Based on Meg Rosoff’s popular novel, How I Live Now features Saoirse Ronan as Daisy, an American teenager sent by her father to stay with relatives in the English countryside. Initially withdrawn and alienated, Daisy begins to warm up to her beautiful surroundings and strikes up a romance with the handsome Edmund (George MacKay). But on the fringes of their idyllic summer days are tense news reports of an escalating conflict in Europe. As the UK falls into a violent, chaotic military state, Daisy and her young cousins, including Tom Holland and Harley Bird, find themselves fighting to survive.
Director Kevin Macdonald combines his experience as an award-winning documentarian (One Day in September, Touching the Void, Marley) with his creative approach to drama (The Last King of Scotland, State of Play) in this unusual story told almost entirely from the perspective of young people facing the unimaginable. Macdonald’s cinematic eye may be genetic — his grandfather was filmmaker Emeric Pressburger who is best known for his series of collaborations with director Michael Powell (The Red Shoes, 49th Parallel, Black Narcissus). When I sat down with Macdonald to discuss his latest film, I couldn’t resist talking about some of his grandfather’s films.
Danny Miller: I have to tell you that two of my all-time favorite films are your grandfather’s Stairway to Heaven with David Niven, Raymond Massey, and Kim Hunter, and I Know Where I’m Going! with Wendy Hiller.
Kevin Macdonald: Oh, that’s such a beautiful film, isn’t it?
Yes, and less known, for some reason, than a lot of the Powell-Pressburger films. But it’s Stairway to Heaven that reminds me more of your latest film — or did you grow up calling that by its original title?
Yes, we know it as A Matter of Life and Death.
Why did they change that for the American release?
Michael Powell used to love telling that story. They changed it because the marketing people in America were sure that no one would go see a film with the word “Death” in the title. (Laughs.)
Oy, I used to work for a publisher that wouldn’t let us use the word “Democracy” in a title — they thought that would be the death knell for the book! Anyway, there’s something about A Matter of Life and Death that was evoked in this film for me — that combination of fantasy juxtaposed against a gritty and harsh reality.
That’s interesting. The Powell-Pressburger film that I was most reminded of while making How I Live Now was a more obscure one called A Canterbury Tale from 1944. That one also evoked the magic and mystique of the English countryside, and it created a kind of faux history of England which felt very present in this film.
It’s funny — even though we see Daisy on her cell phone and we know that the film takes place in the near future or possibly a parallel present, it almost seemed like a period piece to me. Maybe because of my fantasies about English children in the countryside during World War II?
Yes, I wanted it to be sort of timeless and a bit like a fairy tale. It’s true that when we see kids in wartime, at least in Britain, we think of the children who were sent away from the cities into the countryside during the war. One of the references for me while making this film was definitely John Boorman’s Hope and Glory which is a beautiful film about how children react to war and how the freedom that war brings to children can be incredibly liberating.
Oh, right — Hope and Glory — that’s exactly where my fantasies about English children during World War II come from!
That’s something about this story that I loved — the fact that the kids are at their happiest right after the nuclear bomb goes off because they’re left to their own devices in the countryside enjoying themselves. That sort of contradiction with what’s happening is so interesting to me.
I love how the film is told exclusively from the point of view of the kids. It’s so interesting to not know what’s happening in the outside world even though there are moments like when we see Aunt Penn on her computer where I was straining to read the text on her screen to try and figure out what was going on! But it’s cool that we don’t know since the kids themselves probably wouldn’t either.
Exactly. Kids wouldn’t know, and they’d be bored by the geopolitics of it. Also, for me, ambiguity is always scarier. If you don’t know who those people are that are behind these events, you don’t know who’s your friend and who’s your enemy. It makes you very paranoid!
Right. And we don’t even know if this is maybe just an internal thing in the UK, do we?
No! I definitely didn’t want to identify the threat, or make it about specific groups, like Islamic fundamentalists, for example. I think we live in a time of anxiety, we live in a time where we don’t know where the next bomb is going to go off, who’s going to hijack the next plane, where the next war is going to start. And we feel very insecure about that. That’s why I think there are a lot of dystopian films being made at the moment, because there is so much anxiety in our culture, such a sense of vulnerability.
But did you privately have an idea of what was happening in England?
I did work out for myself what I imagined was going on. I needed to have the logic in my head of what had happened. I think you need to know a little more than the audience does!
Not to obsess on that great scene between the wonderful Saoirse Ronan and Aunt Penn, but did you all have a lot of discussion of what to put on the aunt’s computer screen?
We actually did! What we settled on was projections of deaths in different scenarios of the war. You can see those if you look quickly.
I’ll be pausing on that frame when I get the DVD! I also found the moment when the bomb goes off so fascinating to watch. How do you figure out how to show that? Did you consult with scientists?
Not at all! You know, we’ve seen destruction in so many movies — we’ve seen Manhattan destroyed bit by bit so many times. I thought it was a lot more interesting to be at a distance when the bomb goes off. Then it’s about the characters and how they’re coping with the situation rather than just being about the spectacle. I wanted it to be a visually striking scene that hopefully sends shivers down your spine, that interrupts this pastoral, bucolic idyll they’ve got going there. I liked the idea of the bomb creating this wall of wind that comes towards you and then having the ash that’s being brought in the wind coating everything in the countryside.
It’s such an interesting balance you have to strike in this film between the scenes of such beautiful, idyllic moments with some of the most brutal moments I’ve seen on film in a long time.
Oh God, really? The most brutal? (Laughs.) I think one of the things that really attracted me to this story is that it takes such a radical left turn. It starts out very beautiful and then goes somewhere very unexpected. It’s great giving an audience an experience where for once they really don’t know where they’re going.
How I Live Now is currently playing in select cities and is available on VOD.