While English director Joe Wright is more well-known for his classical, period-piece works like “Pride & Prejudice” and “Atonement,” his upcoming action thriller “Hanna,” starring Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, and Cate Blanchett, isn’t as modern, at least spiritually, as one might imagine.
Described accurately as a mix of “La Femme Nikita” and the ‘Bourne’ franchise, the film centers on a teenage girl (Ronan) reared in the wilds of Scandinavia by her father (Bana) to be a natural born killer and assassin. But despite sounding like a contemporary actioner in fact, Wright told New York Comic Con audiences that he took inspiration from material decidedly much older.
“It’s really a fairy tale,” Wright said of the film’s true archetype, clearly preoccupied with these types of myths and fables since he’s also developing a live-action version of “The Little Mermaid.” “[And] like all fairy tales it’s about the rites of passage, like the Grimms fairy tales or the little mermaid or any of those stories. So we played on these theme and motifs….Cate [Blanchett’s CIA] character is kind of like the evil Witch.”
So while thematically familiar, “Hanna” did provide its challenges, and these risks are evidently part of the reason the director took on this directorial left turn.
“Generally, when something frightens me and I don’t want to have to do it, then that’s possibly what I’ll do,” he explained. “I think a lot of it is about overcoming fear… I have to be scared almost every day.”
Ronan, who came to fame by scoring a Best Supporting Actress for her role in Wright’s “Atonement,” said she took on the role specifically because she wanted to try something different and was then pleasantly surprised when Wright signed on and then was delighted with his take on the material. “Hanna’s a really fascinating character cause her mindset is really simple. She’s been brought up in the wild, only around one person, her father,” she said. “When she kills someone, its not like killing a person [in real life], it would be like the wild in the way she has grown up her entire life and that was really fascinating. There’s no other girl out there like that. She’s a bit of a freak, but I like that.”
Bana’s echoed the sentiment about Wright’s original fairytale spin on what he already thought was an inventive screenplay that caught his eye. “When I read it, I didn’t know where it had come from and that was really exciting, its originality. And through conversations with Joe — his take on it was purely fascinating so that combination is what [sold me],” he said. “It’s not a traditional father-like role. In many ways he’s quite cruel to his daughter in the way that he is bringing her up and at the same time, the undertone is a traditional father/daughter relationship. But Joe always had interesting spins on twisting the traditional which was always challenging and exciting.”
The film utilized the ‘Bourne’ films’ fight coordinator Jeff Imada, and Bana had high praise for his contributions and Ronan’s go-for-it attitude. “She’s really tough. I’ve worked with a lot of guys that require a lot more coddling than Saoirse did,” he said, “And in the end I didn’t hold back and tried to land one on her. She’s fast and she’s got a long reach, really long arms, I had to be careful with that!”
And while the Hanna character is feral and fierce, at the end of the day her curiosity is what the young Academy Award nominee connected with. “Her yearning is quite simple: she wants to experience the world and life and I think that’s something every teenager goes through, I know I do,” the sixteen year old said. “These were things that I could really sympathize with.”
As for the footage itself, we weren’t nearly as convinced. Two sequences were shown to the NYCC crowd in rough form. One was a scene where Eric Bana tries to barge in a hotel room and kill Cate Blanchett’s character — after having distracted her by unexpectedly calling her on her cell — and another scene focused on a young Hanna when she is first captured by the CIA and held in a interrogation cell. When Hanna is condescendingly spoken to by a psychologist and asked what she wants, she says she wants to speak to [Blanchett’s character] Marissa Wiegler. Spying in on the interrogation via satellite, Wiegler watches as a fake Wiegler is sent in to talk to Hanna, but then moments later is ruthlessly killed. Guards attempting to restrain Hanna are instantly killed and the 14-year-old girl then takes their pistols and disposes of the multiple cameras in the room that are watching her every move. The scene then cuts to black.
And while we’ve written a lot about “Hanna” in advance and are greatly anticipating the film, we’ll admit something was definitely off. We’ll give the final film the benefit of the doubt, but we’re hoping it is currently in a much rougher state that we thought. Shot on digital cameras, we’ll presume the footage was not remotely color-corrected as it looked poorly lit and shot and like some generic action drama you might see on the F/X channel. Editing-wise, the scenes felt clunky, with cheap, too-quick, jarring edits. Another unfortunate element was the Southern accent that Blanchett’s character donned that did not feel remotely natural (and nowhere in the script do we remember it, so why was it even necessary?). But again, we’re holding out hope as we’re into Wright’s creative detour, but we’d be lying if we said we weren’t a little bit worried.
There’s lots of time for improvement though, “Hanna” doesn’t hit theaters until April 8, 2011.