Felicity Jones on Breathe In

“I wanted this to be very different from Like Crazy, I wanted her to feel different. The story was different, tonally. It was a love story that was more damaging potentially and is coming out of a very difficult situation...” 

I stop award-winning actor Felicity Jones in full flow. A love story? I explain to her that I found the relationship her character has with Guy Pearce’s older man in Breathe In, Drake Doremus’s brooding new film and Edinburgh International Film Festival opener, to be quite different. Jones plays Sophie, an English exchange student who acts as a disruptive catalyst in the lives her hosts, a middle-class family living in upstate New York. For me, Sophie is a symbol of lost youth and dissolved dreams for Pearce’s character, the family’s middle-aged patriarch. And he, in turn, is the necessary figure to fill the gap in her damaged young life. Each one is simply an abstract; the other’s desire.

Jones disagrees: “I felt like there was a deep, deep connection. There’s a film, A Place in the Sun, an Elizabeth Taylor film with Montgomery Clift, that was a real inspiration for both Guy Pearce and me, and that film is about an intense connection with someone else that they are both navigating because their relationship doesn’t conform to what it should conform to and that disturbs them both.”

Naturally Jones understands Sophie more than anybody – even writer and director Drake Doremus. While some filmmakers use actors as chess pieces, to be controlled like flesh and bone pawns on set, Doremus is the opposite. He gives his actors space to fill out their characters, allowing them to move in their own chosen direction. This collaborative process builds a character with dimensions and history. “There was a very developed backstory of where she’d come from and why she was here,” Jones tells me. “I feel that Sophie is looking at a way to navigate the world. It’s interesting to see that she’s always reading these novels and looking at other characters to ask, ‘Is that how I should be?’”

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“The actors improvise on the day and doing that with drama is a great way of working. We have an outline, an emotional map. How you get there is up to you” – Felicity Jones

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Felicity Jones at the opening night of Edinburgh International Film Festival (photo: Gavin Crosby)

Just as the Raymond Carver books Jones’s character loves were famously edited down from floral prose into the succinct ‘Carveresque’ style, so Doremus could, at times, make use of a strong editorial hand. Drama occasionally slips into melodrama when extended gazing shots are emotionally scores, and these sit uneasily next to the beautiful, natural conversations spread throughout the film. There are organic pauses, a hunt for words. “Searching for words is so important,” explains Jones, smiling a little at the ridiculous truth of her next statement: “That’s the problem with having scripted dialogue, you have to find a way of finding the search for words.” Indeed, such is the naturalism of its performances that Breathe In at times feels like an exquisitely composed documentary. “We have a treatment, like a lot of comedy works,” Jones says. “The actors improvise on the day and doing that with drama is a great way of working. We have an outline, an emotional map. How you get there is up to you.”

Where they get to is a mature dissection of the banality of middle-class existence. The character’s deal with a very first world problem – not of hunger or death, but of self-actualisation. There are selfish shades to both leads: they’re individuals with almost everything, but thier lives fall apart when their keystone desire is pulled. “I did feel it was a very American film,” she says. “Guy’s character is living the ideals of the American dream: he has a comfortable life, he works, he has a family who are important to him, and all those things that are upheld by the American dream, but somehow something isn’t quite right underneath and there’s something more elemental that he isn’t looking after or responding to. Then this woman comes in and exposes this dissatisfaction. It feels like the film could only be made in America in that way.”

Jones will reveal a different side to herself soon, when she stars in the Hollywood blockbuster sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man next year. Hopefully, however, she will not turn her back on such cracked porcelain roles.