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Creation: Paul Bettany

Creation: Paul Bettany

The ever charismatic Mr Bettany caught up with LOVEFiLM to talk about his new film, Creation. Which sees him and real-life wife Jennifer Connelly play Charles and Emma Darwin. The film takes a look at the struggles Darwin faced before he published his revolutionary thesis. Bettany told us how much of an un-known romantic Darwin was, his passion for science and why we all need to know more about the man who changed our entire way of thinking.

LOVEFiLM: You’ve just had the World premiere of Creation at Toronto, how did it go?

Paul Bettany: Yeah it was great. I hadn’t seen the film. But it went really well and it did what the film makers wanted it to do which was drum up some real interest, so it was a real life line for us.

LF: Were you aware of Darwin’s struggles getting his work produced, before filming?

PB: I was aware. But I had no idea about him as a man or a father. It strikes me as crazy that this is a man who changed the world irrevocably, and in our country, yet we don’t really know about him. He’s just a guy on a ten pound note. I didn’t know he was ill, I didn’t know he was anxiety ridden. I didn’t know any of it, and that’s the bit I was so blown over by. How crazy it is that he’s our greatest export and we know nothing about him.

LF: It’s great that your version of Darwin is as a real romantic and less of a scientist...

PB: I agree. Although I think science gets a bad rap in that way. Science is an act of love. If you’re a scientist you have a passion and a wonder at the world. He [Darwin] was such a progressive father and strangely modern husband. He was very eccentric in that way. The servants were always complaining that they were finding Emma’s jewellery in the children’s bedrooms - she would let them use all her clothes and her jewellery to dress up. It’s not what I thought of this Victorian patriarch. I had a different notion of what he would be like.

LF: Did you feel apprehensive about playing Darwin?

PB: Yeah I did, and then I realised that if I were playing Superman I wouldn’t be able to fly either. It’s too tall an order. To bring his intelligence to the screen is too tall an order, so you have to let it go. He had arguably the greatest ideas that human beings ever had and I admitted this defeat in the same way I admit of course I can’t fly. The things I do know about, are marriage and children and loss and madness, those things that are more universal, and hopefully this is a film that is grounded enough that you brush over the bit where I have to look very bright.

LF: That’s the beauty of the film; it captures the emotions which we all recognise...

PB: Yes absolutely. It’s a film that is self-consciously domestic. Darwin has been political for a hundred and fifty years and this is a film where he hardly leaves his house, which appealed to me. I read another script about Darwin and it was told in a quite linear fashion. He was seventy f**king six years old when he died; you can’t cover that much time in a movie. It’s a very peculiar life when you think about it. At 23 he’s on board a boat for five years, I think, and then he comes home, and 20 years later and he writes a book and why? The procrastination is really intriguing and that was fun to sort of hypothesise and there are a number of reasons.

One is this outer obstacle, which is that his wife is a Christian, they have lost a child and her one solace is that she will meet that child in the afterlife, and he’s writing a book that potentially robs her of that.

And secondly, I think he was a social conservative that had a revolutionary idea. I don’t think that sat well with him. I think writing about it made him ill. What made him so good at observance is that he moved at a glacial pace, eight f**king years studying barnacles! Can you imagine everyday going in and looking at it? And the amount of imagination! The link between seeing the skull of this giant sloth and making the leap to say I wonder if we all have one common ancestor? That’s imaginative and then to study and experiment and to back up your hypothesis over 20 years.

LF: I have to ask you about that incredible scene with Jenny the orang-utan...

PB: I remember shooting that and thinking, ‘please let this be in focus!’ She came up and started playing the harmonica and you could just feel everybody behind the camera in awe. She played the harmonica and that’s not dubbed on, that is production sound that happened. She blew into it and there was an undeniable connection between me as a human being and her as an orang-utan. I think it is impossible as a rational human being to not feel connected to that animal or not see that connection.

LF: It kind of cements the film, and Darwin’s main argument, that we are all linked…

PB: I agree.

LF: It must be great to be part of a film that causes such debate and discussion?

PB: I think it is extraordinary. I started this movie thinking how little I knew about this man who has changed the world, and how I know more about Brad Pitt. It’s amazing.

Helen Cowley

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