Showing Knightley

Published on Tuesday 17 June 2008 21:03

Tonight, Keira Knightley will dazzle Edinburgh at the world premiere of her new film, The Edge of Love. At just 23 she's a huge star, constantly shadowed by paparazzi, but in an exclusive interview confides in Claire Black that fame is ruining her life and all she craves is anonymity

'I GENUINELY think it's rude. I don't feel like I have to tell people I don't know about things that are really personal to me. I think that's nuts." Keira Knightley is telling me, in no uncertain terms, why she has no interest in talking about her personal life to journalists such as me. To be fair, she didn't raise the topic, I did. Having been told repeatedly that no personal questions were to be asked, I wondered if Keira might feel some sympathy for journalists under pressure from their editors to get a story? No, she doesn't, as it turns out, but so polite and genuine is her reasoning, I feel like a heel for having raised the topic in the first place.

But Knightley, who is still only 23, knows the steady succession of journalists who file into the luxurious London hotel suite, dictaphones and questions in hand, ostensibly to ask her about her new film, The Edge of Love, co-starring Sienna Miller, Matthew Rhys and Cillian Murphy, are also assessing her appearance and body size, studying the way she interacts with Miller and secretly hoping for a scoop. It's no wonder she's wary.

For the record, Knightley is slim but far from skeletal. She looks as naturally slim women in their early twenties do: her limbs are long and lean, but not waif-like. Her complexion is flawless, her brown eyes complemented by artfully smoky make-up, her dark hair pulled back loosely. The short, grey-and-black sleeveless dress she's wearing is immaculately elegant, her heels vertiginously high. She is very beautiful.

As for her relationship with Sienna Miller, at a press conference early in the day, the two women seem friendly and relaxed with each other. Their on-screen chemistry, which is the true delight of the film – and according to Knightley a testament to the fine script written by Sharman MacDonald, also her mother – is much less intense offscreen, but it's there nonetheless.

Both Knightley and Miller have plenty of experience at the eye of the media storm and could be forgiven for resenting the fact that, at times, it's overshadowed their acting abilities. The Edge of Love should go some way to rectifying that, drawing performances from both which have already been described as career bests.

The fact is, though (and this is the sop that I offered Keira too), as well as being interested in her acting, people want to know about movie stars. But sitting opposite someone who has to cope with a gaggle of paparazzi following her every time she sets foot out the door, like the proverbial ball and chain, it's harder to justify.

"It's the amount (of coverage] now and how it's turned into a big business. I think that's what's changed, just how much money can be made from it." Is it impossible for her to ever be anonymous? "It's not impossible," she says with a wry smile, as if I might ask her to explain to me exactly how she does it. "It's amazing, when I don't have men with cameras following me, nobody really bothers me at all. And it's so nice.

"It got to a point where it was constant; it feels like so much is being taken from you that you don't want to give anything at all, which is quite odd.

"I've never been particularly comfortable with fame. I get lost in characters, that's the point. The point isn't – and I know at premieres it certainly looks like it is – to go, 'Wooh! This is me'. So I have found that aspect of it difficult and I don't think I've always behaved particularly well to people who have come up to me. I feel guilty about that."

As well as finding intrusion rude, there's another aspect to it that Knightley objects to, perhaps even more strenuously. "I like reading biographies," she says, "so I get it. But when it's on a day-to-day basis you can completely ruin what is really magic about going to the cinema. It should be about what you (the viewer] wants, not what the artist wants. It's about a personal experience."

It's not surprising that the magic of cinema, of creating a character and a story which is utterly compelling and believable, is so important to Knightley. The fact is, she's never wanted to be anything else. She was three when she first asked her father, theatre actor Will Knightley, for an agent. And it wasn't long before she had one. First there was TV work, then movies. She was only 18 when the first Pirates of the Caribbean film catapulted her to international stardom, and five years on her career shows no sign of slowing down. It's been "extraordinary", she says. She's been given opportunities that she could only have dreamed of and she wouldn't change any of it, even the inevitable knocks that come along as a result of learning her craft publicly.

"I don't have any training," she says. "I have been on my own just trying to work it out – and I'm still trying to work it out. It's frightening, but it's exciting too.

"I don't regret it at all, but there have been certain aspects that have been really, really hard. If you are an actor you just have to learn to get over them, pick yourself up and dust yourself down. "

MacDonald wrote the part of Caitlin Thomas (Miller) with her daughter in mind, but Knightley was always clear that Vera was the character she wanted to play. "Acting for me is very instinctive, it's very much what moves you at that moment in your life," she says. "I found her (Vera] very moving. She sort of quietly gets stripped of everything that she has. I found it tragic and very beautiful."

In this film, Knightley finds a depth and subtlety that's truly impressive. And she knocks off a fine Welsh accent to boot. When I ask her if she is pleased with her performance, she explains that she's far too self-critical to be able to tell.

"It's actually impossible, I just can't," she says. "What's great about this film, though, is it's a four-hander, so I didn't have to just watch myself the whole time.

"I'm really proud of the film. I saw it the other day with a friend and we said, you know, what if we'd come across that in the cinema? I think I'd be really pleased when I came out."

It's a good thing too, given that Knightley, as well as starring, drove the whole process of getting the film made. She wooed director John Maybury and used her name to secure the financial backing. So has she become a Hollywood power player?

"Yeah, for a very small budget," she says with a smile. "It is a wonderful thing that when you get any kind of box-office success you can help get films made, films that you feel passionately about. That is very exciting. It's also rather terrifying when you're wondering whether they're going to work."

Knightley's plucky and modest in a way that makes her seem at once serious but also childlike. She laughs easily, blowing air down her nose and screwing it up as she does so. As she sits in the armchair opposite me, her arms folded up in front of her, her fringe covering one of her perfectly made-up eyes, I wonder how she explains her massive success, with a career that many actors twice her age would be pleased with?

"It's hopefully more than just luck," she says. "I've worked really, really hard. I don't think I've ever misbehaved on a shoot. It is a job and you have to be professional and people when they're not professional don't get hired.

"I was aware when I was younger of my shortcomings as far as experience and training went so I thought at least I'm going to be good to work with. I think actually being respectful of people gets you an awfully long way."

REVIEW: THE EDGE OF LOVE

Portrait of the artist as a selfish moocher in the background

DIRECTED BY: JOHN MAYBURY

STARRING: KEIRA KNIGHTLEY, SIENNA MILLER, MATTHEW RHYS, CILLIAN MURPHY

THE late, great Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that "being an American means never having to say you're sorry". The same could be said of being an artist. Be they writers, painters, poets or pop stars, an ability to create something lasting and meaningful out of something insignificant or ephemeral is apparently a licence to leech off others, toy with people's emotions and generally act appallingly while fully expecting to be loved unconditionally. Just look at Dylan Thomas, artist-in-residence in tonight's Edinburgh International Film Festival opener, The Edge of Love. In the film, directed by John Maybury (who made the Daniel Craig-starring Francis Bacon film, Love is the Devil), we see the Welsh bard urinating on plant pots, cheating on his wife, insulting his colleagues, shirking his parental duties, mocking the war effort, drinking to excess and stabbing acquaintances in the back (metaphorically, of course) while happily living off their meagre earnings. He's an insufferable, self-absorbed bastard yet, because he's a poet, we're expected to take it as read that his myriad character flaws are interesting, not to mention attractive to women.

Mercifully, this is not a cue for a clich-ridden cradle-to-grave Dylan Thomas biopic. Covering only a couple of years of his life in Britain during the early days of the Second World War, The Edge of Love may rely on his fame to ratchet up interest in the story, but that story is not especially interested in delivering yet another variation on the tedious rise-fall-redemption character arc so beloved of Academy Awards voters. Instead it uses to explore the complications that arise when an idealised notion of love crashes into reality. More to the point, it tries to do this by making Dylan (played by Matthew Rhys) more of a background figure, a constant whose function is to catalyse the drama. The real story revolves around how his consistent self-absorption affects his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller) and his childhood love Vera Phillips (Knightley) after the latter briefly re-enters his life and becomes intimately involved with them both.

Complicating matters further is William Killick (Cillian Murphy), a young soldier who falls for a reluctant Vera and, through dogged persistence, coaxes her into marriage.

With the film initially set in an artfully rendered vision of London that presents the city as a bohemian enclave thriving under the constant threat of attack, The Edge of Love is certainly something to look at. Maybury's seductive use of kaleidoscopic images, lush colour-schemes and inventive period details gives bombed-out London a slightly dreamy quality, as if no-one can quite process the reality of the surrounding horror. There's little to fault acting-wise either. Following Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, Knightley delivers another impressive performance, and a credible Welsh accent to boot. Miller's accent is of more indeterminate origin, but as Caitlin she finally transcends her previous "It Girl" status.

For all their good work, however, the film remains peculiarly unmoving. Close-ups and tight angles give the illusion of intimacy, but emotions never bleed through the screen in the way you might hope. At times it's like looking at a beautiful work of art through a veneer of Plexiglas – a problem that becomes more acute as the film leaves the confines of London for the drab, isolated misery of the Welsh coast. It's here that the film is supposed to reach its dramatic high point, but the way it simply peters out in such meaningless fashion suggests that the real-life incident upon which it is based might not have had quite as much significance to those involved as the rest of the film needs it to. But that's the problem with films about artists. We think everything about them is significant, when more likely they're just getting on with their lives.

&#149 The Edge of Love screens at Cineworld, Edinburgh, tonight at 9:30pm and 9:45pm, as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Alistair Harkness's coverage of the festival continues in Life & Arts tomorrow.