The “wild and trippy” movie that dragged Anne Hathaway out of her “creatively beige” era
With pretty much every big acting award to her name, including an Oscar, Anne Hathaway has managed to achieve more than most actors do in their entire lifetime in her short 24 years in the industry. With her dazzling smile and charming persona, it might be easy to dismiss her, but with everything from The Devil Wears Prada and Interstellar to Eileen, she’s proven she definitely has range.
This doesn’t mean that her career has been without its slumps. It’s rare that anyone, let alone an actor, doesn’t have at least one. While her critical slump came a little more recently, Hathaway talked to Press Association about an earlier creative block that she’d experienced before her 2016 film Colossal, “Sometimes you have to get really hungry when you can’t quite get turned on by anything. I was just in that place creatively and couldn’t connect to the scripts I was sent,” she admitted.
While in the years prior to this film, she had starred in some of her most critically acclaimed and financially successful films of her career—think of her work with Christopher Nolan, her Academy Award-winning turn in Les Misérables, and The Intern with Robert De Niro—something clearly just wasn’t working for her at this point. Lucky for the actor, she had friends in high places to shake her out of her stupor.
Previous collaborator and director behind her first Oscar nomination, Jonathan Demme, recommended that she watch A Field in England by English filmmaker Ben Wheatley. It’s not exactly the film you’d expect Hathaway to chime with, given that it’s so very English and weird and different from her oeuvre. But, she loved it, stating, “To feel so creatively beige and then see this movie, which was so wild and technicolour and trippy and different, I just knew that I wanted to make something that had the same qualities as that.”
The film itself is anything but “creatively beige”. It might have been shot in black-and-white, but it transcends its limited colour range to become exactly how Hathaway described it. Set during the English Civil War in the 17th century, the film follows a band of deserters who stumble upon an alchemist who enlists them to find a hidden treasure. After a quick meal of many mushrooms, it becomes clear that the treasure might not be gold as they’d first presumed, and the group descends into psychedelic chaos.
It might not be as widely known or praised as his debut Kill List or as much of a box office hit as Meg 2: The Trench, but it’s another film that cements the unique skillset and underrated prowess of the independent filmmaker. Plus, it did the important job of pulling Hathaway out of her self-proclaimed slump.
It allowed the actor to branch out into territories she hadn’t thought to explore until that point. Searching for something she felt was akin to the uniqueness and creativity embodied in Wheatley’s film, she landed her role in the quirky monster flick Colossal. Financially, a flop, it was well-received by critics and managed the task of handling heavy themes with a fun premise.
It might not have had the intended effect on her career, but Hathaway has managed to retain her status as an A-star actor with several critically acclaimed roles since. And, who knows, maybe one day the stars will align and we might get to see the actual crossover of her and Wheatley’s worlds, but that seems unlikely.
