I want to.
I really, really want to.
But every time I think about doing it, I remember how painful it’s all got, and I’m still trying to get my head around how to change that story for us.
But this story at least has now been fixed, the writing team have hammered it out, and we on the cast have been given our new pages.
Over the next five days, the boys will stage their flight to Berlin. They’ll make it all the way there, just like in the novel, and will be hit by flak. Tim will still be injured, and the plane’s electrics will be damaged, preventing Jacob from discharging their bombs, so Robbie will turn back to England with them stuck in the bay’s doors.
On the control tower set, I’ll receive Robbie’s call, and tell him he’s going to be a father.
The boys will circle back to the coast.
Six of them will jump.
Back in LA, a team in special effects will create the moment the bombs fall too, sendingMabel’s Furyleaping upwards, high enough that Tim glides back to England, crashing into land.
Then, this coming weekend, after we’re packed up here, all the crew except Felix will take a swim in the North Sea, and find their way to that German boat, and its kind officer.
The movie’s final scene, just Nick and me, won’t happen until well into the new year.
And it won’t take placeat Iris and Robbie’s ruined cottage in the woods, because I still haven’t told anyone about it.
Tim and I agreed that I shouldn’t.
‘It belongs to them,’ he said, ‘and you now, too.’
Instead, a location team has already been tasked with finding us another cottage of some sort, with a sloping thatched roof, winding front path, and pretty, bloom-filled garden.
That’s going to take them a while.
Even when they do find it, we won’t be able to shoot immediately.
Not whilst it’s winter, and the trees are so bare, the days so dark.
No, that last scene, sun-kissed and full of light, life and hope, needs to wait for spring.
No one expects these last days to be easy, and they’re not. The revised scenes, unrehearsed, packed with new lines and new blocking, take relentless hours to get right, and making them perfect becomes an all-consuming task. We split – me in the control tower, the boys on the cutaway – practising, filming, practising, filming again. Every day, we work longer, pushing deep into the night, drained from lack of sleep and the emotion we’re expending, but continuing regardless, propelled by the sense that this is something special we’re doing. Something not true, but right.
As it should have been.
And, to my mind at least, maybe,maybe, one day, will.
I barely see Nick, except for an unbearably tense session on Tuesday morning when we finally shoot Iris and Robbie’s passionate encounter in the billiards room. It’s a closed set. We don’t have to stage these stolen moments of intimacy in front of a lot of people, but we still do enact them under the scrutiny of Ana, the camera operator, and sound recorder. I never like doing these scenes (‘Does anyone?’ says Nick), and the way I’ve always got through them in the past is by viewing them emotionlessly.
Or, with the help of Felix making light.
But Nick doesn’t make light.
And I can’t view any of it emotionlessly.
‘That’s what’s made it so good,’ says Ana to me afterwards, with a big hug.
But it is only Nick I see as I kiss him, and say Robbie’s name.
Only his touch I feel.
Only his voice I hear, telling me he loves me.
