‘Creation’: The evolution of a movie

WASHINGTON – Funny how some projects evolve.

Take the new film "Creation." Its director, Jon Amiel, insists he had no interest in making a movie about the life of Charles Darwin.

"Truthfully, I have to say my first reaction was ‘not interested,'" Amiel recalled, laughing. "Don't want to make a movie about some crusty old fart with a big beard, don't even like biopics, don't like historical drama. ... I find mostly they're reverential, dull.

"The fact that these people led interesting lives does not make them necessarily interesting movies, and chronology of a life is rarely plot. So I was deeply resistant for all of those reasons, until I started reading that book."

"That book" was "Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, his Daughter, and Human Evolution" by British conservationist Randal Keynes, Darwin's great-great grandson. "It's such an intensely personal memoir, because Randal had access to all the journals, letters, writings, objects of the Darwin family," Amiel said. "His work is infused by something very different, a kind of heart and a very personal connection to the Darwins. ... I found these remote Victorians suddenly becoming absolutely real, living, moving people."

So Amiel signed on with his friend, screenwriter John Collee, for "Creation." It depicts Darwin's struggle to produce his masterwork, "On the Origin of Species," after being devastated by the death of his young daughter, Annie – and the tension between Darwin and his devoutly religious wife, Emma. Paul Bettany ("Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," "Legion") portrays Darwin; Jennifer Connelly, Bettany's off-screen wife, plays Emma. The film also stars Jeremy Northam and Toby Jones.

Amiel and Keynes spent a day last week at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, promoting the film and, by extension, Keynes' 2001 book (now being released in paperback as "Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin" to tie in with the movie).

"I've done much more commercial films with big movie stars, and there most of the questions are about movie stars," said Amiel, an Englishman whose resume includes "Queen of Hearts" and "Sommersby," but who most recently has been associated with escapist action-adventure fare ("Entrapment," "The Core"). "What's been really nice about this is that we get a lot of questions about the film and the issues it's dealing with."

"Annie's box," the catalyst for Keynes' book, was the writing box used by Charles Darwin's favorite child before her death at age 10 from scarlet fever. Keynes discovered it in a chest of drawers left by his grandmother to his father.

"I found photographs, letters, books, games the children played – everything like that, and then, in one corner, this little child's writing case, which turned out to be the writing case which had belonged to Annie ... and had been kept by Emma (Darwin) after her death as her private keepsake of Annie," said Keynes, who also happens to be the great-nephew of the iconic economist John Maynard Keynes. "She never showed it to anyone, never could talk to any of her other children freely about Annie. But she kept this little box."

Keynes said he's very happy with "Creation," even though the film dramatizes only a part of his book.

"Randal's book covers Darwin from childhood, his family context, his social and political context, and follows him all the way through to his death – and indeed, some of the repercussions after his death," Amiel said. "So it was vastly too broad a canvas to be [made into] a two-hour film. What we had to do ... [was] to say ‘What's the heart of this story? What actually would make a movie?'

"What we discovered very quickly was that if we focused on one year, the year in which he was writing "Origin," and the enormous emotional turmoil that that cost him, and told other parts of the story in flashback, so we told the story in a non-linear way, we could actually make sense of the story in a way that a literal, month-by-month chronological account would not have done."

Martha West makes her film debut in "Creation" as Annie. She threatens to steal every scene she's in, even from such seasoned co-stars as Bettany and Connelly, who won a supporting-actress Oscar for her role in "A Beautiful Mind."

"When I first met Martha, I was as smitten with her as I know every person who sees the film is. My fear was that she was TOO beautiful," said Amiel, laughing. "I thought the screen is going to just love her, and is she going to look like a movie moppet, and not like this sort of robust, vibrant and earthy girl that Darwin described?"

"She's very important to the film," Keynes said. "Is this a sentimental portrayal? Absolutely not ... She was fearless."

"She does have the acting gene," Amiel said. "Her father is Dominic West of [the acclaimed HBO series] ‘The Wire.'

"Dominic became the stage father, and would turn up at the rehearsal room and sit outside for hours, waiting for his daughter," Amiel smiled. "It was an interesting turnaround, I'm sure, for him."