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Recently, Findlay and Hinds spoke with DeWayne Hamby of Reel Faith about the film and its themes of human longing and spirituality.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Polly, this was your first feature film after a lifetime of theater work. So, tell me a little bit about what you take away from it, and how this compared to what you\u2019ve done in the past?<\/strong><\/p>\n Polly Findlay:<\/strong> Well, Ciar\u00e1n and I have spoken about this before, but I feel I was very lucky in having this as my debut feature. It felt like the ideal gateway from theater, in that it is a film very much about the acting and about the performance. We were really aware going in that the quality of the film was going to live or die on whether or not we gave these two fantastic actors the space and the time to do the thing they do so brilliantly. In some respects, that felt familiar from theater, because a big part of the challenge was creating a set that was reactive and responsive and genuinely engaged and interested in what Lesley and Ciar\u00e1n were doing. In some ways, that felt like home territory.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Ciar\u00e1n, you have been in everything from \u201cRoad to Perdition\u201d and \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d to Harry Potter. Where does Gerry of \u201cMidwinter Break\u201d land in all these roles? You\u2019ve had some very eccentric, very dramatic characters, and this is a pretty understated role. So, what do you take away from Gerry and what were your thoughts going into it?<\/strong><\/p>\n Ciar\u00e1n Hinds:<\/strong> I think we were very fortunate in this day and age to have two days with Polly just reading the piece. It was difficult to actually get to know each other, to get to know who our characters might be, for those characters to get to know each other, for Gerry and Stella. Polly was there to probe us, to ask ourselves and each other questions about the relationship we were going to portray. It gave Lesley and me the license to really be free with each other. Therefore, it wasn\u2019t about what we wanted from the scene, but trying to play the scene as truthfully as possible\u2014whether that meant being emotionally honest or hiding emotions. That was a movable feast, in a way, and we just had to play right in the moment. Almost every scene we did was guided by Polly, and it was a great experience for me. It really meant a lot to me, actually, to be able to play like this, because it\u2019s very rare one gets that kind of opportunity to be so personal and so connected in the search for truth and honesty.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Polly, I write about things from a spiritual aspect most of the time. She\u2019s really struggling in her faith. She\u2019s struggling to rectify her relationship considering deeply held things that she believes, and she feels he takes them lightly or mocks them. How difficult was that to portray with them?<\/strong><\/p>\n Polly Findlay:<\/strong> Well, I think it\u2019s one of the things that I remember loving in the book. The book is such a wonderful piece of writing, and I felt there were certain phrases and sentences from the book that I wanted the feeling of to live under the film. One that I remember is that Stella, in the book\u2014she\u2019s an old English teacher\u2014says she loves old English because of the language\u2019s ability to move in a blink to the mystical. That sense of moving in a blink to the mystical was a thing that Lesley and I talked about a lot. She is somebody who is constantly seeing a miracle. She\u2019s somebody that spots miracles in places. So that scene where they see the horses, or even just in a little way that scene when we\u2019re in the museum, and there\u2019s that crowd of children looking at the picture, and they\u2019re also striking in their white coats. There are these little things that we found all the way through that felt like they had that sense of daily miracle in them. Of course, that\u2019s what a marriage is as well\u2014there\u2019s that sense\u2014and I think that is what happens at the end: there is a decision to have faith in each other, to find a moment of change and trust, and to take a leap into what feels like the unknown, which is an amazing thing to do at that stage in a relationship. So, for me, the religion of the film was less about anything that felt like dogma, and more about that character having a super sensitivity. One of the other sentences was Bernard talks about pollen sensitizing your nose to sneezing, so that you have the pollen in your nose. There\u2019s a sense of: Oh, I\u2019m just about like that. You feel super sensitive. They\u2019re both in this place of super sensitivity over the course of this weekend\u2014liveness to the world\u2014and the spirituality of the film is in that sense of being alive to the world and each other, I think, as much as anything else.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Her spirituality could be substituted with any kind of strong held belief that she has, that he doesn\u2019t necessarily subscribe to, or that he may make light of. Ciar\u00e1n, I felt like you really played your role very sympathetically. I felt for Gerry, even among the issues that he had, the challenges that he had. I did not want her to give up on him and I love the resolution of them coming together. Talk a little bit about just that stage of life when a man basically has to assess, \u201cWhat\u2019s going wrong and what\u2019s going right, and what do I need to do to change it?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Ciar\u00e1n Hinds:<\/strong> It\u2019s interesting. From my perspective, when you play it, but from the outside, he\u2019s quite a needy person, quietly, very needy. He\u2019s almost like a child; he has a deep-seated fear of being abandoned. The only person that he\u2019s been really connected with his entire life is his childhood sweetheart. He has lost his faith; she has not, and he doesn\u2019t want to take her faith away from her. But at the same time, there are some things that he can just let be. That\u2019s where the friction comes from. I think at the end, he wants to be honest with himself and honest with her, and that is the problem when resentment and frustration come into a relationship about two people living together some 45 years and they\u2019re not on the same path. But there is a way that they can hold each other along the path, and I think that\u2019s what he\u2019s aiming for. Towards the end, when he does say, \u201cI love you more than anything,\u201d he still can\u2019t admit to the fact that he believes it was more science than religion that saved our child\u2014the fact that the bullet didn\u2019t bear, that it missed and went through. When he says, \u201cI hate myself when I drink. I hate myself more when I\u2019m not drinking.\u201d He\u2019s honest in his appraisal of himself. He\u2019s ashamed of himself. He loves this woman so deeply, and he needs her so much that he\u2019s a bit of a mess, but he will try and hold her up. That\u2019s all. It\u2019s so human. It\u2019s so human.<\/p>\n \u201cMidwinter Break,\u201d directed by Polly Findlay and starring Lesley Manville and Ciar\u00e1n Hinds, released February 20 from Focus Features.<\/a><\/p>\n