Director James Hawes talks about the challenge of bringing an extraordinary – and true – story to the screen in One Life.
This article originally appeared in Film Stories issue 47.
The incredible story of Sir Nicholas Winton – a man who arranged for the safe evacuation of more than 650 children who were otherwise headed to Nazi death camps during World War II – is one that people may be aware of through one of three avenues.
There are the select few who knew what Winton was doing at the time – a small circle of family friends and colleagues involved in arranging the evacuation.
For far more people it took almost 50 years for the wider public to learn what he’d done, courtesy of a segment in the Sunday night BBC One magazine programme That’s Life! This was a hugely popular show that’d go from a dog saying “sausages” one moment to a deathly serious story the next. It was there that host Esther Rantzen explained the heroics of Winton and the people around him.
YouTube
More likely though, people know the story from a two-minute clip of that episode. A clip that saw Winton sat in the studio audience, and his stunned reaction when he learned that the people seated around him wouldn’t have been on the planet any more if it weren’t for him. On YouTube alone where it particularly went viral variants of the clip have attracted tens of millions of views, and it’s from there that most people have since learned of what Winton did.
Which presents a challenge for the people behind the new big screen telling of Winton’s story, One Life. After all, which audience do you cater for? The people who know a lot, the people who know what they saw in one clip, or the people who know nothing of the story at all. Do you have to assume that people are coming to it fresh?
“Yes,” asserts the film’s director, James Hawes. Hawes is an experienced director of television, but here he’s making his feature film debut. Referring to the viral clip, he adds that “the strength of that moment is that it gives an emotional character story, and a narrative story a really satisfying conclusion”.
Still, there inevitably needs to be more. “You’ve also got to then thread back from that. Having given our story, our film, a very good end, what are the stages that lead up to that? And I think the art in the movie has been interweaving the 1930s and the 1980s, and having those two stories inform and flatter each other.”
Timesplitters
One Life, then, is a telling of Winton’s story told across dual time frames.
In 1930s Czechoslovakia (as it was known then), Johnny Flynn plays Winton, as we see the efforts to evacuate the hundreds of children come together.
Then, in the 1980s, Anthony Hopkins steps into his cardigan to explore the story around the That’s Life! moment.
On paper, that sounds like an interesting way to approach the film. I do put to Hawes that in practicality, that presumably meant he was making effectively two different films, in two different periods of time, with two different casts, who presumably were working in two different languages? He nods, his face betraying not a jot of how difficult that may have been. And in a 30-35 day period? “32 days,” he grins.
“We shot the later stuff first with Tony, partly because it’s Anthony Hopkins. And he put a huge amount of work into the more visible, more familiar version of Nicky Winton. Because obviously there was much less of the younger man. [Hopkins] worked on what the voice was, what some of the movements and gestures were. Which meant that our wonderful Johnny Flynn, who is absolutely the [sort of] actor that would embrace and relish this opportunity, he came to the set to watch the work, and watch the dailies.”
By watching Hopkins shoot his footage, it meant that Flynn could then come to his scenes with an idea of how to play the younger version of the character. An advantage of the tight shoot meant that filming both parts of the movie was pretty much constained to a month.
Read more: One Life review: Nicholas Winton’s extraordinary life story brought to the screen
True faces
The casting, though, is clearly strong. The danger with a project such as One Life is that you could, in theory, end up with a lead actor being a mimic rather than building a character. And then the other lead actor would, in effect, become a mimic of the mimic.
“You’re absolutely right about mimicry,” says Hawes. “That way, performance dies. It has to be built from the inside out rather than with affectations on the outside. I think they both managed to do that. By building again: what does the character feel in any given scene? What does the character need in any given scene? One of the things that could have been a bump, the cutting between the two Nickys, is fairly fluid.”
If the filming was relatively brisk, the editing certainly wasn’t. “A lot of the intercutting [between time periods] during the edit wasn’t scripted. What we discovered in the editorial process was that once you started moving from the 1930s to the 1980s more often, you develop some mysteries.” That in turn made the editing more complex but, in the end, the film that bit richer. It’s quite a lot for its director to reflect on.
Bigger screen
It’s been quite the journey for Hawes, whose screen work crosses three decades, to make his film. “In the deep darkest past, I grew up wanting to direct movies, because they had a magic about them – because frankly, way back when, television did not always have [that],” he admits.
There was something of a turning point for him though when he made a film with Helena Bonham Carter (who has a supporting role in One Life) called Enid, about the story of Enid Blyton. It was part of a range of BBC Four television movies that were attracting film actors to television projects. In the 2010s, this became the norm, “and suddenly television became the sexy place to be. You had resources, you had scale, you had cast.”
Film meanwhile was struggling a little, and Hawes admits that when he was making episodes of something like Black Mirror or Slow Horses, he wasn’t yearning for cinema. What he was putting on screen was more than scratching that itch.
But then he got a call. “When [producer] Ian Canning comes to you and says ‘you used to do true stories, and there’s this one, and Tony Hopkins may want to do it’… it was just begging to be done, and I feel truly humbled that the opportunity came my way.”
Lifeline
That call came in the autumn of 2021, when Hawes was in post-production on Slow Horses for Apple. The script had been completed for One Life by that stage too, “but then the writers pause and wait to see who the director is, and what they want to bring with it.”
Hawes wanted to slightly beef up the thriller-y aspects of the story once he’d absorbed the material, and to also develop the character arc of Hopkins’s take on Winton. He worked in collaboration with the screenwriters, Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, who had taken Barbara Winton’s book about her father as their source (Barbara Winton would pass whilst the film was in post-production). They still came up with a screenplay for a film that’d tightly clock in at comfortably under two hours.
I put to Hawes recent comments made by Alice Troughton, who herself after decades of television work recently directed her first feature, The Lesson (more on that in issue 46). Troughton admitted in interviews that she didn’t find making a film as difficult as she was expecting, having experienced the pace and demands of TV work. Hawes nods, not quite co-signing Troughton’s comments, but admitting that the long path to this point has helped enormously.
“I grew up in documentaries,” Hawes tells me, sat in front of bookshelves in his own home that seem creaking with books and unmade scripts. “But in early days, I was also working in fringe theatre and touring that at the same time. I was developing my ambitions to work with actors alongside the work that paid a monthly cheque.
“As you know, there’s no direct career path that anybody can say is a way to directing high end television or feature film. I’ve dabbled in historical drama, in sci fi and near future fiction, which I particularly enjoyed, and I’ve done a few TV movies based on real life and real events.”
All experience that would serve him well when it came to the demands of One Life.
Family life?
As our conversation draws to a close, I quiz Hawes on whether he’s deliberately made One Life as a film that a family could watch together. Whilst it’s not one I’d recommend for younger children, it’s likely to go out with a 12A certificate, and is surprisingly the kind of feature that I’m personally considering taking my own children to see.
Hawes seems delighted by this, and tells me that at the cast and crew screening of the film, some of those who worked on it brought along their own children too. It wasn’t necessarily by design, but the way he and the writers felt, ultimately, the story should be told.
As we sign off, I ask him about his second feature, The Amateur. Starring Rami Malek, it’s a thriller that got halfway through filming before the actors’ strike began in Hollywood. Now that the long running strike is over, he’s got a deadline to hit on that.
In the meantime, there are now four ways that people are likely to have heard of the story of Nicholas Winton. And the film One Life does his legacy proud.
