life when he’s girding his loins to write Origin and telling the rest of whatever else we needed in flashback was enormously liberating.

Secondly, the decision to visually dramatize his stories to his children immediately meant that we could break out of the confines of your traditional country cottage period movie. We all know what those look like. So we could take the audience to all of these interesting places like Borneo and Tierra Del Fuego.

Even more importantly I think was the decision to dramatize not only his stories but his dreams and his nightmares. That gave us the visual texture of the film. It’s also a very powerful visual way not only to take the audience to his ideas, because a couple of the sequences in there are based on passages in The Origin of Species, but also into his emotions.

SSv: I know you mentioned your friendship with John Collee, but how were you earmarked as a possible director for Creation in the first place?

Jon: Well, yes, he’s a good friend of mine and we’ve wanted to work together for some time. He sent me the book and said, ‘Do you think there’s a movie in this?’ That literally was how it started. Once John and I talked a bit and established a few very basic parameters of our story, I went to Jeremy Thomas, the producer, and said, ‘Here’s our idea. What do you think?’ To his enormous credit, and my gratitude, he basically said ‘yes’ after a 10-minute verbal pitch. Then he financed the writing of the script. Many, many games of ping-pong ensued, [Laughs] where John Collee and I fleshed out the structure of this story.

SSv: I just ask because you’d think that John [Collee] would have been looking for a director who specialized in these kinds of pictures or was at least interested.

Jon: You know, I have to say that this film could only have been made with a lot of trust and shared belief between the producer and writer and director. It really came to pass because Jeremy Thomas is rare among producers. He respects filmmakers, how unusual. [Laughs] He actually likes them. He’s not intimidated by them, and he let’s them do their work. John Collee and I worked together like brothers on this, and I think we both challenged each other to push the envelope on this. The fact that I’d made The Singing Detective some years back taught me a lot of lessons. Dennis Potter taught me how to be freer and more courageous in the telling of this kind of story.

SSv: When you work with such a loaded cast, was there one actor/actress that actually surprised you the most?

Jon: Well, the little newcomer Martha West really astonished me with what she did. When you work with kids, especially kids who’ve never acted before, and even though she’s the daughter of Dominic West [The Wire], she’d never acted before, there’s always an element of blind date. You can believe a kid can act. You can believe they’ve got the temperament to survive the hardships of a six-week shoot. But you don’t know until you get them on camera quite how they’re going to respond. So I was absolutely ecstatic really about the work that Martha West did in this film.

SSv: I wondered about your thoughts on Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin and specifically his ability to channel what you pictured as you and John Collee were playing ping-pong?

Jon: People will always tell you in these interview, ‘Oh, the only person I’d ever thought of for this role was Paul Bettany.’ Frequently, you then discover he was number eight on the list. In this particular instance, it is completely true. It was always Paul.

SSv: Is that from John’s previous work on Master and Commander?

Jon: Slightly, yes. But the fact of the matter is, if you look at a picture of young Charles Darwin and there’s a famous portrait of him by George Richmond of Darwin in his late-twenties, the similarity to Paul is astonishing. Like Paul, Darwin was 6′2″, slightly gawky and angular, very fair complexion with high coloring – he would flush or blush quite regularly. He had a very high forehead. So Paul physically was perfect for him. He was also British, so he could understand the idiom very regularly.

Paul had something that I’m afraid to say is rather rare among our leading men, which is an acute intelligence and the ability to explore a passage of thought rather convincingly. How many times have we watched on television or the movies some hunky leading male with perfect pecs put on a pair of glasses and given a bit of smart dialogue to enunciate and we’re supposed to believe that he’s a nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize winner? It’s rather absurd frequently. But Paul has the ability to utterly make us believe that he really believes the thoughts that he’s expressing.

Tagged as: biopic, Charles Darwin, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Amiel, Paul Bettany

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