How I nearly made it to the silver screen
Saoirse Ronan and Kevin Macdonald, star and director of How I Live Now
On one of those summer days last year when it never stopped raining, my mood was lifted by an out-of-the-blue email from a casting agent, asking me to play myself in a film.
How I Live Now was to be based on a bestselling novel of the same name by Meg Rosoff about a group of children who survive the dropping of a nuclear bomb.
“There is a role for a news reporter who announces a huge, unprecedented bomb attack on London,” the casting agent’s email said. “It’s a good weighty speech and Kevin is very interested in you doing this.”
“Kevin” turned out to be Kevin Macdonald, an Oscar and BAFTA award-winning film director, perhaps best known for The Last King of Scotland and Touching the Void. Television news reporting attracts big egos, so I read that sentence “Kevin is very interested in you doing this” more times than a smaller ego would.
I had visions of intense one-on-one sessions with Kevin, discussing my motivation for my role. At the premiere in Leicester Square, I would escort my wife down the red carpet and as the camera bulbs flashed we would marvel at my first film role, and how far we had come from that poky maisonette in Shepherd’s Bush where we’d first lived.
Reporting a nuclear holocaust, albeit fictional, was surely the biggest story of my career. Not many people get to report those. Mushroom cloud or not, the film company was offering the minimum day rate it pays extras, hardly adequate for the perfect harbinger of doom – but after brief negotiations involving my agent (well, me) this star-struck reporter quickly said yes.
My script arrived. “Please ignore the mention of a woman in an anorak!”, the accompanying note said. Even better, I thought: Kevin must have decided to write the woman in the anorak out of the script because he really wanted me instead. Kevin needed someone special to report nuclear oblivion. It wouldn’t be easy, breaking bad news like that to a terrified Britain. Not any hack in any old anorak would do.
Just before 6am one morning in mid-August, a black limousine pulled up outside my home to take me down to the film set, which turned out to be a garden centre near Guildford.
It wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind. My day job is as a foreign correspondent, a role in which garden centres do not often figure. You don’t need flak jackets or anti-stab vests amid the gladioli in Surrey, though cacti, I suppose, might prove difficult.
Still, my job was presumably to make the cinema-going public believe that a greenhouse in Surrey was in fact the safest site from which to report an apocalypse. Though I had only been sent one page of script – mine – so I couldn’t be entirely sure.
I found a bedraggled mix of technicians and actors in wellington boots mustering besides an outdoor tea urn. The film had just finished seven weeks of shooting scenes in Wales, where it had poured almost constantly, and everyone looked damp and glum.
A young man with a clipboard and chaotic ringlets of hair caught my eye. He looked like one of those students in the high street, collecting direct debit mandates for charity. “Are you Jonathan?,” he asked. It was Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning film director, clearly not recognising me from Channel 4 News at all.
A very busy woman with another clipboard showed me to my trailer and, to my astonishment, asked me what I wanted for breakfast. When she wasn’t looking, I took a photograph of the trailer with my phone. Otherwise my children would not believe any of this when I got home.
The make-up artists were working in a converted double decker bus, parked next door. They seemed so traumatised by the Welsh weather (all that mascara running for weeks on end) that I decided they would not be crossing the Bristol Channel in a hurry again.
Once I’d got off the bus, another black limo drove me to the set. The distance was about fifty metres, but the driver took it slowly, allowing me to savour the delicious ridiculousness of moviemaking for almost a whole minute.
About 15 people were standing next to a willow tree, including Kevin and his director of photography, Franz Lustig. All you need is a cameraman with a wonderfully Teutonic name like that to know that you are embarked upon really serious cinema. Light readings were taken. It was time for us to discuss the role.
“Kevin,” I ventured, “I have a suggestion to make.” In television news I always write my own words, and the screenwriter’s didn’t quite fit. I needed to shorten the sentences and add my own phrases. Could I insert ‘government sources’ into the claim that 15 different terror cells had claimed responsibility for a “device which has killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people in and around the capital”?
I needed to know how far the nuclear fallout had reached. “Say Bristol and Manchester,” Kevin suggested, casually wiping out large swathes of Britain as he spoke. I didn’t dare raise the topic of my motivation for the role, give that I would be on screen for no more than 20 seconds.
I was wearing my favourite zip-up fleece. It had seen me through the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt , Libya and Bahrain and I’d decided I wouldn’t be going near a mushroom cloud without it.
There was, sadly, no opportunity for me to do that irritating thing TV reporters often do – to walk towards the camera, gesturing with a thumb at the scene over my shoulder, as if viewers are too stupid to notice what they can obviously see for themselves : “It is mushroom clouds like these…” (REPORTER GESTICULATES MADLY AT CAMERA.)
The filming was over with three takes from three angles in less than 10 minutes. I never met any of the other actors, not even the film’s star, Saoirse Ronan, who is supposed to say: “What the f***?” after watching my terrifying TV report.
“You have improved our film,” Kevin Macdonald said kindly before the chauffeur whisked me back to my trailer. “Hope to see you at the opening.”
Scroll forward to the film’s nationwide release, and no invitation to any such opening had been received. With no red carpet in sight, I nervously emailed one of the producers. Had my scene been dropped?
“I am afraid that your image has not made it into the final cut,” was how she put it. “But your voice has. It is a very good film. You should go and see it.”
Crestfallen, I have not yet seen How I Live Now, my movie debut in which I do not actually appear. The only feedback has come from a former work colleague who asked if that was my voice she’d heard in the cinema the night before, the one announcing nuclear oblivion.
Then I was walking my dog in the park when I bumped into a friend who directs television dramas. How, I asked him, as I kicked at the fallen leaves, could they have cut out my TV report on nuclear annihilation?
He paused, and then decided that Kevin Macdonald had been aiming for an “everyman effect”; that locating a nuclear attack in any particular time and place would lessen the impact; that the power of How I Live Now depended not upon the sight of me in Channel 4 News mode, but upon my disembodied voice which would resonate down the ages.
Mmmm. Maybe. The other way of looking at it is that I really should have stayed in radio.
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