A Hard Day's Night

Much of the discussion surrounding Sam Taylor-Wood and her debut feature film Nowhere Boy has focused on the artist-turned-filmmaker’s personal life. Her engagement to the handsome young lead Aaron Johnson (more than 20 years her junior) and the parallels between the film and her own teenage years have consumed the column inches in recent months. In some ways it seems a shame that the focus has shifted away from the accomplishment of the film itself because, talking to Taylor-Wood, there’s one thing that becomes apparent: she fought tooth and nail to make it. “I fought bloody hard for this film and I’m proud of the fact that I had to fight for something so hard and got it!” she exclaims. Having been covertly passed a copy of the script when the project was still in its infancy, she knew instantly that this was a story she had to tell and set about the task of persuading the producers to give her the job. “They knew that they had a damn good script on their hands and that they could get anyone to do it and they were flaunting it in front of me about who they thought they could get and I just said ‘no no, it’s going to be me!’” The perseverance more than paid off.

Nowhere Boy is an elegantly realised depiction of the teenage years of John Lennon (Aaron Johnson). Brought up by his stern Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) he is reunited with his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) when he is 17 only for fractions to soon develop between the three of them. At the same time Lennon is introduced to rock and roll and makes plans to form his first band, The Quarrymen. Full of colour, fabulous fifties fashion and a vibrant soundtrack Nowhere Boy is a delight to look at and alongside its popular subject matter likely to attract the whole gambit of cinemagoers on its release.

For Sam Taylor-Wood, however, the challenges didn’t stop at getting her hands on the director’s job: there were some good "stand up fights and arguments” along the way too. Memorably, some of these involved heated boardroom discussions with none other than Hollywood big shot Harvey Weinstein. “It was good fun to stand in a room and have a battle with Harvey Weinstein and feel like you may have won. I found him really fascinating to be around because when you think of all the films he’s produced and how he’s fought for quite a lot of independent films I had a lot of respect for him so being in a room with him, and fighting, actually felt like a privilege.”

And then there was the small issue of attempting to make a biopic about one of the world’s most iconic figures and all the pressure that that entailed. “We just had to keep pushing out of our mind who the film was about because it was just too big.” Not that she needed to worry – the film has even been given the seal of approval by Yoko Ono, who gave Taylor-Wood the rights to use Lennon’s song Mother for the closing scenes.

One choice which did come easily was in casting Johnson as the young Lennon. “He was streets ahead of everyone else. I just knew he could do it and I knew he could play such a complex character and do it fearless of who Lennon was. A lot of other people were too self aware or in awe of the character.” Although the role without doubt had its challenges: “He [Johnson] had to go through the many complexities of the character, alongside having to learn a Liverpool accent and then having to learn the guitar and then having to learn how to sing – that was really difficult. Doing the musical days were the worst filming days of all of them; invariably I had a guitar thrown at me!”

Yet there’s no pain without gain, as they say, and the climatic scene in the film where emotions bubble to the surface paid off, despite being painful to shoot. “I refer to it as black Thursday, the day we shot the meltdown… I watch it with such pain because I know what we went through to get it… [but] that one is the scene where I feel I achieved something quite monumental.” Equally memorable is a quieter scene near the end of the film between Lennon’s Aunt Mimi and mother Julia. “The scene which makes me cry every single time is a scene between the two sisters in the café; even talking about it chokes me.”

Taylor-Wood has said that the story held an emotional resonance for her – her own mother left when she was just a teenager and her relationship with her has been difficult ever since. At the same time she doesn’t find herself consciously channelling this in her work. “I work really instinctively so I think that a lot of my own experiences in life have helped and informed certain scenes, but not consciously… it was much more an instinctive understanding of how each person would be affected by certain things that were said and done.”

Despite all the challenges entailed in the project the experience hasn’t put Taylor-Wood off the desire to make more films, and she says she has received “many fantastic offers and really interesting scripts”. But right now she is looking to enjoy her own life a little: “At the moment I’m still in the Lennon world… I’m actually trying to enjoy my life for a bit before I enter into someone else’s world again and get obsessed, because you need to be obsessed before you do something like this.” Obsessed it seems and also imbued with a strong fighting spirit.