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The young film director Joe Wright has just flown into Manhattan from the Toronto Film Festival, where he screened his engrossing adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement. But even on two hours' sleep, the big, genial Brit is quick to spot ironic body art for a laugh. "Do you see that guy's tattoo?" he marvels in the lobby of the Mercer hotel. "He has 'Marc Jacobs' tattooed on his arm. That's extraordinary! "It's not a sixth sense, exactly. Wright just possesses an unsettling hypersensitivity to even the smallest visual detail, which has become his trademark after only two feature films (his first was 2005's Pride & Prejudice).
In Atonement, set partly in a lush English manor in the 1930s, James McAvoy plays Robbie, the educated son of a housekeeper. Robbie is falsely accused of a sex act with a minor, and thus torn from the love of his life—the aristocratic Cecilia Tallis, brilliantly played by Keira Knightley. "I think Joe was disappointed in my first reaction to seeing it," says McAvoy. "I was so gobsmacked after I saw it. I couldn't be profound or forthcoming. I had to sit in a corner and just go, 'Fuck.' "
Atonement was not expected to translate well on screen. The novel's primary thread explores the restorative power of art—not your typical box-office magic. "It's a book about happy endings," Wright says, simmering it down to its most comprehensible nugget without giving anything away. "I watched The Great Gatsby for that sense of ease, that sense of languor," he adds, before trailing off into an inventory of the flimsy nothings draped on Knightley's fine form, including a long green silk number that winds up hiked around her waist.
Wright grew up in North London, where his parents ran the Little Angel puppet theater. Later, he studied film at London's Central St. Martins, and now he's all over the map. Before Toronto, he screened Atonement for the citizens of Redcar, the town on Britain's east coast where the Dunkirk evacuation scene was miraculously knocked out in three and a half takes. (The camera operator's knees gave out on the fourth.)
Prior to Redcar, Wright was at the Venice Film Festival—where at 35 he became the youngest director ever to have a film open the event. And right before that, he was kneeling on the shores of Lake Como, proposing to his girlfriend of two years, Rosamund Pike, the Oxford-educated beauty he directed in the role of Jane Bennet in Pride. "It was a roller coaster, "Wright says, grinning. "It felt like the whole thing was a celebration of our engagement. Even the fireworks."
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