Dev Patel and Hugh Laurie joined 'The Personal History of David Copperfield' writer/director Armando Iannucci at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.
00:00Mr. Iannucci, would you like to give us the elevator pitch?
00:03The elevator pitch. It's a mechanism that can take you without using stairs either up to the top of the building or down.
00:12Variety of doors. You could have a kind of concertina type gate thing that you can clank open.
00:20Or more commonly, there's just the sliding doors apart from the middle.
00:26It's two hours long. It's an unbelievable ride.
00:33I so admire you for doing that.
00:44It's about anxiety. Although it's written in Victorian times, it speaks to the modern condition, which is why it was so appealing.
00:53So it's a film about someone who spends most of his life worrying if he fits in and then works out how to.
01:00I could only think of Dev playing David. I didn't have anyone else on my list, so I got in touch with him when I knew that it was the film I was going to make next.
01:09First person I spoke to was Dev, and I said, look, you're David Copperfield. And I'm glad he said yes, because there really wasn't a plan B.
01:18You went to this meeting hoping to hear more about sawing people in half, but it was a different David Copperfield.
01:24Can you walk us through how that went down?
01:27Yeah, I totally skipped this classic growing up, so I didn't know anything about it.
01:33And then I sat with Armando, and then he laid out this incredible story, and his vision for it was so funny.
01:42And he was like a child in the meeting, like he was such a big fan of this book.
01:48And I kind of hadn't read the script and said yes already at that point, because I was just so eager to work with Armando.
01:54I totally trusted him. I really related to David. I relate to someone, you know, trying to find themselves.
02:03And there's a general awkwardness to him that I can strongly key into.
02:08But it's a coming of age story about identity and about accepting your past and embracing where you came from.
02:18And that in turns for David is where his biggest success lies.
02:23And for me, for any young person I think growing up in life, trying to figure out who you are,
02:29and you're constantly shifting looks and styles around different people.
02:33And that's David's life story, is he's constantly trying to overcome these great adversities.
02:38And he couldn't have done it without the amazing people around him.
02:41And that's the story's strength, is it's about acknowledging the people that got you there,
02:46and trying to bring them along with you in success.
02:50Well, one of those amazing people is Hugh Laurie.
02:54You know, it's one thing to be able to say lines, you know, from Dickens, but also from Armando Iannucci.
03:00It's not the easiest thing for an actor either.
03:02But what was the most challenging part for you?
03:05Doing it justice, doing him justice, you know, justifying the man's faith.
03:12Playing a character who is one of the earliest, I think, you would agree,
03:16one of the earliest representations of mental illness has afflicted this character.
03:21And this was not a good time to suffer from mental illness.
03:26It probably never is.
03:28But that was certainly a pretty rough time.
03:33And this was a character who finds a kind of peace and joy through his relationship with David,
03:39and particularly his relationship with Betsy Trotwood, who sort of rescues him from the big institutional machine,
03:46which would have been his fate if he'd been on his own.
03:49Can I ask you quickly, just because it's so important, the colorblind casting.
03:54Why was that so important to you?
03:56Well, I mean, it shouldn't be important.
03:58And it should, I think, by the time you watch the film, it should be entirely irrelevant.
04:02I just wanted to cast the best people for the part.
04:04And I also wanted the film to speak to now.
04:08You know, for the people in the film, even though it's in 1840,
04:10for those characters, that's today.
04:12That's their present day.
04:14And I wanted the audience to feel that you're watching people living in their present day.
04:19And therefore, we wanted to avoid all the mannerisms of how people behave when they put costumes and bonnets
04:25and big, big white dresses on, and the stiffness of that.
04:29But it was also to do with the fact I wanted to be reflective of...
04:35And also, the theme of it is all about, you know, am I fitting in, you know, background.
04:43In the book, it's all about, you know, status in society and, you know, will rich people get on with poor people?
04:50Will David try and hide his past when he kind of befriends people from a different social circle?
04:58So it's always about people being questioned and then realizing that that's all irrelevant.
05:04And also, I thought, why can't I draw from 100% of the acting community for these roles?
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