Benedict Andrews on abuse drama Una and moving from theatre to film

‘The fact there’s sexual desire mixed up with the guilt and abuse makes everything uncomfortable’

Rooney Mara plays the title character who confronts her abuser 15 years on. ‘We‘re sending people’s moral compasses spinning, but that’s also the heart of the matter,’ says director Andrews

There are few directors who boast as an impressive CV as Benedict Andrews. Having worked extensively in theatre and opera, the Australian has helmed numerous high-profile performances, including A Streetcar Named Desire (with Gillian Anderson and Ben Foster), a two-night, eight-hour version of Shakespeare’s “Wars of the Roses” cycle (featuring Cate Blanchett and Pamela Rabe as Richard II and Richard III, respectively), and the 2015 Laurence Olivier Award-nominated La bohème production.

Now comes his latest project, a filmed adaptation of David Harrower’s harrowing play Blackbird, a chamber drama about a young woman meeting a man who sexually abused her 15 years prior. Renamed Una, the feature film debuted last year at the Telluride Film Festival to critical success, leading actors Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn receiving huge amounts of praise.

Sitting down with The Independent, Andrews spoke about why Blackbird was particularly suited to film and the difficulties of learning a new craft.

JS: Hey, Benedict. I watched your film yesterday, the day after getting back from a holiday.

BA: And it spoilt it?

JS: Not quite!

BA: It’s a tough watch.

JS: Was it tough to make?

BA: No, not necessarily. It was tough to wrestle the story down, trying to keep the characters and the storytelling on a knife edge. In terms of both the questions we ask about them, and particularly about him; It’s the essential question of love and abuse. If he’s a good man or a serial abuser. To not solve those questions, to leave them swinging in the balance, and get uncomfortable close to them was hard. Of course, to go into that material day-to-day, it’s tough but that’s why I’m a theatre and film director, you want to go into those tough emotional spaces. Some of it’s hard to shape, but you approach everything with a huge amount of humour and generosity on set. I find that exciting, to go into those spaces. This story may deal with a lot of pain and the consequences from a catastrophic relationship, but it’s the same when you’re directing a tragic play.

Andrews (left) with ‘Blackbird’ author David Harrower and Rooney Mara (Rex) (REX)

JS: Watching the film, there’s a moral ambiguity regarding whether Ben Mendelson’s character was right or wrong. Did that seem almost dangerous to put out?

BA: I think that’s the attraction of the material. It’s about a genuine ambivalent space, both in the specifics or the story and what I understand about the survivors of abuse. Legally, that’s all black and white, which is completely right, it should be black and white. But, emotionally, the experience of it can be very ambivalent and confusing. The film’s about confronting that. It’s her question all the time; was I the only one? Was this love or abuse? Those things have become so mixed up. If you told that in an easy way, providing the audience with answers they already have. They probably have thoughts, perhaps being like the father wanting to kill the abuser. I understand that, but she doesn’t feel like that. On one hand she feels like that, but on the other she wants him to desire her. That’s pretty mixed up. We explore that ambivalent space and ask the audience to confront that without ever condoning what happened. On one hand, it’s clearly grooming – and the film’s aware of that. They’re unpacking those questions. The power also comes from how they can’t talk to anyone else in the world about this. She’s had something that’s ripping her apart, not allowing her to go on with her life, to be haunted by this. The only way to go beyond is by confronting him, to being to heal and understand. That’s what’s very uncomfortable. And she’s not just an avenger. It would be a nicer version where she’s just there to seek retribution and seek punishment for that crime. Some of the time, it’s like that. At others, she seems to be seducing him, or wanting to be desired by him. The fact there’s sexual desire mixed up with the guilt and abuse makes everything uncomfortable, sending people’s moral compasses spinning, but that’s also the heart of the matter.

JS: With Una being based on the play Blackbird, why did you think the story would be better suited for the screen? Or did you?

BA: I don’t know about better. I directed the play in 2005. It was a good production and there will continue to be good productions as it’s one of the great chamber plays of the 20th century. I wanted this to become its own thing. I don’t need to film theatre, I do theatre anyway. Film is something else, and I wanted this to exist purely as a unique piece of cinema, at times a piece of visionary cinema. Here, there’s the complexity of their relationship, and the camera allows us to explore that closer. Where the theatre production is a boxing match between these two characters, the cinema opens up the silence, where a quiver of Rooney’s lips says everything. You could never do that in the theatre. The other thing, and the essential idea, which I don’t mean to sound intellectual in any way, is to do with the experience of time. This is a story about two people who haven’t seen each other for 15 years, and that experience unlocks the past. There’s the idea that we carry the cells of memory in our body – a filmed representation of our lives – and the most traumatic, dramatic and extreme are really most burnt into ourselves. We carry a huge databank of the cinema of our lives. We invented this thing, cinema, to replicate what memory does. Here, the story looks at the scars left behind by something and looks at how the past cuts into the present. In the more obvious way, that’s the flashbacks; these two people stuck in these ugly rooms with cuts to the past. But it’s also the experience of the camera floating around them, studying them. A key film was Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, a beautiful film about two survivors, one of the Hiroshima bombing and a French woman who collaborated with a German soldier in the Second World War. It’s about how the past intrudes on the present, and the theatre can’t do any of that. If we see anything, it’s because of the words spoken onto the screens of our imaginations.

JS: Moving from the theatre into cinema, there seem to be two ways you can go. Either it’s liberating, being able to explore multiple avenues, or you become tangled by perfection, labouring over every frame.

BA: I couldn’t say it’s either of those things. Everything you make is a creative struggle with what you have, whether writing a poem, novel, or film. I mean that by the final days of rehearsing a play, I could give them notes. All those winds that go through, leading to a raw, exciting performance. It’s about setting a tightrope for yourself, whatever you’re doing. I’m trying to set that for the actors in a play and for the audience, so they feel “this is not a given”. Every night the audience come out and watch Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, I want them to feel that “they drop the ball, this could all fall apart”. It’s similar with this, whether that [tightrope]’s you’ve only got 26 days to shoot; you only have an actor for a certain amount of days; you only have one hour left to shoot. One of the most powerful moments in the film happens when the young Una goes into the bushes. We were at the end of the day and with a young child actress you cannot go into overtime. We had been planning the coverage for hours longer than we had, so we had 17 minutes [left]. We then had to plan how to film everything in two long takes in 17 minutes. That necessity, where you know what you’re after but there’s an emergency and improvisation, that gives birth to something truly unique. If we had done the conventional shot structure it could have been less interesting. We’re always chasing down the film and play. You’re chasing down the same thing but with rigour, rawness, and improvisation. Those are the forces you need to create something lasting into the world. You need to create that state and intensity.

JS: From a viewer’s perspective, you never think about only having actors for a select number of days!

BA: That’s all part of it. Filmmaking is like making that cathedral [points out of the window towards a huge spire]. How do you get that spire up there? All the people who have to work getting the cross atop there. All the technology and effort that was put in, the money, how to work around that, it’s all very exciting and different to making theatre or opera where I know the mechanics. Learning something new has been very exciting.

JS: I’m guessing there was a lot of trial and error?

BA: Learning on the job, for sure. But I felt I was drawing on the same muscles as a theatre maker. It felt very natural. Next time, having that all under my belt and discovering things I didn’t know, will help immensely. The first day was the first time I’ve ever been on a film set. I’ve used cameras in the theatre, but that’s completely different.

JS: That must be hugely exciting, learning a new craft, and doing so after being so established.

BA: I get a huge kick out of the craft, even writing the screenplay. That script acts as a blueprint, and learning how the process works was exciting. They say you make the film three times – once when writing, once when filming, and once in the cutting room. Beforehand, I would have said that’s not true. Everyone loved the script but then we reinvented everything when shooting, for practical reasons or improvisation. Then everything changed again while editing. They were all different temperatures, which was very unlike theatre.

JS: Which step did you prefer?

BA: I really loved the editing process. It can be really fraught. You’re only working with what you’ve got, so you’re almost puzzle solving. There’s creativity within restrictions, which I really love. With shooting, I loved the adrenaline of that. It’s so close to the experience of lucid dreaming. You find yourself at three o’clock in the morning, all these people sitting around you, the room wallpapered the way you and your team talked about. You’re like, “how the f**k did this happen? This came out of our brains!” When you go to the theatre, it’s a little like that, you’ve made your own imaginary world or strange version of reality. You always want the theatre to feel like a dream, in a way. But here we were literally there. I got a real kick out of that. You can see why people get addicted to that, because the high is so intense while the editing is the comedown.

JS: Which have you found more rewarding, coming out with a film or theatre production?

BA: I really can’t say. Coming out with Una was incredibly rewarding, and coming out via baptism by fire was incredibly rewarding. It feels like the beginning of a new journey. I’m not really in the comparison game with it. They are both seared inside me, and I hope the audience. There will be other shows – hopefully not films – where you feel it’s not quite there, but you’re in the process of getting everything there. Now, I can go into film with the reassurance that I’ve carved out a home in the theatre. Just because I have that doesn’t mean I have to be there every day. That’s a soul place I can always return to, and have an immense gratification working on great literature. When you’re young you’re hungry all the time, but now I know that’s not going to go away. That’s a beautiful thing. Having done one film, I really want to dedicate a lot of time dedicated to film, exploring filmmaking, flexing my muscles as a filmmaker.

JS: When you were working with these two central performances, was anything different to the theatre?

BA: For the theatre, we rehearse the shit out of everything for eight weeks, going through all the possibilities so they can do that in front of an audience. I didn’t want to do that in a film. As it’s about two people meeting after 15 years apart, I wanted to capture the shock of that meeting, and the rawness of that shock. If that happened in the rehearsal room rather than with a camera there we couldn’t live with ourselves. I wanted to preserve that. So, I spoke with the two actors but didn’t really rehearse that. When filming, I would draw on the experience from the rehearsal room, to guide them towards those exposing places. That would happen between takes, speaking to both of them, whispering in one’s ear. We were really hammering it. Of course, the biggest difference was the performance in cinema is made in the editing room. You have the raw materials, but unless you’re doing just one take, that performance is being built from what you’ve gathered. That doesn’t mean one’s better, but those circumstances are so different.

‘Una’ is in UK cinemas now.