Director adds fresh string to bow

By Neil Smith
Entertainment reporter, BBC News

British filmmaker Joe Wright tells the BBC News website what drew him to make The Soloist, an inspirational drama about a homeless violinist.

Foxx plays Nathaniel Ayers, a real-life Los Angeles street musician

If you know Joe Wright at all, it is probably for his 2005 film of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice and for his 2007 interpretation of Ian McEwan's Atonement.

The films, both of which drew Oscar and Bafta recognition, showed the London-born director to have an affinity with handsome period drama and intelligent literary adaptation.

They also starred British actress Keira Knightley, with whom Wright has since worked on a hard-hitting charity advert highlighting the issue of domestic violence.

Knightley, however, is nowhere to be seen in The Soloist - a fact-based drama that marks Wright's first feature set in the present day.

Based on writings by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, the movie tells of his friendship with a homeless street musician he saw performing outside the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Digging deeper, Lopez discovered his new acquaintance - Nathaniel Anthony Ayers - had once studied at New York's prestigious Julliard School.

The columnist ended up writing a book about Ayers which served as the basis for Wright's partly fictionalised film.

'Love story'

The fact that The Soloist marks a change of pace from his previous work, however, was largely coincidental.

"I don't really see much difference between contemporary and period films," the filmmaker told the BBC News website.

Downey Jr (right) plays the writer who befriended Ayers and told his story

"It was a matter of being interested in mental health and music, and the relationship between the two.

"I read the script and liked it and thought I'd like to spend some time with these people," he continued.

"It's really a love story between these two odd characters, both of whom are soloists in their own way."

Garrulous, volatile and schizophrenic, Ayers - played by Oscar winner Jamie Foxx - is rightly at the centre of Wright's film.

But the script also elaborates Lopez's role to suggest the journalist - played by Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr - is a spiritual counterpart to his disadvantaged friend.

"Neither are good at connecting with other human beings, and they're both cocooned in the realities they find themselves in," explains Wright.

"Steve objectifies the world through his work but doesn't really touch anyone - until he meets Nathaniel, whom he allows to affect him.

Social injustice

"And Nathaniel has his own reality and is quite scared of letting other people in. They're both disengaged from an ensemble view of life."

Wright admits he felt some trepidation about tackling the thorny issue of social injustice in his first American movie.

Wright has made two films and a charity advert with actress Knightley

Indeed, he only agreed on the proviso that The Soloist be made with the approval and participation of the homeless themselves.

"I wasn't sure that I had any authority to make a film that was so intrinsically about America," he explains.

"But Steve Lopez took me down to Skid Row, I met a load of people and I fell in love with a lot of the community.

"I decided they had the right to make the film, and I had to give them the platform from which to speak.

"These are people who have had their voice taken away, and who haven't been given space to express their view of life."

Wright will be returning to the dim and distant past with his next project, an epic about the final days of British rule in India.

The director, though, does not see any particular pattern in what draws him to material.

"A film happens at the right moment," he shrugs. "A script comes along and you respond to it because of where you're at in your life.

"Maybe I should be more complicated and strategic, but I'm not. It doesn't really work like that."

The Soloist is out in the UK on 25 September.