Kate Beckinsale on The Face of an Angel: ‘Without journalists, we live in a police state’
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Version 0 of 1. There’s an early scene in The Face of an Angel where Kate Beckinsale and Daniel Brühl swig espresso in a scenic Roman square. As a troupe of street performers seem to levitate behind them, the pair discuss their plan to observe a murder trial in Siena. “If you’re going to make the film, make it a fiction,” Beckinsale’s seasoned journalist Simone tells Thomas, the dissolute director played by Brühl. “You can’t tell the truth unless you make it a fiction.” Brühl furrows his brows and concurs. Related: How can a feature film about Amanda Knox ring more true than the news? It is possible to see Thomas as a surrogate for Michael Winterbottom. And while the director’s new film never mentions Meredith Kercher and Amanda Knox, it’s also possible to view The Face of an Angel as an attempt to address the truth of that infamous murder in Perugia nearly eight years ago. At least, it kind of is. But what might start out as a relatively straightforward dramatisation of the consequences of a killing soon becomes something else – a study of the modern habits of journalism, as well as a descent into madness. Plus, by the by, a rumination on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Among other things. “Obviously we’re aware that this film isn’t going to give people what they expect,” says Winterbottom, perched awkwardly on a sofa in Toronto’s Trump hotel. It’s the morning after The Face of an Angel premiered at the city’s film festival and the 53-year-old is talking 14 to the dozen. “The idea of the film starts off one way, and then every 10 minutes – as soon as you start to think, ‘Oh it’s going to go this way,’ – it changes. It goes from murder investigation to journalists and then journalists to struggling director and so on. I’m aware of that, and I’m hoping – to be honest – that these changes are part of what keep you watching, because you’re wondering how it’s going to end up. You’re aware that the film is disappearing off down an alleyway that you didn’t really want to go down, but you’ll keep going because you want to see what’s at the end.” Fans of Winterbottom’s work might not be too surprised by his discursive approach to one of the most talked-about crimes in recent memory. He is, after all, the man behind a film about a film of Tristram Shandy and The Trip, the BBC comedy that watches Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan sightsee while doing the same impressions over and over again. As a director he has also skipped happily between genres throughout his 22-film career. He followed 2008’s coming-of-age romance (and ghost story) Genova, with southern noir The Killer Inside Me. Straightforward isn’t really his thing. One of the objects of Winterbottom’s fascination in The Face of an Angel is the mores of the media. After Simone and Thomas head to Siena they are soon swallowed up by the small press pack who make their living peddling every small detail of the case. There are big-shot Americans, wheezing Italians and a strapping stringer for the Daily Mail who could charm the hind legs off a donkey. Related: Michael Winterbottom’s Meredith Kercher movie: revealing truths through fiction The caricatures of this dying breed (in Simone’s introductory gambit to Thomas she explains how a cushy number in Rome led to her covering an entire country for multiple media outlets) are robust, but not cold. There’s even a hint of admiration. Having been introduced to the details of the Kercher case through a book by Newsweek’s Barbie Latza Nadeau, the inspiration for Simone, Winterbottom took time to ingratiate himself with the hacks. “I met a lot of the journalists who covered the case: people from the British, Italian and American press and it’s not that they’re terrible people, I liked them,” he says. “They’re thoughtful people, they’re intelligent people, they’re trying to do their job the best they can. I think they were aware of the problems with the coverage but they just couldn’t find a way of addressing that problem within the system. It’s a market and it’s very clear that as a freelance you have to have something to sell. And that means discovering 10 minutes before everyone else that Amanda Knox is wearing a brown skirt.” Beckinsale, whose career to date has left her well-versed in the ways of the popular press, thinks the film is more of a study of a mode of journalism than anything else. “It was weird for me to be playing the journalist but I realised quickly how important it was for my character that people were giving her information. It isn’t just salacious, it isn’t just what she wore in court. And if we don’t have journalists we live in a police state. It’s also true that journalists and actors share some qualities. Say you’re having a terrible argument with your boyfriend and you’re breaking up. For an actor there’s this still slight distance where you’re observing the event, thinking: ‘This is what it looks and feels like to be breaking up with someone.’ I think that journalists have that same ability to step back and see things from a different perspective. That doesn’t necessarily make the journalist an arsehole, any more than it does the actor.” Alongside Beckinsale is Cara Delevingne, the model and ubiquitous face. She’s so ubiquitous that, even as I speak to Winterbottom, she’s in the same room, prancing, pinging her assistant’s bra and generally sucking up attention. Delevingne gives a winning performance as student Melanie, the object of Thomas’s increasingly morbid fascination. With her energy and wide-eyed charm, Melanie is the heart of the film. “I didn’t really know who she was”, says Winterbottom of Delevingne, “but as soon as I met her I knew she’d be perfect for it. I wanted someone who had that kind of energy and optimism, the sense of someone who wants to live life. People either have that quality or they don’t. But you can also have that spontaneity in real life and then not be able to portray it on screen. Cara was able to do that. The film is pretty much entirely scripted so she is acting, but it’s a quality of hers which she’s projecting. I think she’s like Julie Christie in that way: not an actor in the traditional sense but with a fantastic ability to project things on screen.“ As well as an optimistic counterpoint to Thomas’s gloom, Delevingne also acts as an important proxy, as she stands in for the absent victim at the heart of the film. “The Melanie character is the kind of person who’s been lost and all the things that have been lost because of the murder,” says Winterbottom. Ultimately, it’s this loss that the film-maker wants his audience to remember. “People want to get to know the people in the story but once they do there’s a soap opera about whether they go to prison or not. That I find pretty depressing. The whole point of this film is that you should try to remember the person who’s been killed. The Kercher family behaved incredibly honourably and they didn’t want Meredith to be forgotten. But amid all the books and all the media coverage, I think that disappears.” For Beckinsale, it’s clear that Winterbottom wanted to honour Kercher’s memory. “I think for Michael, it’s about love far more than it’s about Amanda Knox.” If people go to the cinema expecting a real life whodunnit, she acknowledges they’ll be disappointed. Taking a story that inspired frenzied fascination only to make a movie that deliberately defies those appetites? It sounds like typical Winterbottom. |