Joe Wright
Joe Wright
Joe Wrightis an English film director known for the romance film Pride & Prejudice, the romantic drama war film Atonement, the action thriller Hanna, and his 2012 adaptation of the classic Anna Karenina. His most recent film, Pan, is a Peter Pan origin story...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth25 August 1972
art drama school
I went to comprehensive school in North London and left without any qualifications [diploma]. And I was doing bits of acting and improv in a drama club in the evenings. Then I discovered you didn't need qualifications to go to art school, you just needed a body of work.
emotional ideas people
I've been wanting for some time to find a way of stylizing cinema and trying to get closer to the emotional story I was telling and get rid of all the bumph that goes with it and allow the audience a more participatory experience. It was an attempt to do all of those things and to express the idea that all these people were just performing roles in their lives.
careers blue decision
I'm quite spontaneous in my decisions often. Your career is kind of what happens whilst you're busy developing other screenplays, and so it came out of the blue.
children eye watches
One of the things I really love about 3D is that because as we grow older on eye weakens more than the other, 3D becomes more difficult for adults to watch than it is for children who have very balanced eyes often.
play trying dimensions
I was really excited to try 3D and play with it really, again, experiment formally with that extra dimension.
long atonement known
I was known for a while for doing very long takes, especially after Atonement.
taken cutting done
3D doesn't work quite so well with quick cuts and I probably would have done some longer takes had I really taken that information onboard.
cutting firsts studios
My first cut that I showed the studio was probably 2hrs 20min.
adventure expectations want
I don't ever want to go backwards, I quite like it. I like the freedom and I like the - What I set out to do was to make a big action-adventure movie that ticks all the boxes in terms of audience expectations and spectacle, and yet also make a very personal film and it feels like I've gotten away with that, I've managed that.
teenager thinking might
I think maybe I might tackle something that doesn't reach down to a very, very young audience, like more of a kind of teenager and upwards.
art political action
There's good art and there's bad art. A lot of action films are bad art, but Paul Greengrass showed us with the Bourne films that it's possible to make an action film with a political, social conscience.
lying england-and-america people
So much of today's film culture, in England and America, is based on lies, really. The industry is very ambitious, and success has become such an opium, people start from the wrong place they forget sometimes that the core of what we do is storytelling. It serves a need, a purpose for the individual and society to pull us together in shared experience and help us realize we're not alone in that experience.
dad actors directors
I couldn't be a cameraman or a designer or an actor - I have to be a director because I learned how to do that from my dad.
growing-up book kids
I was never a kind of superhero fan much growing up, I'm not a kind of comic book kid.