Behind the scenes with director David Yates

This is an old article I came across from The Telegraph where David Yates talks in detail about all that went on behind the scenes of this film: http://j.mp/1zNTGu5

Just a few interesting paragraphs:

I'm spending too much time in dark rooms. First there was the music recording and the mixing. Now there is the dubbing of the final soundtrack of the mini-series that I've spent the past year making for Channel 4. It's called Sex Traffic. Outside, Toronto is ablaze with summer heat, and here inside, I'm beginning to acquire the same studio tan as everyone else I'm working with. We all look like we need a blood transfusion.

Between sessions I get an e-mail from the producer Hilary Bevan Jones. She has an unfinished script she wants me to read, a tentative first draft - written very quickly. It's by Richard Curtis. Richard himself describes it as a work in progress, an idea he's not sure he wants to see through to completion yet.

Here is a man who has defined a whole genre of British cinema - and probably been responsible for more successful British movies in recent years than anyone else I can think of.

I read it. It's about a desperately shy civil servant, Lawrence, who meets Gina, an enigmatic girl in a cafe, and as a dating gambit takes her to a G8 summit in Reykjavik. There they fall in love and in the course of their brief romance collide with the power politics that surrounds them, as the world's most powerful nations argue about what to do on the issues of Third World debt, aid and trade. As a first draft, it's the most unfinished script I've read all year, and yet it is also the most complete. It is acute and honest and full of desperate tenderness.

A dash to Notting Hill… My first meeting with Richard. A huge spread of a lunch is waiting for us as we begin our script meeting. Hilary and I decide not to reveal the sandwiches we just bought in a rush on the way here, and they stay hidden in our respective bags.

We set to. Richard has been a big fan of the work I've done in the past three years: The Way We Live Now, The Young Visiters and State of Play. He wants me to bring my sense of story-telling to The Girl in the Cafe. I don't think I've seen a film quite like this before. It's a romantic comedy with a message - it seeks to entertain as well as to inform, and to inspire a response to the slow-burning holocaust caused by global poverty.

At present the script, which has been commissioned by the BBC, wears its politics too much on its sleeve. The agenda that Richard feels so passionately about is surfacing too readily. Sometimes you can see the tragedy of it overwhelming him - clearly the years he's been involved in Comic Relief raising millions for Africa and other causes hasn't in any way inured him against what he clearly feels is a race against time to save lives. He is a campaigner at heart, wrapped up in this funny, gifted creative powerhouse of a writer.

I suggest that the key to moving the script and the story forward to the next draft is to make sure that the humour, the emotion and the issues don't compete; they should nourish each other. There has to be a very acute balance which ensures the film remains playful, but truthful. Either side of that pivot point lies failure. Too much overt humour will trivialise the issues; too much canvassing of the issues at the heart of the film, and we risk falling into the polemical.

Bedroom scenes are always tricky and we've reached the critical point in our film where Lawrence and Gina finally spend their first night together, in Iceland. It's a very beautiful part of the story, about healing rather than about sex, as these two displaced people find tenderness and warmth with one another. Bill and Kelly have a wonderful rapport, on camera as well as off.

I get as wrapped up in the characters as they do, I always do with anything I make. For me they become real people - and have a life within the scene and outside of it.

Bill and I chat about Lawrence. It's scary how we both identify with him - it seems we both had the same tortured adolescence when it came to understanding and unlocking the secrets of the opposite sex. All that experience has found its way into Lawrence.

And Kelly has a terrifically intuitive sense of Gina - we both find her terribly poignant, a character who has these hidden corners. Kelly's skill is that you rarely if ever see the acting. She like Bill understands that the camera is like an emotional X-ray machine - rather than playing a feeling, you have to almost experience it for it to be special.

Three weeks into filming. We've reached one of the biggest scenes in the film, and a huge day for Kelly. It's the final day of our G8 conference and the big concluding dinner. World leaders are gathered, and at a pivotal point, Gina, a non activist, non politician, a complete outsider, feels compelled to interrupt the Prime Minister's speech during the meal.

We've got lots of extras playing pretty big power players, including the American, Russian and French presidents. I see all three on a minibus on the way to the set after breakfast. The French president looks glum and I tell him to cheer up.

Richard has joined us on set, he's keen to hear it too. He's been fantastically supportive, and take after take we both sit there listening, incredibly moved by Kelly's quiet and dignified performance. With each take, the atmosphere and the emotion in the room begins to escalate.

I cover the scene, as I've covered most scenes in the film, economically. I am very strategic about getting coverage (the amount of shots it takes to tell the story within a scene). Some directors believe in shooting everything from every conceivable angle, and then working the material in the cutting room. I believe where you put the camera for a scene, how you move the camera, what lens you use, and what is or isn't in the frame with the actor, defines the story in that moment. Therefore for me, there is only one optimum place to ever put the camera if you are to achieve maximum impact for the story.