"Never Let Me Go" is a haunting tale of people who aren’t quite what they seem to be on the surface. The movie (based on Kazuo Ishiguro's novel of the same title) centers on three main characters: Kathy (played by Carey Mulligan), Tommy (played by Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (played by Keira Knightley), who all grow up together in what seems to be an idyllic English boarding school named Hailsham.
The three friends are very close until a love triangle develops between them: Kathy falls in love with Tommy, but Ruth tempts him away from Kathy. Their love triangle isn't the only thing they have in common: Kathy, Tommy and Ruth all have the same secret about their origins that will be revealed to them in a matter of life or death. Knightley, Mulligan and Garfield sat down to talk about "Never Let Me Go" in 2009, when they were filming the movie in England.
How would your describe your "Never Let Me Go" character?
Mulligan: I play Kathy, and she’s the narrator of the story. In the first reading, she can come off as kind of a passive character, but she’s a carer from when she was a child. She looks after people, and she’s really aware of how people around her feel. And that’s what makes her a good carer. And she’s loyal and stays back in the shadows …
Her relationship with Ruth, she [Kathy] is on the backfoot, and Ruth is the one who is the popular at school and then grows up to be the popular girl in the cottages. Kathy’s sort of in the background a lot. But I suppose of the three people [Kathy, Ruth and Tommy], she [Kathy] deals with the situation they have in the most restrained way. She sort of buries everything so she sort of has a surface character that seems quite reserved but there’s also a lot going on underneath.
Knightley: I play Ruth in "Never Let Me Go." I think she might be seen as the baddie of the piece, possibly. She’s the person who keeps two people, who should be together, apart. I think all the characters of the piece represent different aspects of humanity, different emotions. And I think Ruth is completely driven by fear. And I think every single act she makes is guided by the unbelievable fear that she feels all the time.
I actually think she’s actually a vulnerable character. I think she’s somebody who doesn’t easily say what’s on her mind. She’s manipulative and who reacts when she’s made to feel emotion and is made to feel insecure, goes into attack mode. So I thought she was a really fascinating character.
Garfield: He [Tommy] feels everything through every single pore in his body, not just through his heart, but through everything. He seems to be emotionally in touch with everything that’s going on in the given circumstances. Even if he doesn’t know it consciously, he’s being affected by it unconsciously and subconsciously in a way that he can’t gauge, and it brings a lot of varying emotions that he can’t grab hold of. It’s like he’s at the mercy of himself.
What do you think about the major themes in "Never Let Me Go"?
Knightley: It’s a story about life, about everybody’s life. We all die. We all can’t comprehend what that means. None of us can. Me sitting here, knowing that I’m going to die, I don’t comprehend what that is. You can’t run away from it. And even though you put these characters in this strange situation, it is just actually just actually looking at life, [concentrated] down to 26 years or however old they are when they actually die. But there is no sense that they go, "Oh, I’m going to fight it. I’m going to run away." It’s this weird, institutionalized thing, where they don’t actually run. And I thought as an idea, we don’t actually do, a lot of the time. I don’t think humans do run. We accept our fate, in a funny way. And it’s not dramatic to do that necessarily, but I thought it was a fascinating insight into humanity as a whole. And what was interesting is that you’re looking at humanity through these people, through these things that are called "creatures." It was a fascinating concept.
Mulligan: It’s about three people who spend their whole lives together. You meet them when they were children. They’ve known each other since they were able to recognize other people around them and the way their short lives unfold … If you look at how they live their lives, they live a full life, from birth to middle age to being old, but it’s compressed into 26 years.
What do you think about the relationships between Kathy, Tommy and Ruth?
Garfield: It’s been like this thing where we were drawn to each other since we were very young. And she [Kathy] is the only person — when I’m in one of my rages on in one of my extremely difficult moments, let’s say — she’s one of the ones who defends me and attempts to look out for me and protect me and care. It seems like she actually, genuinely cares about me. And that sets us up for these kind of two magnets, I guess, who are desperately trying to be together but are somehow kept apart.
Mulligan: Tommy’s sort of an outsider when he’s at school, and he’s awkward and socially inept, and no one really knows how to approach him. Kathy just always seems to have an understanding of him. And when he’s teased by other people, Kathy sees him as this sad, lonely boy and feels there’s some sort of connection and wants to look after him and wants to help him. It starts off as a really innocent thing of Kathy realizing that this boy needs a friend. And they become close, and she’s the only person Tommy really knows.
And then as they get older, Ruth becomes involved in the relationship, and I think sees Kathy finding this special relationship with this boy — and not wanting to lose her best friend, intervenes and takes him. And then their paths sort of split. And then it’s Ruth and Tommy. And Kathy’s on her own. And the whole story is this massive curve of them coming back together again.
Knightley: The actual love story, as far as I’m concerned and as far as Ruth is concerned, his greatest love is Kathy. And I think actually the whole reason why she goes off with Tommy in the first place is because she’s so in love with Kathy as her best friend, and cannot handle the idea that Kathy would be in love with anyone else. And so, she separates the two people [Kathy and Tommy]. But I think it’s literally the jealousy of seeing the person you love in love with someone else. And actually, in this case, I think it is in fact Kathy. It’s not so much Tommy. I think it’s these two best friends, and she can’t handle the idea that Kathy doesn’t want to be with her. I’m going deeper. You can tell that I’ve really kind of justified the whole thing.
But yeah, they’re best friends. They always have been. They have a very strange relationship. I recognized that female friendships can be tricky, and I think this one is a very tricky one, it’s a manipulative one. It’s two people who have grown up with each other since the word "go." They’re like siblings who bicker, who pi*s each other off, but nevertheless, there is this huge love there. I think they are— as much as these characters can ever have — family, they are family.
Carey, what’s Andrew Garfield like?
Mulligan: He’s amazing. And I was so excited that he was going to be in it. I loved doing our scenes together. We both really like improvising. It’s a helpful way to film stuff going on and things being shouted. During set-up changing and light-changing, we’d talk to each other and stay in character. And when we would do that, I think the scenes become more truthful. We found a really good way of working together. And I think we were both very careful of how to tell the story of Kathy and Tommy. There always had to be a feeling that they were connected.
There’s a scene in the cottages where he finds her reading these porn magazines, and she’s told by Ruth that he thought she was looking at them, to look at these dirty pictures. And then you find out eight years later … You know at the time that he knows exactly what she’s doing — and that’s not what she’s doing. You tried to create the sense that he just knows her and she knows him. And really, they’ve always been together. They’ve always been with each other all along.
Carey and Keira, can you talk about working with each again?
Mulligan: We did "Pride and Prejudice" together, which was my first job. I played her sister. And she was so brilliant in that. And when we found out we were doing this ["Never Let Me Go"] together, it’s so nice to come on to a job with a friend, kind of already having an ally. But because we know each other so well, and because we’ve known each other for five years, I think a lot of that shared history came off when we were working together.
It was so much easier to just say that we didn’t have to spend weeks getting to know each other to get to a level where we say stuff about scenes. She could just call me on something instantly or say, "This should be faster." I can say anything to her. I think what she does in the completion stage of the film especially is just really heartbreaking.
Knightley: I think she’s played Kathy beautifully. Kathy could be perceived as a passive character. And when I first read the script, I thought, "That’s a really difficult role to play." And she’s managed to fight against that passive thing really, really brilliantly. She’s put an edge to [Kathy], which I find really interesting, because Kathy isn’t a complete innocent. She isn’t necessarily the goodie. None of them are.
Obviously, Ruth does the biggest crime, but there is something strange about Kathy. And Carey’s brought that strangeness out of her. And I was fascinated watching her create this character, because she’s worked very hard. And I think she’s done a brilliant job.
How would you describe "Never Let Me Go" director Mark Romanek? How much input did he allow you to have?
Mulligan: We’ve been given free reign to play around, really. Yeah, I did come into it with lots of ideas, but they’re mainly just being faithful to who she is in the book and my impression of what I read. And so he’s been completely fine with that. We’ve just played, and that’s just the nicest way to do it, to be creative. We’ve gone in with our first instincts on how to play a scene and block it. And usually, that’s what we ended up shooting. He’s really open to listening to our ideas.
How does the "Never let Me Go" screenplay compare to the novel?
Garfield: It’s honored the book. Alex Garland … his focus on what ["Never Let Me Go" author Kazuo] Ishiguro intended is to be lauded, because I can imagine it’s quite rare that someone who takes on a piece of material. I’m sure you’d want to make it our own in a certain way, and there’s a certain ego that comes in, but not with Alex. I know Alex has been so nervous and so concerned with making it with the original intentions that Kazuo Ishiguro wanted remain in the heart of this [movie]. And I think without ego, without any self-serving, he’s done that. So when I read the book and the script together as one, they are the same — and that is really wonderful.
Knightley: The concept of the whole thing, I thought it was a brilliant concept, is as opposed to making it a science-fiction thing, which you kind of expect if you’re talking about cloning people, harvesting people — it hasn’t actually happened yet, so you set somewhere in the very clinical future. I think when I first read it, I thought, "I can see how that can be kind of a way to go with it." What I thought was fascinating was to say, "No, it’s parallel. We did start cloning people in the ‘50s, and now we’ve come to the ‘70s, and it’s been a couple of generations or something like that. And here we are." And it’s become this accepted thing.
Actually, when I come into it, it’s the ‘80s. But to set it in that time period, so that there’s something retro about it makes it even stranger. You’re saying, "This is happening right now. This was happening 20 years ago. This is happening today." It’s a very strange concept. You look at the clothing, the look of it. We did go for the orphanage-type vibe. It’s a group of people who don’t have any money, so it’s not like they’re going out and buying fancy things. It’s clothing bins that charities have donated and they get chucked and they sift through. Their contact with the outside world is very, very small.
How did you approach your role in "Never Let Me Go"?
Knightley: As far as my pseudo-psycho analysis of the character went, it did come from the book. It did come from tiny little moments, like it’s very much painted in that she has this huge imagination in the book. There’s this whole thing where she imagines that she’s got these horses. She invents games. And also in the book, she’s desperate to be somebody’s favorite. And there’s this whole thing in the book, which I don’t think is actually in the film, which is all about this teacher whom she wants to be loved by.
And I thought that was actually a big key into the characters, because it’s this girl who’s desperate to be loved best by someone. In the rehearsals that we had, in the discussions that [I], Carey and Andrew had on our own, this idea that these people are brought up without parents and no parental influence whatsoever, exactly what that does to you, what it does to you to have nobody that loves you best. I think a lot of Ruth’s actions come from that instability of not having love. And so when she sees her two best friends falling in love, the immediate act is to be incredibly jealous that the focus is off her, and to try and pull it back to her in some way.
Garfield: I discovered that he just wants joy. He wants to experience joy, like we all do. As soon as you get to that very simple need and that kind of desire, you angle everything you do to getting that. And it just becomes this wonderful process of you finding your own joy. And it kind of infiltrates to who you, outside of being on camera, in terms of myself as Andrew, you kind of go, "That’s what I want." And when the character meets [who you are] and you are on a quest together, it’s very lovely and invigorating, and you feel like you’re doing your job properly when you’re not thinking, "What would Tommy do?" You’re not thinking that anymore. You’re thinking, "What am I going to do?" It’s as simple as that. You just enter fully into the situation.
For more info: "Never Let Me Go" website
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