“I thought that was remarkable of him”: the one director Anne Hathaway would shoot with “300 times”
Anne Hathaway has been in Hollywood long enough to see how every single movie can get made.
Even though there are many behind-the-scenes nightmares that everyone has to go through to get their career off the ground, the reason why Hathaway works so well is her willingness to put in the work, no matter how demanding, whenever she’s working on a new film. But it takes a special kind of director to get her to put her nose to the grindstone and make the greatest performance that anyone has ever given.
That said, it’s not like Hathaway needed to completely switch up her style every single time she made a film. She knew that she needed to really inhabit the characters that she was portraying, and while she didn’t necessarily go to the level of Daniel Day-Lewis or insist that she be referred to by her character’s name or anything, it’s easy to see how much she put into every one of her roles.
But it’s not like there’s one set way to understand any of her characters. Andy from The Devil Wears Prada is completely different from her role in The Odyssey, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t give anything less than 100% whenever working on any of the scenes. Then again, not many actors have the chance to work with someone who was as clinically precise as Christopher Nolan.
In the world of Nolan’s movies, taking the easy route is basically taboo, and any number of his films are about trying to get the best shot that he possibly could. Hathaway had already seen what he was capable of well before his Greek epic, but while Interstellar features some of her best work, The Dark Knight Rises was the first time that she saw what kind of artist she was working with.
Nolan wasn’t one to mess around, and if he had to spend all day getting one singular shot, he was going to go the extra mile to get it. He spared no expense when working on Oppenheimer, but when looking at how Hathaway portrayed Selena Kyle in his final Batman adaptation, Nolan was going to do everything that he could to make sure that everything looked exactly right for the scene.
He was conscientious of Hathaway’s time, but she would have been locked in to work with him as long as she needed to, saying, “Chris came up to me and said, ‘Listen, I want you to know we’re going to do a lot of takes and it won’t have anything to do with you. I’ve just had this shot in my head for a long time, and I won’t be able to move on until it looks just right.’”
Adding, “I thought that was remarkable of him to do that – to know himself well enough to know that he didn’t want me to become anxious or self-doubting. It’s his prerogative to tell me to do it 300 times if he wants. That day illustrated a lot of who he was.”
And to think that one of the most ingenious directors of our time was having those kinds of doubts is almost reassuring. Each movie that Nolan works on should be a collaborative effort, and even if Hathaway was going to be there all day, she was going to make sure that she still had the same fire and energy that she had, no matter what take they were working on on any given day.
The Dark Knight Rises was always going to be living in the shadow of its predecessor, but Hathaway and Nolan could both rest easy at night knowing that they didn’t mess around for a second. They tried to do everything they could to get the right idea for the final cut, and nothing was going to take away from the massive effort that they put into it.
