Sean Ellis Talks About 'Anthropoid' and Mentions Jamie

*This interview contains strong spoilers.

Inverse - Why tackle a World War II movie now?

I don’t think there’s any rhyme or reason. I’ve been preparing this since 2001, and I don’t say, “We should get this ready for 2016.” For me it’s about how I’m just obsessed with telling this story. The more I found out about it the more I thought, “This is what I want to make.”

How thorough did you get in your research into Operation Anthropoid before making the film?

Reading lots of books is the start, then looking on the internet. Then you actually go to the places and start interviewing people. You look through documents at the Ministry of Defense, you go to the war museums. You try to get lots of opinions, but the trouble with this story is everyone has an opinion about it. There’s three or four different stories about things that did or didn’t happen. You get all this conflicting information and, in a weird way, you’re a detective trying to piece it together in a way to tell it. What’s truth and what’s not? What feels like truth and what doesn’t?

Operation Anthropoid had been previously told on-screen in films like Operation Daybreak or the Czech film Atentát, but those haven’t been big hits. How did you want to separate your film from the way this story has been told before on-screen?

Filmmaking has changed a lot since those films. You look at them now and they’re dated. It’s a story that needs to continually be told… like 99 percent of the world doesn’t know about it. It’s a chance to tell the world a story that happened in a very culturally specific place but has universal themes. That’s movie-making gold.

What was the casting process like searching for the perfect Jan and Jozef?

They have to work together, so they have to complement each other. We cast Cillian first after he responded well to the script. Once he was in place it was simply: Who is his Jan? I hadn’t seen 50 Shades of Grey, but I had seen Jamie in The Fall and loved him in it, but I thought he was too dark for the role.

We met and talked about his character being a kind of puppy dog to Jozef, and somebody who doesn’t want to go through with it and maybe physically can’t. After that it felt right, so I talked to Cillian who said, “We’re both Irish, and I love him.”

New Interview of Jamie with National Post

Jamie Dornan knows how to define the dark side as illustrated by his Fifty Shades of Grey sex fiend in film and his twisted serial killer on the series The Fall. Now he’s giving a real life reluctant war hero a try with his portrayal of Czech freedom fighter Jan Kubis in the WWII film Anthropoid.

Co-written and directed by Sean Ellis after he developed the project for nearly 15 years, the movie recounts Operation Anthropoid. It’s the code name for the 1941 mission of ex-patriots Kubis and Josef Gabchik (Cillian Murphy), who return to Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Their assignment is to assassinate high-ranking SS commander Reinhard Heydrich.

At a Manhattan hotel, Dornan, 34, discusses his work on Anthropoid and his career. Here are five key things he had to say.

1. Ellis’ undeniable obsession with the Anthropoid story becomes a Dornan inspiration

“You should always have a certain amount of obsession or at least be bold about what you want to accomplish,” says Dornan. “So I couldn’t fail to be hugely engrossed in the characters and the story, because Sean’s attention to detail went far beyond what he needed to do.”

2. The Dornan way of emoting

The actor says the screenplay indicated decisively that Jan is not the soldier or the killer type, “so I had a clear way into how to play him.”

“Jan was like a little brother to Josef and Jamie understood that almost immediately,” says Ellis.

New Interview of Jamie, Cillian Murphy and Sean Ellis with IndieWire

There are no happy endings in Sean Ellis’ World War II drama “Anthropoid.” But should a new plan to honor the heroes portrayed within the new war drama pan out, the true story’s gruesome history might be forever altered in an unexpectedly positive way.

Ellis’ latest film follows the true story of Czech resistance fighters Josef Gabčík (Cillian Murphy) and Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan), who undertook the nearly impossible mission to assassinate SS General Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942. The plan ultimately resulted in the deaths of Kubiš, Gabčík and five other Czech fighters – and while Heydrich didn’t die immediately as planned, he did succumb to his injuries soon after, altering the course of the war forever – and while the soldiers have long been national heroes, over seven decades have passed without a proper burial for their bodies.

Thanks to renewed interest in the unbelievable story of Operation Anthropoid, that could be changing soon.

“Because of this discussion that’s going on, the government have acted on information that they know where the bodies are,” Ellis recently told IndieWire, referencing a recent story by the BBC. “Now they’re going to excavate this grave, and they think that Kubiš and Gabčík are there. Their heads aren’t there, because they were decapitated, but the seven guys, they think, are in this grave.”

A Proper Ending

Per Ellis, should DNA testing prove that the bodies of the seven fighters – and, in particular, Kubiš and Gabčík – are in a mass grave in the Dablice cemetery (located just outside Prague), the Czech government intends to treat them with the utmost of respect.

“They are going to give them a proper burial, with memorials and all the rest of it, because they are the Czech heroes,” the filmmaker said.

New Interview of Jamie, Sean Ellis and 'Anthropoid' Cast with New York Times

New York Times - What's Jamie Dornan got to look forward to? The links.

While happy to be employed, the "Fifty Shades" hunk said he's been working on back-to-back projects for what seems like forever and can't wait to "play a bit of golf" as he chills at home in London with his wife and two young children later this year.

"They've been with me everywhere I've filmed but still I'd like to have more than just the weekends and the odd evening with them," Dornan said during a recent media tour. "It's time to be on daddy duty for a while."

So what's he been up to? Making the last two "Fifty Shades" movies, for starters, and wrapping the third season of "The Fall," the BBC series that launched his career.

There was also filming of a Netflix military thriller, "Jadotville," in a role based on a real-life commandant of an Irish UN contingent in the Congo. And then there's "Anthropoid," out Friday, another true-to-life war role, this one in Nazi-occupied Prague.

Oh, and he squeezed in "The 9th Life of Louis Drax," which has him playing a doctor with questionable judgment and cool mind-reading skills, against a boy in a coma.

Veering in and out of all of these worlds at a breakneck pace suits Dornan just fine.

"I love that aspect of it. My mind can be quite busy and sort of constantly kinetic and I think ... I've picked a good profession to sort of enable that," he said. "But sometimes it's tricky."

New BTS Pictures from 'Anthropoid' + Quotes from Jamie, Cillian Murphy and Sean Ellis

 

Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan together on the set of “Anthropoid,” the new World War II thriller from the fashion-photographer-turned-director Sean Ellis. “I can’t imagine the film without them,” Ellis says. “I met with Cillian and thought we were definitely on the same page. After reading the script he had some really great, insightful ideas about the character, and you go, yes, this is someone who’s just going to bring to really breathe life into Gabcik.”

Ellis (left) watches Dornan rehearse a scene from behind the camera. Dornan remembers being taken with the script from his first read. “It all felt very human and very relatable,” he says.

Reinhard Heydrich, played by Detlef Bothe, points his gun at Jozef Gabcik (Murphy). The scene features one of the film’s big twists, which Ellis describes as “one of the great reversals, for me, in this story.” After learning about the details of Operation Anthropoid from a documentary, Ellis says, “I couldn’t believe it” — punctuating his statement with much stronger language.

Dornan (left) and Murphy head off on their mission. “He was a very, very successful photographer before he became a director,” Murphy says of Ellis. “The guy knows about photography like nobody else.”

Dornan as Jan Kubis. Ellis admired Dornan’s work as the sociopathic serial killer Paul Spector in the British drama “The Fall.” “I sort of said to him that he’d be opposite of Paul Spector,” Ellis says. “You’ve got to eradicate any of that darkness.”

Murphy and Dornan on the set of the final shootout in an exact replica of the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague. “They were the most intense days of filming,” Dornan says. “We were all running around from gunfire, and it’s a very hot, sweaty, sort of mad environment, I would say. It’s exhausting and totally immersive.”

For the movie’s final moments, which take place in the church’s crypt, the music was especially important. “I worked very closely with Robin Foster, the composer,” says Ellis, who commissioned the final music early in production. “I played it only twice and I wrote back to Robin and I said, ‘It’s the piece of music that we’re going to use; I can’t listen to it anymore because I do not want it to lose its power for me.’”

 Cillian Murphy

Murphy as Josef Gabcik. While Ellis saw Dornan’s character as “innocent,” Murphy’s Gabcik was a hardened realist. “In a weird way, Cillian’s got the darkness,” Ellis says. “He was very excited to explore that as an actor.”

Take a look at all the amazing BTS pictures from 'Anthropoid' HERE

New Interview of Jamie, Sean Ellis and 'Anthropoid' Cast with The Knockturnal - 'Anthropoid' Premiere

Jamie's Interview

What was the appeal of the film? What drew you to work on this project?
The script and the stories blew me away. I didn’t know any of the mission or particular part of history. But beyond all of that, like three weeks before I got sent the script, I’d watched Metro Manila, which Sean directed, and I thought it was one of the best films I’d ever seen. And I’d be saying to my wife like, “Fuck, I’d love to work with this guy,” and then almost serendipitously three weeks later, my agent emailed me a script, and as soon as I knew it was Sean, it could’ve been about anything and I would’ve loved to do it because I’m just such a fan of Sean. So yeah, that was for the most part why I wanted to do it.

Can you tell me what you admire about Sean as a filmmaker and a writer?
His attention to detail is insane. I’ve never met or worked with anyone who is so driven and passionate about their project. He turns up every day know exactly what he wants to do. His meticulous planning of every shot, and he built like figurines of Cillian and I for all the action sequences. I mean I’ve worked with directors that don’t even have fucking storyboards. Sean took it to the level where he had figurines of us doing each action. He’d lit them in a way he wanted to light them on the day. I mean, his attention to detail is just incredible. It’s very rare, I think, of filmmakers these days. Certainly I’d never experienced that before. I was very taken by that.

New Interview of Jamie, Sean Ellis and 'Anthropoid' Cast with W Magazine

W Magazine -  “I want to be a star!” said actress Charlotte Le Bon, wistfully, as her Anthropoid co-star Jamie Dornan whisked down the red carpet behind her, bypassing the row of reporters waiting expectantly, voice recorders in hand. It was the evening of the film’s New York premiere, and French Canadian Le Bon, clad in a sweet Valentino dress, had paused for an interview, stepping away from the camera’s flashing bulbs with a quiet “Merci.”

Still, movie star or no, Dornan would soon be back to chat; he was on break from shooting Fifty Shades Freed, a wholly different film from the small-scale war epic he was promoting Thursday night.

Le Bon and Dornan star alongside Irish actor Cillian Murphy and Czech actress Anna Geislerová in Anthropoid, a Prague-set World War Two drama that recounts a lesser-known moment of the Czech resistance against the Nazi occupation — so lesser-known, in fact, that most of the cast was unaware of the episode before receiving the script. The film takes its name from Operation Anthropoid, a resistance mission in which Murphy and Dornan’s characters — Josef Gabcík and Jan Kubiš, respectively — were tasked with assassinating Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich was the chief architect of the “Final Solution,” the leader of the Prague occupation, and the right-hand man of SS commander Heinrich Himmler. Geislerová and Le Bon play Lenka and Maria, two young Prague natives who start out as companions of Gabcík and Kubiš in order to make them less conspicuous, but eventually fall for their faux-partners.

“Honestly, on the first casting, I didn’t know who’s Jamie Dornan,” Geislerová confessed. “I couldn’t remember Cillian Murphy. Then they showed me the pictures, and I was like, ‘Cool. That’s good. Not bad at all.’”

Director Sean Ellis had been researching and writing this film for 10 years, Murphy explained, and it culminated in a two-month shoot on location in Prague. While the relationships between characters were invented, the action sequences — including the chilling finale — remain true to historical narrative.

“It’s not just fantasy; it actually happened,” he said. “You feel quite humbled when you’re playing these characters.”

“We felt such a strong obligation to tell the story in a correct manner,” Dornan added. A historian of the Second World War consulted on set throughout the entirety of the shoot, he explained, ensuring the cast was hyper-vigilant about the weight of their task. 

It’s not just an important moment in Czech or even European history, though; the tale also resonates today. It hadn’t been adapted since 1975, Ellis explained. (Though another telling, an adaptation of the Laurent Binet metafiction HHhH, is currently in production with stars Mia Wasikowska, Rosamund Pike, Jack O’Connell, and Jason Clarke.) “We keep making these same mistakes and we need to look back in our past at these kind of stories and figure out … what we can do to stop it.”

And while the heft of such a historical narrative may have weighed on the cast — perhaps none more than Geislerová, who grew up hearing stories about the parachutists who swooped into Prague to take down Heydrich — the Czech accent also proved a challenge. (Well, except for Geislerová, who became an impromptu dialect coach on set. She even recorded Le Bon’s lines for her for the Canadian actress to mimic.)

“I think the Czech people are very forgiving of the accent,” Murphy said with a slight, wry grin. “Hopefully we passed muster.”

New Interview of Jamie, Cillian Murphy and Sean Ellis with Huffington Post - 'Anthropoid' Press Junket

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Jamie, Cillian Murphy and Sean Ellis on AOL Build for 'Anthropoid' (August 5) - Interview + Pictures

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