COVERED BY: BRENDA MEYER

On the soundtrack and working with The Chemical Brothers:
Well, I'm embarrassed to admit, but I went to their very first concert in London in 1992, nearly twenty years ago now. And it was a club called Rah-Rahs above a shoe shop in north London and it was kind of one of the seminal nights of my life. And so I've been a friend, a fan and a groupie ever since then, really.

I have a very deep love of music - so much so that I married a musician - and all sorts of music, from Beethoven to Indian classical music to The Chemical Brothers - and so, I'd wanted to do a film with a kind of modern score for awhile now, and finally I did a contemporary film called The Soloist, and it was about fucking classical music. (laughs) So, I really embraced the idea of doing something very modern and a completely synthesized score as well. There's not a single instrument on it.

I just thought it would be fun, really. I could post-rationalize it and tell you that Hanna was discovering the 21st century and the synthetic world or something like that, but actually that would be bullshit, really. I just like it. And also I like the fact that their music...with classical scores or orchestral scores, there's a very clear division between the music and the sound effects. But The Chemicals, one could blur that division so that sound effects could be organized into music and music could be deconstructed and turned into sound effects. And I really enjoyed that idea that everything is music and that music is the organization of sound.

Is there a trend now of directors going outside the box, with film scores by Daft Punk and Trent Reznor and now The Chemical Brothers?
I didn't know that Daft Punk or Trent Reznor were doing scores when we were doing Hanna. I offered The Chemical Brothers the job two years ago, so I wasn't aware that I was part of a trend, I thought I was being rather original. (laughs)

I think it's a really exciting development. I think, unfortunately, it's probably got to do more with the decline of the record industry. I think that these people are now kind of available, that no one's buying records anymore, so musicians either have to tour for their entire lives or they're doing music for films to earn a living. I think there's a crisis in the music industry and touring schedule is very full.

On preparing and filming the one-shot Steadycam subway tracking/fight scene with Eric Bana:
I think the challenges were really greater for Eric. On the Steadycam shot in Atonement, the challenges were perhaps greater for myself and my assistants because we were marshalling over a thousand troops around a set. On this one, we have far fewer extras. They're always a gamble and I like that gamble and I like the fear of that experience. Fear is a drug and I enjoy it. (laughs)

And also, they're born out of necessity as well. If I was to have shot that scene as a series of cuts, I would have needed probably about forty different setups and I usually only get about fourteen setups a day, so that would have taken me three days, and I only had the day. The budget only allowed me a day of shooting for that sequence. Then you kind of think, well, okay, if I do it all in one, it could be a gamble and I might get nothing, or I might get everything. So we started preparing early in the morning and we rehearsed and choreographed for seven hours, I think, or six hours, and at the end of that we started shooting and got I think six takes.

The fight had been very carefully choreographed before that by Jeff Imada, who's an extraordinary fight choreographer, and he had designed it to work in a circle, so the choreography between the camera and the actors was already in place before that day.

On shooting on the different exotic locations:
I kind of like to scout locations during the development of the script process so that we can respond to the locations that we find. So, for instance, the abandoned amusement park in Berlin was something that my sister had once seen in 1992, and so we went and found it and it was still abandoned. It seemed like it was kind of the main family day out for East Berliners before the Wall came down and then when the Wall came down, they all went shopping. (laughs) And no one wanted to ride on swans anymore, the magic was gone. They wanted to go to American department stores.

So, anyway, I like to respond to what's around and feed that into the script process. Finland was one of the most amazing places I've ever been in my life. I love Finland. It was minus twenty-nine degrees when we were shooting there, we had icicles hanging off our beards and the Finnish people are just lunatics. Big men, beautiful women as well, but enormous big men, and you'd say, 'I wonder if there's a camera position up on that hill over there,' and [this guy] would be all, 'yes, I will go and find out,' and he's got this big spade and he just walks off the road and just falls into seven or eight feet of snow, and you see this sort of shark fin of a spade cutting its way up the hill, and then 45 minutes later, he's there going, 'yes, okay, good here,' and you're like (mimics wide eyes).

And you're going on location scouts on Skidoos. I mean, how fucking cool is that? I don't go on holiday much, but I get to go to these amazing places, be it Finland or L.A.'s Skid Row or Chatsworth House to meet the Duchess of Devonshire. I mean, that's one of the things I love most about my job.

On the differences between shooting in Morocco and Finland:
Oh, Morocco was dreadful. The desert was dreadful. I mean, it was in excess of 150 degrees and you just can't move in that weather and that heat, it was just dreadful. I remember the girl that plays Sophie, Jessica Barden, lost all feeling in her hand one day and it was like, oh Jesus, she's lost all feeling in her hand, it's the heat, it's the heat, and everyone stop filming and call the set medic. And the set medic arrived half an hour later from under the tree from where he'd been having a nap and then we discovered she'd had a tight hair band around her arm which cut off all circulation. (laughs) But, it was quite an alarming environment. I loved Essaouira, which is the fishing port by the sea in the southwest of the country where we filmed the port and that was quite lovely. That was where Orson Wells filmed Othello as well.

On making an action film and how different that was than his normal period dramas:
Yeah, it was really exciting and very challenging and kind of terrifying. I like to work outside of my comfort zone and certainly felt I was with this. The action stuff, you're kind of like a kid going well this can't work, this is ridiculous and then you put it all together, and you go, well, it actually looks like she's doing that, this is kind of interesting. I kind of still get a kick out of it and I still can't believe the magic of montage and the magic of cinema and I still get such a surprise when I see the rushes and go, oh, it works.

What was it about the story that grabbed you:
I liked Hanna. I liked the philosophical opportunities that a character like that afforded. One of my favorite films is Hal Ashby's Being There and the character Chance, I felt, was almost like an older uncle of Hanna's somehow, that kind of sense of strange innocence, the Holy Fool as depicted by Russian literature, the idea of a character who comes to the world and sees it with completely fresh eyes, and what that character can teach us about our dependence on electrical gadgets or the objectification of women or gender politics or anything else, I thought was an interesting device, if you like, to be able to examine contemporary society and how it was constructed.

But, I mean, the point is to make a piece of entertainment. I grew up in a puppet theatre and by our dinner table, there was a booking book, and the phone would ring day or night, 365 days a year, and you'd pick it up and say, 'hello, this is Little Angel Theatre' and someone would say, 'yes, I'd like to book four tickets for Saturday morning's show,' and you'd take the booking. I was doing that since I was seven years old. And if the booking book was full, then the family had food on the table, and if it wasn't full then you'd be eating cornflake curry and everyone would be a bit depressed.

And so, first and foremost, one is wanting to make films that people will enjoy and go and see, and then you can kind of play with the audience and perhaps do something that they weren't expecting or talk about things that they're surprised by. I think one of the most surprising things in [Hanna] is the kiss between Hanna and Sophie...and, for me, that was kind of an interesting challenge to a normal kind of action audience. So, you can kind of play with audience expectations, but first, you have to first entertain them, otherwise you're a crook.

Did you think about Hanna's backstory, or the backstory of the other characters:
There's a lot of room for you to project your own backstory. I mean, I think that I was kind of playing with notions of the MacGuffin also as something I've never really done, and whether the MacGuffin as a concept still stands up in the 21st Century. I wondered whether you could still get away with the kind of MacGuffin like Hitchcock was using in films like North by Northwest, when who knows what is in that briefcase and it really doesn't matter, or whether nowadays you actually have to explain the papers and explain the briefcase, and so I was interested in playing with notions of that. I've still yet to discover whether you can or can't get away with it.

On the opening and closing scenes mirroring each other:
I think that Hanna is not the most empathetic of characters, but developed understanding. And I think she's in a different place at the end than she was at the beginning. But she doesn't differentiate between human and animal, man and woman, beauty and ugliness, really. She has absolutely no judgment of what she sees and, in a way, that kind of, for me, lifts her to almost a kind of spiritual plane. That lack of judgment was one of the keys to the character that Saoirse and I developed, and so that was kind of the idea there.

I also think that Oedipal story of the son killing the father is obviously very famous and we all know about it, but from watching my sister and my mother and my wife and her mother and generally girlfriends with their mothers, it's certainly also true of mother/daughter relationships. I know a lot of daughters who want to kill their mothers, and I think it's a very difficult relationship. But for some reason, they just talk about father/son relationships mostly. So I was interested in that relationship, and I do see Marissa's character as kind of being a step-mother. Interestingly enough, it was the Brothers Grimm that introduced the character of the [evil] step-mother. Before that, in the folk tales and fairy tales they took and published, the step-mother character was always the mother. They kind of watered it down for contemporary Victorian society.

On the scene where Hanna is introduced to the electrical world:
That was very, very important sequence to me because it was the moment that I kind of unlocked the film. It wasn't in the original screenplay and it's something that I kind of discovered one day, and it was really the moment that I went, I really want to do this, I want to see that scene. And, really, it was just a matter of taking all of the kind of things that we take for granted and what they'd be like for someone who'd never seen an electrical appliance before and how they might be quite frightening. And I liked the idea that here was a character who wasn't frightened, who could kill a deer with her bare hands and could take on Eric Bana, but an electric kettle was terrifying. I like that kind of contradiction in her.

What's next:
Hopefully we're going to do Anna Karenina next.

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