Philip Pullman and Ruth Wilson on His Dark Materials | In Conversation

we do learn a lot about ourselves through stories we learn how to fall in love through stories we learn how to be brave through [Music] stories so i'm yes of course i'm interested in what's going on in the world you have to be otherwise your your world gets smaller and smaller and drier and drier and emptier there's a very significant bench that's in the botanical gardens which is where will and lyra end up returning to every year on mid-summer mid-summer's day why did you pick that day because and lyra have to go back to their different worlds of course and they're never going to see each other again but their worlds sort of map onto each other so in will's world there's a divinity school in lyra's world there's a divinity school and it could have been anywhere but the botanical garden is a beautiful place and midsummer's day is the same in both worlds and i thought if they both went there at the same time actually um nicholas wright who adapted the story for the national theater had a better idea i had the meeting at midday he had the meeting at midnight yes much more romantic yeah and he opened the play with a big tree with a seat around it and um will is there in his world and lara is there in her world and they're talking sort of almost across each other but it's a it was a magical thing i always think benches are really quite romantic in themselves aren't they yeah there's inscriptions on benches and i just think i quite like a bench well you need a sort of arbor roses i don't know about that but yes i love her i think they're really magical um but talking of libra let's talk about lyra because you've already said that she's this character that people really respond to and you obviously noticed her in your classes those girls like that what is it about her what are her traits and qualities that kind of that um stayed with me for longest and became clearer to me as i was writing the story was that she's capable of enormous affection she's enormously affectionate towards roger the little boy whom she looks after and then goes out in search of and goes down to the world of the dead to bring him back that's pretty yeah it's quite a lot of love to do that um and she's she's capable of both giving affection and inspiring him yeah um that i think is her main characteristic yeah but what do i know i only wrote her yeah i always think that it's funny i was thinking about all your characters in the books and i feel a lot of them seem like loners or you know lee scoresby yorick uh mrs coulter in her own way is completely separate from everything everyone else around her is there do you think that was intentional are you interested in this sort of loner or the outcast that's something that i hadn't noticed before um uh you pointed something out that i wasn't aware of yeah what was it that interested you in mrs coulter you know as a character you have created the most mysterious woman uh on the page ever to be written i would say i remember when i got the call to play mrs calter and um to my shame i hadn't read your books um i'd known about the play but i hadn't read them so i didn't really know him as a school towards and my agent was saying ruth are you mad she's the not only the most extraordinary and you know female literary character that exists so anyway i got reading and um i find her endlessly fascinating because what i think you do so brilliantly in the books is you create questions you don't answer everything so for me as an actor getting inside that was that one i had she's so deep i can keep peeling back the layers of this character and i had to form my own theory which i wouldn't ever love to share because it might not be your theory of who the character is but it doesn't matter it's like i had to sort of create a back story and a world for her that made sense to me but i thought the key of her was always about her relationship with the monkey it's about what that you know that's relationship with herself so that is the key to understanding her and her journey throughout the three books that was the great advantage for me of discovering the demon because um what i could do well i'm still discovering things yeah i can do with that idea and it wasn't until i realized that um children's demons change and adults demons don't that was the key to the story for me the key to the whole thing and where did the idea come from the damon uh i don't know where it came from but i remember where it was when it came to me where were you at my desk of course yeah that's the place to be um to be honest and i haven't told this to many people um the demon was for me the answer to a technical problem and the technical problem was this when you're describing a character on their own doing something you've got to tell the audience what she's thinking as well as what she's doing and what she's saying but she can't say there's nobody else there now that is that is slow going actually to read it's much much quicker if there's someone else there that and they can talk and he can say let's not do this and she's oh don't be such a card no come on she says i'll look at so instantly there's a dynamic there between the two characters and names okay so names because it like my monkey doesn't have a name no i couldn't think of one really that's it so how did you think of the other ones because they're quite like well there are two ways it's like book titles either they come at once or they come after a long period of thought and reflection and throwing away and all that sort of stuff mrs coulter for some reason was always mrs corter i don't know why some people have asked me if i was basing her on the american political commentator ann coulter really but i wasn't because i'd never heard of her um and my mrs culture is far more interesting than ann coulter anyway lyra was always lyra um another quite a lot of lyrics loads of libras yeah yeah so i was pleased with that um israel was always asriel um joric bernerson wasn't always i i had to look quite hard to find the name for yorick bernerson um in the end i got it from an old my old university copy of the edda the norse edda okay which i've never read during this obviously at the end well no not right in the middle of a pandemic this isn't ending anytime soon do you find like the things that are happening in the world do they affect your ability to write or to imagine can you shut that stuff off um no when i wouldn't want to shut it off because um you know i'm a citizen as well as a mm-hmm um as anything else as well as a father and a grandfather and a writer and a taxpayer and all those other things so i'm yes of course i'm interested in what's going on in the world you have to be otherwise your your world gets smaller and smaller and drier and drier and emptier so um yes but that doesn't mean i want to rush out at once and write a pandemic novel and no um no one wants it doesn't it doesn't happen that quickly anyway no experience has got to be um you know stored and meditated turned over occasionally and um you know before it'll come out in what you in what you're right but no i don't believe in an ivory tower i think it's a bad bad place to live when you're playing a character where it might be mrs cooper it might be heterogeneous do you come at her from inside or from outside i mean do you need for example to know what sort of shoes she'd be wearing or do you need to know what her childhood was like uh it's a combination of both i think the process it's always different for each character you play but i think i start sometimes when you're reading i a voice often is something quite important to me and weirdly when i'm reading it sort of comes instinctively a voice comes instinctively and then i but then i have to work i work on the psychology of the character and then you build up that indicates how she might hold herself or what kind of shoes she might wear it comes from inside really first but there's a scanner magical things with the way you walk i remember you were in that um sarah waters story yes yes where you played a sort of country woman with a well it was a ragged old raincoat and a piece of string around it and big heavy gumboots yeah well she again i love doing adaptations because uh there's so much nuance that's been written by the author and you have so much insight into the character and she her walk was described quite clearly by sarah and so again i was like right i'm going to find out what this walk is and manifest that into the character and it was a weighty heavy very different to mrs calter and mrs called her i was like well she's monkey she's part monkey in my mind so i felt like i wanted some monkey hands and when she got more angry and violent when she'd let her monkey side out she'd become more monkey and just slightly and it's fun to play that and push those you know the levels of that but i physically i mean i'm a stage actress really and that involves the whole body and i'm incredibly physical and i think um when i inhabit a character it's in all the movements it's in everything every part of me um because no one walks the same i mean no one speaks the same everyone's very particular so the more kind of nuanced and fun you can have with that the better and make it really specific both from time and place but also psychology i was thinking my favorite character in in the trilogy is mary malone because and i wondered if she was you in some ways i don't know well i'll tell you why she's my favorite characters i sort of feel like she is um she's the most philosophical well for me the most philosophical part of the book and she um well i love the premise none on the run but also um that she is the most to change her life the the sort of courage she has to completely transform her life and the curiosity she's like a character in constant search of understanding or of meaning and i i'm very fond of mary yeah to me she's the uh i just feel that's wonderfully played in the tv beautifully played and um i just wanted the sort of marriage of religion and science as well yeah uh and philosophy she was um she was always again i liked immediately you know you you like some characters don't particularly like other ones though you find them interesting to write about but i was very fond of mary always and her function in the story is really to tell a story she has to tell the story of when she fell in love when she was young and there was a little sweet or something involved and she put it in the boy's mouth and they knew and that is very important because lyra and will overhear this and then later the next day when they're on their own in this beautiful wide open world and there's no danger and they're together and she picks up a little fruit and she does that as she's heard in the story so she knows that he will know what she means and she knows what she's doing and they both know what's happening um and that happens because of a story and i think we we do learn a lot about ourselves through stories we learn how to fall in love through stories we learn how to be brave through stories and in this case they learn how to fall in love or how to express this love [Music]

Channel: Penguin Books UK

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Keywords: Penguin, Penguin Books, Penguin Books UK, Philip Pullman, Philip Pullman interview, Philip Pullman his dark materials, Philip Pullman Northern Lights, His Dark Materials, Ruth Wilson, Ruth Wilson Interview, Ruth Wilson Philip Pullman, Ruth Wilson His Dark Materials, Ruth Wilson His Dark Materials Inteview, Philip Pullman His Dark Materials TV, Philip Pullman Daemons, Philip Pullman author, Philip Pullman Lyra, Philip Pullman Oxford, his dark materials audiobook

Id: 4RQI0Q94j_w

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021