ONE DAY Q&A: "It was like making 20 little films."

Can men and women benefit from friendship, or do they always end up as friends with benefits?

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ONE DAY Q&A: "It was like making 20 little films."

POSTED: Friday, August 19, 2011, 12:00 PM

Filed Under: Interview | Movies

Adapted from David Nicholls’ bestseller, One Day begins when Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess) meet for the first time, on July 15 (St. Swithin’s Day), and end up spending the night together.

Director Lone Scherfig’s film chronicles Emma and Dexter's experiences over the next two decades as their friendship grows more intense. They try not to get their feelings of love and/or interest in sex get in the way of their friendship. As such, the film asks: Can men and women benefit from friendship, or do they always end up as friends with benefits?

“I think it’s possible for a straight woman to be friends with a straight guy and vice versa," said Hathaway in a recent interview. "And yes, sometimes tension can get in the way of friendship; usually that dissipates into what it’s meant to be — which is a friendship.”

But then she added, “But I’m not the person to answer this question. I’ve been in a rock-solid relationship for three years, and I’m a one-man woman, so I don’t really look at other men. The majority of my friends are gay men, and I’ve never had any sexual tension with them — which I consider to be a personal failing. That said, [I’m going to be playing] Judy Garland — so I’ve got to get on that.”

Scherfig concurred. “I know men and women can be friends. I have a lot of male friends. And I have a lot of [male] colleagues who I work with every year. I can shoot films with the same DP and stand next to him at the camera for twelve weeks, and not fall in love.”

However, Sturgess was less sure. “I think men and women can be friends, really good friends — but I have to question if they can be best friends like Dex and Emma," he said. "The[ir] connection is so strong, and they are so compatible. Maybe they can’t. I don’t know.”

Sturgess continued to think about the film and how One Day’s story reflects on issues of love and regret when it comes to romance. “The film does make you think about other people you met in your life," he said. "I’ve been a sort of long-term relationship, so I stuck with my best friend.”

Yet Sturgess clearly understands the character he plays in One Day, someone who is nothing like the actor off-screen. “Dexter’s not had relationships, and certainly hasn’t had friendships before. He has an interesting relationship with his mother (Patricia Clarkson), and a really non-existent relationship with his father (Ken Stott). But I don’t believe he’s ever experienced that level of intense friendship and that backbone and strength and foundation that that friendship gives you, so he is a bit lost. His friends were just sort of drinking buddies and he never really experienced love.”

Audiences will enjoy watching Dexter and Emma come into their own over the years. Each vignette brings them both closer together or further apart before the film’s poignant finale.

“It was like making 20 little films,” Scherfig explained about creating One Day. She said the challenge of making the film was to make it “fluid and consistent and not frustrating or monotonous.”

Describing her character, Hathaway observed that Emma may be insecure, but she is someone who knows who she is. “She’s not a girl who changes, she’s a girl who evolves. She’s not trying on new personas, she’s trying to refine the one she has.”

The actress said that it was fun to work on Emma’s look to achieve this side of her character. “The pinnacle of her beauty is when Emma’s in Paris. She’s so free, and so herself. She’s letting her romance flag fly. She’s cut off her hair, wearing vintage that she probably had tailored.”

Hathaway revealed her surprising approach to the character: “It was fun to figure out where she ends up and work back from that. I had these fun conversations with the costume designer — what was the year that Emma found the right bra?”

She let out an infectious, throaty laugh, continuing, “Every girl has many years where you do not wear the right bra, and one day you find it and doors open and doves fly. It’s a life-changing moment. For Emma, it was right around the teacher years.”

Sturgess admitted that, despite his various shirtless and nude scenes, he also found his character through his clothes. The actor developed a fondness for the leather pants that Dexter wears in one scene.

“They were pretty shocking, weren’t they?” he asked with a naughty smile. “I’ve never put on a pair of leather trousers in my life before that. I didn’t realize how comfortable they were. I always thought leather trousers would be difficult to wear.”

Sturgess wears those pants like a rock star, maybe because clothes from the British music scene inspire the actor, who is also a musician. (For the record, he plays piano, drums and guitar.)

And music plays a big role in One Day. Not only do cultural touchstones like Elvis Costello and Fatboy Slim appear on the film’s soundtrack (in part to signal what year it is), but Scherfig recounted that the actors bonded off screen by exchanging iPods.

“I gave him show tunes, and he gave me awesome indie rock,” confessed Hathaway about swapping music with her co-star. “He turned me on to Elbow. I turned him into Bony Bear.”

Sturgess remembered, “She was really into Patti Smith at the time, which I never got my head around. I was into British bands that she never heard of like, The Stone Roses — stuff that came out of the '80s and early '90s.”

And that's perhaps what makes Emma and Dex — as well as the actors who portray them — so compelling. They share something special that makes their relationship stronger when they are together.

Read Gary M. Kramer's review of One Day at citypaper.net/movies.

Posted by Gary M. Kramer @ 12:00 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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