VOICE OF STEPHEN HAWKING: 'There should be no boundary
'to human endeavour.
'However bad life may seem,
'while there is life, there is hope.'
Thank you.
It almost felt like, um, a sort of investigation into love,
and to love in every sense, in every guise,
whether it was young love and passionate love,
but also love of subject matter, love of family,
and then the limitations, the boundaries of love.
I found it just completely eye-opening,
for someone that... I went to Cambridge,
I'd seen Stephen across the campus, I knew his voice.
I knew that he had done stuff to do with black holes,
but I had no idea that there was this extraordinary story behind.
It would have been easy to make this into, like, a kitchen-sink drama,
and to make it grim and realistic in that sort of dogged way
that you could have done.
But our idea was to go the opposite direction,
was to flood the film with light.
And to make it, in a way, to pick up on the mood of the characters who,
despite all the things that happen to them, are really quite optimistic.
I loved sitting down and reading this film
and that it was a love story, essentially,
and it's about this love surviving over 25 years.
But also the film is asking broader philosophical questions about,
you know, why are we here, what is the meaning of life,
and I loved the way it moved between this domestic relationship
story and then these broader themes.
And I liked that straight away from reading the script.
So, if you reverse time, then the universe is getting smaller.
All right.
So, what if I reverse the process
all the way back to see what happened
at the beginning of time itself?
At the beginning of time itself?
So the universe getting smaller and smaller,
getting denser and denser, hotter and hotter...
You mean wind back the clock?
Exactly, wind back the clock.
Is that what you're doing? Are you winding back the clock?
That is what I'm doing.
You've got quite a long way back to the beginning of time,
we've got a long way to go! Keep winding! Keep winding!
Really, on this film,
I felt like I had to just educate myself on everything,
so I went wherever I could and I try, for my own sake,
when I'm working, to make it three-dimensional,
to try and, just to keep myself enlivened - and I have quite a short
attention span, so - but otherwise the most complicated side of it was
working out - all the documentary start coming out in the '80s,
when Stephen became more famous,
but by that point he's in the wheelchair,
so what was complicated was finding out how he physically
progressed into the wheelchair and,
although there's stuff written about that,
I had to go and look at photographs,
and I would take those photographs to a specialist
called Dr Katy Seidel and she,
by looking at what the hands were doing,
Stephen's hands were doing, or his feet, would help work out
what his specific physical decline may have been.
Because with motor neurone disease, you have what are called
upper neurons and lower neurons,
and if your lower neurons stop working, there's
a kind of softness and a wilting,
and if you upper neurons stop working, there's this rigid quality.
MND is a combination of those two things,
but which part of your body has which is completely unique to
each patient, so by analysing the photos we could try
and work out what his specific decline would have been.
Eddie was spending time with people with motor neurone disease
and studying Stephen's physicality,
and he would bring details that we would then use in the film.
Felicity did her own version of that with Jane and her research.
Also, we improvised in the film as well.
The screenplay was very good but, at the same time, there was
scope for the actors to kind of elaborate,
sometimes with dialogue, sometimes with physical actions,
to enhance the screenplay. I was very open to that.
The book is so detailed about her experience,
physically and emotionally,
um, and I realised I'd have to start going to the gym
in order to get the physical strength that Jane had.
And Eddie Redmayne may look very light but he's actually very heavy!
And just the sort of physical lifting of being the carer,
but also the emotional side of that experience,
I was constantly coming back to Jane's book.
But what was important is that she is this woman who has this
incredible capacity for love, and has this strength
and determination, but I was keen that she wasn't a saint,
you know, she's also a woman that has a very strong sexual identity,
and also has a career that she's
absolutely vehement about, and rightly so.
She's someone who, I wanted to show this complexity.
Are you going to talk about this or not?
Is that what you want?
Yes, it is what I want, so please, if you care about me at all,
then please just go.
I have two years to live. I need to work.
I love you.
You-you've leapt to - that's a false conclusion.
I want us to be together for as long as we've got,
and if that's not very long, well, that's just how it is.
It'll have to do.
It'll affect everything.
When Stephen is diagnosed, Jane doesn't want to burden him
with her pain and distress so it's always for him
she's giving a face of strength and determination and we're going to get
through this and that was constantly throughout their relationship.
She wanted to give him the best support she could
and that was about being quite selfless.
The innocence of their early time together was very
important to the way the film was then going to unfold. To enjoy that.
The charm of that, of people falling in love, you know,
in Cambridge, all very innocent
and like a fairy-tale, knowing that a nightmare was going to come
and descend upon these characters, you know, inexorably in this story.
A true story of course.
Erm, but it was important that the foundation was there, that we
felt the genuine reciprocal love between these two
characters because when you test it in such difficult
ways as their lives unfolded together.
Because we weren't shooting chronologically it was
important for me to be absolutely...
and because it's a disease that once,
once a muscle stops working, it doesn't start again.
And quite often with film, you know,
you make a film and then in the edit you can shift this scene to
here and that one can go there.
And James and I were...and Anthony, the writer, all wanted to be
rigorous that with this film we couldn't do that.
Because you couldn't have Stephen sort of not moving here
and then starting moving again there.
Um, and so, I made this chart with each muscle
and when it was stopping working,
whether it was upper or lower neuron, whether it, um...
what glasses he was wearing, which wheelchair he was in.
And then, of course, we have chapter four,
this black hole at the beginning of time.
It's brilliant.
Brilliant, Stephen. Superb.
Therefore, all there is to say is, "well done".
Or perhaps I should say, to be more precise, "well done, doctor".
Bravo, Stephen.
Thank you.
So, what next?
And prove...with a single equation, that time had a beginning.
Wouldn't that be nice, professor?
When you meet Stephen, the disease is entirely secondary to him.
He has no interest in it and I didn't want this to be...
in the way that he is someone who looks forward and passionately...
I didn't want this to be a film about a physicality
and so, what was important, was to make the physicality so
embedded that they are the character,
they become conjoined with the character and that by the time
Felicity and I were playing together, we could just play.
My name is Stephen Hawking.
It's American.
They have an unsentimentality that was really important to us
that we put that into the film.
You know, they are incredibly sharp-witted, always using humour to
survive quite difficult situations and there was no self-pity.
For Stephen, it was very important, and Jane, you know,
with disability often there can be prejudice and you can be patronised
and it was so important for them that they would just retain Stephen's
character and dignity and the illness was never important, you know?
She always saw Stephen. That was just...
For both of them the illness is the least interesting thing.
There's far more interesting things they want to be thinking about.
However much research and however much you educate yourself...what is
at the root of this story is human emotions of the indescribable
things of love and family and so ultimately you also end up
bringing your own experience into that and I think as you get
older you just experience more and I think that's probably no bad thing.
You have to have empathy for a character in order
to play them honestly.
And that's quite an instinctive reaction
when you read something, but you do become their advocate.
You know, you really... It takes a bit of time after filming,
I remember both of us, you know,
taking a few months before we really let go of Jane and Stephen.
And you do...
you become obsessive about that person and there is a lot of,
you have a lot of care for them.
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