How important was it to you to honour the spirit of Ian McEwan’s book?
Vastly important. Ian McEwan is the God of this film and the genesis and I’m a huge McEwan fan and so the challenge is really to take this book and see how we could make a very faithful adaptation.
The book works, I didn’t want to fix it, so it was ‘how do we make a film that works out of this? How do we stay faithful to it?’ That was the challenge.
And Ian allowed me time to talk to him and we spoke a lot about the themes and he kept on reminding me that this is a story about a storyteller, so that I didn’t become too seduced by the whole love story aspect of it.
Atonement is released on DVD 4th February.