KVIFF opener Anthropoid, which has its world premiere tonight, is the first feature film to take on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich since 1975’s Operation Daybreak. Director-scribe Sean Ellis recounts how he developed his characters using scraps of historic documentation from which much nuance was missing.
The film had a 15-year genesis, starting when you came across a TV story of the British-trained Czech assassins [Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan) and Jozef Gabčík (Cillian Murphy)], who killed Heydrich in 1942. How did your version of the story develop in that time?
It was a file that kept growing – whenever I had some spare time, I would do some research. Then I remember doing some commercials in Prague around 2005, 2006 and 2007 and every time Icame Iwas like, ‘Take me to the church’ [where the assassin paratroopers hid]. But I think it really became a project after I finished Metro Manila, and I was looking for another film to make. And I felt a similarity in themes – because Metro is about a man who sacrifices himself for his family. But this is about two men – seven men – who sacrifice their lives for their country.
So this is a theme that’s compelling to you – along with that of doing bad things with good intentions?
I think it’s a theme that I’m quite obsessed about – which is: We’re only here for such ashort time and some people live in such extremes and it’s like, ‘What do you do? What’s the human psyche and what’s it capable of doing at extreme points?’ You kind of know there’s no way out and it’s the end – it’s kind of how you face the end. In Anthropoid, they face the end with such a roar of life that it’s still resonating today.
So how did you choose to focus the story with so much material to work from?
It’s a tricky story because it’s so big. There’s so much. And I think that’s gen erally why it took 15 years. What part of that story do you tell? You could do an eight-part TV series about that whole thing.
You can read the whole interview in today's Festival Daily.
