‘My Summer of Love’ didn’t happen by accident, its director and star say

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, June 16, 2005

For its premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival in May, “My Summer of Love” was accompanied by director Pawel Pawlikowski and actress Emily Blunt. The latter is the darker half of the movie’s intense actress tandem, along with Natalie Press; the film’s success in Britain has already made the relatively unknown performers into hot properties.

For the story about two teenage girls sharing a hothouse friendship, the actresses and their Polish-born director had to create a peculiar level of intimacy in the acting. When I met them for an interview in a blank-slate hotel conference room, I began by asking about this process – after, that is, Ms. Blunt fixed my balky tape recorder.

Question: Most movies don’t reach this level of intimacy between actors. Can you talk about how you get that?

Emily Blunt: I think Natalie and I are very different people, with such contrasting personalities, and I think that was necessary to get that spark and chemistry between these two girls. When we first met, in the audition, we tried some scenes and ran around this house with a video camera, and it just seemed very effortless, and that we could be creative together. There was a spark there from very early on.

Pawel Pawlikowski: Both actresses have great energy, very quick on the uptake. So we can all the time tweak things, add little quirks, make sure there’s always some business, some detail, something that they can play with. So it doesn’t feel like it’s some kind of written thing that’s being enacted by professionals. … It’s all trying to make it feel real and interesting at the same time.

Question: How do you create that atmosphere on the set?

Pawlikowski: It was intimate. I don’t believe in shouting on the set. Basically it was a kind of whispered set.

Blunt: It was hushed. … Let’s say for a scene where Natalie and I are in bed and we’re just talking, we were given time beforehand to get into that kind of mood – you know the mood was so important because it’s a moody, atmospheric film. You can’t just get that on a time limit … if you have a producer there pointing at his watch, you’re never going to hit it, you know? When you watch the film you can kind of tell how much time we were given, do you know what I mean?

Question: Did you also rehearse the film before you got to the set?

Pawlikowski: Yes, we rehearsed it, workshopped it, left some things open – we kind of lived it. It was like creating a little pool –

Blunt: – of ideas, of moments, and quirky one-liners –

Pawlikowski: – and the good ones will come back and work their way into the scenes. The text was kind of like a blueprint – well, more than a blueprint, a structure – it was kind of a like working on a painting, you do the general shape of things, then you leave some spaces where you add a little more color later and try this and that. In other words, you could say it was organic. … I’ve worked out this way of working from previous films, that when I write a story or select a story I make sure I can tell it visually without too much information having to be told in dialogue. And also that every character’s journey is kind of straightforward. Because complexity doesn’t come from the story, it comes from the characters. The characters can really come into their own, they don’t have to become pawns in a plot.

Question: Along with not relying on dialogue, how did you create the rich look of the film?

Pawlikowski: You find the world of the film. I tend to drive around a lot and take snaps in different parts of the country –

Blunt: You go on hikes. Like climbing over fences –

Pawlikowski: My sound man lives around there (Yorkshire), so he gave me all the maps. Oh, I took you on a hike –

Blunt: Yeah, you did. I was wearing really inappropriate flip-flops or something, I was slipping over in the mud.

Pawlikowski: And those walks actually help you think the film as well. There’s a sort of meditative thing about walking in your future location, and finding things, and falling in love with the place.

Blunt: The whole area is just so eccentric. It’s such an extreme sort of place.

Pawlikowski: And it’s an area that was heavily fought over in the War of the Roses, in the religious wars. The Industrial Revolution came and went, and now Nature sort of creeps back in a little bit. It’s kind of a weird place.

Blunt: Strange vibe to it.

Question: The music by Goldfrapp has a great deal to do with the mood.

Pawlikowski: They were suggested to me while I was editing. Somebody gave me the record of “Felt Mountain.” They were kind of eerie and melodious and yet off-key and disturbing at the same time. A bit like the film. They’re very aware of film music from the ’60s – they’re even aware of a Polish composer I really like, Krzystof Komeda, who did music for Polanski, and Burt Bacharach, and all sorts of stuff sort of filters in, but in an interesting way.

Question: The film has done very well in Britain.

Pawlikowski: It’s exceeded our expectations.

Blunt: People have been moved by it. It’s a very thought-provoking film, because it is ambiguous, it is true to life. So that’s the main thing – it’s moved people more than I expected it to.