Creation , the film about Charles Darwin that opens the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival Thursday, marks a significant anniversary. Darwin was born 200 years ago this year, and it has been 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species , a revolutionary book that placed mankind more as risen apes than fallen angels and fundamentally redefined our world view. Though Darwin's argument is still challenged by some religious groups, his theory is now commonplace scientific fact. In England, where Creation was made, Darwin's as familiar as the face on the back of a £10 note.
What it took to reveal the movie potential in Darwin's story was something painfully intimate; a piece of paper, found in the naturalist's daughter's writing box just nine years ago. The discoverer was British conservationist and author Randal Keynes, Darwin's great-great-grandson, who had heard stories from his grandmother about visiting Darwin's house as a child. The child's box belonged to Anne; Darwin's second of 10 children and eldest daughter, who died at the age of 10. In the box, along with her writing equipment, embroidery and letters, Keynes found a piece of paper.
Charles Darwin’s great-great-great grandchildren, Soumaya, 11, and Skanda, 9, with the box that held Darwin’s notes about his daughter.
Talking on the phone from his London home, Keynes, 61, recalls that moment: “It was a sheet of foolscap, folded several times, which, when I opened it, had writing that was unmistakably Darwin's, with detailed notes on his daughter's medical treatment in the two months before she died. Immediately, I felt there was something very unusual about this, in a busy Victorian scientist writing these detailed notes about nursing his child.”
A week after her death, Darwin wrote a short essay (Annie: A Memorial can be read at Darwin Online) describing what she had meant to him, and then, according to family memoirs, spoke of her only twice again in his lifetime. Keynes (who is also related to the economist John Maynard Keynes) began reading more of the family letters and memoirs of Darwin's adult children and came to believe that Annie's death had a deep influence on Darwin's thinking and his efforts to understand what he once called, in a private letter, the “clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.”
In writing his best-selling 2001 book, Annie's Box (subtitled CharlesDarwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution ); Keynes acknowledges he wanted to refute those who portrayed his great-great-grandfather as an apologist for selfishness and cruelty. On the contrary, says Keynes, Darwin believed “social animals are hard-wired to look after each other.”
Screenwriter John Collee ( Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World ) read the book and brought it to the attention of his friend, Jon Amiel, who graduated from theatre to directing a half-dozen episodes of the acclaimed series The Singing Detective in the mid-eighties and then to Hollywood thrillers ( Entrapment , The Core ).
For Amiel, reached at his Los Angeles home, the book was a revelation: “I had always thought of Darwin like one of those heads on Mount Rushmore, a massive figure with his beetling brow and mighty beard. Instead, I discovered a vibrant, warm man, who doted on his wife and children.”
He and Collee took the idea of adapting Annie's Box to producer Jeremy Thomas ( The Last Emperor ), who agreed to option Keynes's book for a film. At that point, says Amiel, the movie suddenly became both more ambitious and more intimate.
“My biggest challenge, to be honest, was to be not boring. ‘Biopic' and ‘drama documentary' are terms I loathe and despise,” Amiel explains. “One of the major challenges, honestly, was to find any kind of dramatic shape at all. Darwin did his travelling in his 20s and spent the rest of his life as a country gent, spending years studying earthworms and barnacles. He was a scientist, and there was a lot of trudgery and drudgery and an immense amount of repetition in his work.”
