Joe Wright On His Pitch Perfect Vision Of Classic Love Story, ‘Cyrano’

Director Joe Wright’s movies are no strangers to acclaim and his latest, Cyrano, is no different. 

Based on the stage musical of the same name, which was inspired by Edmond Rostand’s classic play, Cyrano de Bergerac, Peter Dinklage is the titular lead. Haley Bennett plays Roxanne, the object of his affection. She has no idea that the words of love professed by the man she has fallen for are, in fact, the true feelings of Cyrano himself.

I caught up with Wright to discuss the Oscar-nominated romantic musical drama, the challenges of taking it from stage to screen, shaping Ben Mendelsohn’s nefarious dandy, plus working with The National and Glen Hansard.

Simon Thompson: Musicals are a hard sell, and they are something that you haven’t done before. What made you want to take it on?

Joe Wright: I felt like doing a musical was a natural progression from the Anna Karenina adaptation I did. I conceived that film was like a ballet with words, so this felt like a natural progression to allow the characters to sing. I wanted to make sure that it didn’t become a big declamatory musical, but something that felt honest, true, and intimate. To that end, the cast recorded all the singing live on set. We embraced the faults and the breath, the closeness and the quiet yearning of the songs.

Thompson: How much easier or harder was it to record everything on set. Both Peter and Haley were in the stage show, so they were very familiar with it, but they had to adjust their performances from a stage environment to a film set.

Wright: They had a kind of familiarity, but in a way that meant they’d also got into habits. The songs were quite different from the workshop production they’d done together, so sometimes they thought they knew it and then realized that they didn’t because they remembered the older version. A lot of it was about deconstructing those performances that they’d given and then reconstructing something specifically for cinema.

Thompson: Did that alter your role as a director? When you’re an actor, and you’re familiar with something, you have confidence in it, and you are perhaps planning to deliver it a certain way. As a director, you have a vision too. How did that work?

Wright: I don’t know, but it is interesting. It didn’t feel different from any other film. I always expect my actors to know their lines, whether they learned them a couple of years ago or the week before, and I always do the two or three weeks rehearsals with my actors before shooting. That’s important to get to know each other, learn each other’s rhythms, and figure out who these characters are. The process didn’t feel very different.

Thompson: How was the process of adapting Cyrano from stage to screen?

Wright: We worked on the screenplay for a couple of years, and it ended up being quite different from the original stage production. Some of the dialogue was similar, but it’s an entirely different form. In a way, the history of cinema is about film trying to extricate itself from the traditions of theater. That was challenging but also exciting for all of us.

Thompson: Something that I loved about Cyrano, aside from Haley and Peter’s phenomenal performances, was Ben Mendelsohn. He can portray these almost pantomime villain-style roles while embodying the dandy in unique and brilliant ways. How did you get Ben to that space, or did he bring that himself?

Wright: You’re absolutely right. Ben brings a lot of that, and it’s really about calibrating how far one way or the other he goes. He always brings a kind of emotional reality and truth to everything he does, even if he’s playing these quite flamboyant people. There’s always a psychological depth to what Ben does.

Thompson: He’s very free as an actor and will gladly put himself out there. Did you have to rein Ben in at all to give a contained performance rather than something that was super outlandish and camp?

Wright: Ben will give you many different variations and ideas, and it’s up to you to choose what you want to use in the cutting room. No two takes are ever alike with Ben.

Thompson: We talked about music being so important to this, and obviously, The National created the original score. How much stuff did you have to work on those guys with to build this out?

Wright: I think there was a lot more freedom in working for cinema, especially in terms of arrangements. Some songs like “Wherever I Fall” didn’t change so much, but others like “Every Letter,” the strange ménage à trois song, evolved quite a lot. It was a lot of fun. We worked hard developing the songs right up until shooting. Bryce Dessner was out in Sicily with us, and we had a whole system set up in the hotel. After a day’s rehearsals, we’d go back to his room and try new arrangements and new ideas. It was a very exciting process.

Thompson: Was that stuff already good to go? Was there stuff they didn’t put in the original show? Is there stuff that didn’t get used in Cyrano that we might get on an elongated album at some point?

Wright: There’s certainly stuff that didn’t get used. I’d seen the first workshop production back in 2018, so we’d had a lot of time to work on those songs.

Thompson: When I saw Cyrano, people were genuinely excited by Glen Hansard turning up in one scene. How did that come together, and how game was he to be involved? Were you expecting to get that reaction to him being in it?

Wright: I knew that he was beloved by a lot of people. Once is a great film. We literally called him up and said, ‘Glen, do you want to come and do this?’ I think everyone was so tired of being in lockdown that he was like, ‘Yep, sure, I’ll be there.’ He got on a plane and came out and spent a long time with us out in Sicily. Actually, in the evenings, when he wasn’t filming, he and the other guys who sang that song would go out busking on the streets of Noto and perform to the residents, which was a lovely thing.

Cyrano is in theaters now.