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Keira sings the blues

THE Edge of Love is about the friendship and complicated love lives of four young people in the Second World War; Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, his wife Caitlin, Dylan's childhood friend Vera Phillips, and her husband William Killick, a war hero.

Keira Knightley, who plays Vera opposite Sienna Miller as Caitlin, spoke recently about the role, and what it was like to appear in a film which was scripted by her mum.

Q: Were you instrumental in persuading director John Maybury to come on board?

A: I worked with John on The Jacket and I think he's an extraordinary filmmaker. It was actually Shar (Sharman Macdonald, Keira's mum) who showed me Love is the Devil before I did The Jacket. I read the first drafts of this piece when I was working on The Jacket, and we'd so fallen in love with him that we thought he was the only person that should direct this! We wrote poems for him, we sent him champagne and cakes. Four years later he finally read it.

Q: What was the challenge of this project?

A: It was really lovely to work on something that was so intimate, and small. It is very rare to get a film script that has such good dialogue, so that was a real joy. A lot of the time, you spend on film sets really fighting to find out how to say the words, whereas on this one we were already on another level.

You can't fake warmth. You can fake lust, jealousy, anger, but actual genuine warmth, I don't think you can fake. It was really great that we did all get on, we had a great time all living in the same house, it was wicked. We felt like a proper unit, so that means when you're doing something that's incredibly intimate, that you feel safe to try things out.

Q: What research did you do for the role of Vera?

A: I didn't base my performance on the real Vera. I completely went with what Shar had put in the script. What was fantastic was having the support of the family members - Rebecca Gilbertson (the Killicks' grand-daughter) was there every day, and it was amazing for them to have said to us, "Go for it. Make it a fiction. Make it a good story." And as Shar said, it is a fiction, and particularly my characterisation is that, it's not based in reality.

Q: Were you worried about having to sing on screen?

A: I went through voice coaching. I was absolutely terrified. I thought my knees were going to buckle, and the first couple of takes I sounded like a pubescent boy. I didn't realise I was going to have to do it live. I did actually go into a studio and record it beforehand, so I thought I'd just be miming to playback. On the morning, when there were a hundred extras, John said "We'll just do it live," and I've never been more terrified in my entire life. What was also useful was that John said, "she's singing down in a tube station, she doesn't have to be completely brilliant", so I thought if I hit a wrong note, I can say it was a character choice.

Q: And what about having to put on a Welsh accent?

A: 18 weeks in Swansea helped! We had a really good voice coach. Half of my mum's family is Welsh. I remember when I was a kid she used to read to me, and witches and wizards in books always had a Welsh accent, so I guess I took it from that really.

Keira and Sienna as Vera and Caitlin

Q: Did it feel strange working on your mother's script?

A: No, it felt very natural. You live with a writer, and you grow up with their words, their kind of fantasies, and I'd pretty much seen every single one of her plays, and been in a lot of rehearsal rooms, so it felt very natural and easy. It was lovely to get an opportunity to do that professionally as well. I didn't know that she was obsessed with Dylan Thomas before. She was working on this project for a long time, but she didn't read me Under Milk Wood or anything.

It was a complete accident, really. We weren't looking to collaborate. She just said will you give me some notes, and I just thought it was beautiful, I thought it was an amazing story. I was working on The Jacket, and I gave it to one of the producers, and he said, "Is this something you're thinking about?" and I only really said yes so that he'd read it. I didn't think anything would come of it. It was fantastically accidental.

The Edge of Love is on general release now.

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