Opening this weekend is the Focus Features film, Hanna, and both director Joe Wright and Saoirse Ronan came to Wondercon to meet fans with a panel and showed some footage and met with press. BuzzFocus got an exclusive video interview with Ronan here, and you can also see our exclusive piece with Wright here. What follows is a piece all about Ronan gathered from the Wondercon press and public panel.
Saoirse (pronounced Sir-shay) Ronan came into the project knowing that Hanna is about a girl who kicks ass, and that’s it. She was one of the first people on the project once a script was ready and subsequently was asked to give a name of who she thought would be a good director and she said, “Joe Wright”. She doesn’t know why, because Wright had never done an action film previously. “I hired him,” Ronan said. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
But a few days after he agreed to do it, Wright called up Ronan and told her, “Get your arse to the gym.” And Ronan did that, working out two hours a day, until she saw definition in her muscles. She was trained in martial arts street fighting.
“I feel like we worked on this character from the outside in.We worked on the physicality and her look, then the heart of the character started to develop; she became a weird misfit, a fairy tale princess almost.” Certainly not a Disney-esque princess, that’s for sure. Both Wright and Ronan kept bringing up Hanna being a fairy tale but Ronan clarified it.
“It’s a messed up fairy tale,” Ronan said. “It’s a true Grimm’s fairy tale, which is something that she’s grown up with. The only two books she’s ever had is an encyclopedia and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. For her that is the world and that influences her opinion and outlook on life and people. The structure of the story is like a fairy tale too. She’s someone who has lived in a certain place her whole life and she’s never really experienced a normal life. Now she’s sent on a mission and she’s exposed to beauty and ugliness; judgment and evil, bad people and good people. As an actor, that was fantastic to play, you’re basically playing a young child. Someone who’s mind is clean and pure.”
“Everything she believes will be quite beautiful and amazing. When she’s stuck or confused, she just quotes the book (of Grimm’s). She’s not quite real. You’ll see the first time she hears music for the first, it’s something she’s reached out for her whole life, she’s suddenly a person, a human being. Music is an integral part of our lives, whether you realize or not.”
That’s easier said than done. To mentally prepare for the role she went back to her training as an actor and performed an exercise. “I had to wipe my mind clean of anything I had gone through especially in the last few years, trying to re-awaken fascination of sorts, of everything the world offers us.” Once Ronan had that figured out, Hanna started developing new layers that were essential for her and the movie.
The shoot was long and hard, about three months and started in the frigid landscape of Finland, which hit as low as minus 30 degrees at one point. Celsius or Farenheit, that’s freaking cold. Other locations included Berlin, and Morrocco. “We were on a budget, like maybe 30 million, which was the most Focus had put into a film. We had to make due with what we had. You can’t be reckless when you have a limited amount of money and the only thing Joe had to use was his imagination, so we all had to use our imagination and it was fantastic. We went to some amazing locations that if we had $100 million budget we would have probably just built it on a set.”
The first time Ronan worked with Wright, it was on the set of Atonement where she was 13 years old. Four years later, she says that Wright hasn’t changed his directing style but he is different. “I think he’s a bit braver now and I think he’s more grown up a little bit, as well as me. This was the first time I had worked with someone from the past again. It was a reminder of what we had gone through. He’s very artistic and has quite a beautiful imagination, actually.. For both of us because it’s kind of like a fairy tale and a bit surreal, it freed us up to try different things and be a bit weirder than we could have than on something like Atonement.
Still stirring over what Wright had said in the panel, I asked Saoirse about whether or not she thinks Hanna is a “cool” femme fatale despite her not being sexed up.She quickly responded, “Yeah! Oh no, definitely, it’s cool. It’s good to have people go, ‘Oh Yeah! She’s really kick ass!’ Not in a sexual way, but they’re attractive and people want to know about them and people are interested in the story. I mean looking at the clips I thought, “Oh I wish I was her.” You don’t just to need sex her up.
She admits to not seeing Sucker Punch but she’s seen how it was marketed up on billboards. “Listen, I don’t want to judge a film. It’s not really fair to do that, it could be a great film. I don’t think the poster sends out the right message because girls are in little miniskirts and pigtails, and they look like school girls with guns. [chuckles] I don’t like the idea of people being sexed up in anyway. I’m sure you heard about the Abercrombie & Fitch thing with bikinis, that’s the way we’re headed. Why? Film is an art form, and we don’t need to make it that commercial. Of course it needs to sell, but we don’t need to give up.” She did enjoy Hit-Girl though in the comic book film, Kick-Ass, “She’s cool. I don’t think her and Hanna are similar really at all, but I like her. She curses a lot. She’s got a funny mouth on her.”
Ronan perhaps said it best in the panel about what she hopes people come away from the film and her character in the realm of the action genre. “Hanna as an… action hero, if that’s what you want to call her, is quite delicate in her behavior. I like that about her. I feel like we haven’t seen an action hero like this yet. Hopefully this is the beginning of more interesting young women who leave an impression on people and force people to talk about these different issues.”
What Ronan has next includes Geoffrey Fletcher’s Violet and Daisy with Alexis Bledel and Danny Trejo about two teenage assassins. She agreed to do Violet and Daisy at the same time as Hanna, and shooting began four months after she completed Hanna but neither one influenced the other. “Doing Hanna didn’t really excite me or encourage me to do more action, but it certainly let me know I could do it if someone offered it to me or if I wanted to do something like that. It was fun for me to do. Maybe not straight away but I would like to do something like that again. Violet and Daisy on the other hand, that’s a black comedy and not an action film at all. Daisy, my character holds a gun and that’s about the only similarity the two have, which is great because everyone thinks these are going to be these kick-ass girls, and neither of them are really.”
She fielded another question from the press to see if her relationship with Wright was strong enough that if he asked her to do any role, would she say yes? In particular for Wright’s next film, an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Kiera Knightly (Atonement), Jude Law (Sherlock Holmes), Kelly Macdonald (Boardwalk Empire), Aaron Johnson (Kick-Ass), and Benedict Cumberpatch (Sherlock Holmes) have all confirmed. Wright is supposedly waiting for a response from Saoirse and James McAvoy She smiled back and replied, “Sneaky.” After laughing, she said that they love working together and enjoyed each other as people, not just co-workers. “If there’s a part that’s suitable in a film he’s doing, I’d like to think that he’d think of me. He said he does, so that’s nice. We have a friendship and I guess that helps when it comes to being hired for a film.” She prefaced all of this of course by saying that none of it had nothing to do with Anna Karenina.
Ronan also said she’s not “actually” attached to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings prequel, The Hobbit. “I’m not confirmed, but I do know they are introducing new characters. IMDB.com says one thing, but… I think I’d pass for an elf if I pull my ears back. I wouldn’t want to be a hobbit, certainly not.” Whatever her next choice will be, once she gets her next script, she will be obsessed with it, repeatedly thinking about it over and over again that she lives with it day and night so she has no “dream role,” per se, but she would like to play an Irish girl at some point because she has never played someone from my own country. “Well I was born in New York so I’m a New Yorker too.”
Watch Saoirse in Hanna, which opened Friday and should be currently playing at a theater near you. For a more exclusive interview with Saoirse, visit here.
