What Do The Critics Say?

"Creation counters all its head-scratching factual data with some heart-tugging flights of fancy that actually enliven the film in spite of its dreary subject matter. Who would have thought natural selection and magic realism would go together so well on-screen?" Leigh Paatsch HERALD SUN "In Hollywood, as in nature, survival of the fittest is the law. A romantic biography of Charles Darwin doesn't sound like it could stand on two feet, but "Creation" is full of surprises. Directed by Jon Amiel, it's smart, heartfelt, handsome and just mutated enough to sustain interest in a specialized subject." Joe Williams ST LOUIS POST-DISPATCH "Jon Amiel, the film's director, tells his story with respect and some restraint, showing how sad and weakened Charles is and yet not ratcheting up his grief into unseemly melodrama." Roger Ebert CHICAGO SUN-TIMES "Much of Creation is overwrought, from the score that insists you feel Darwin’s pain to Connelly’s single task of looking intensely concerned. But it’s surprisingly touching, too. It's fascinating to consider what a heavy burden Darwin must have carried as he prepared to tell the world that it wasn't, in fact, created in seven days." Jon Amiel WASHINGTON CITYPAPER "The film focuses on Darwin's relationship with his eldest daughter, Annie who tragically died at the age of 10. Darwin’s grief affects both his physical and mental health. He is paralysed, caught between science, his empirical findings and religion, part of his family life. With solid performances, this film provides an interesting alternative look at one of the most influential scientists of the modern era." Beth Wilson TRESSPASS

"Perhaps no other scientist in history has sparked more controversy than Charles Darwin. Darwin was one of those figures about who I knew very little. Everyone knows the basics of his theory, but of his personal life I knew nothing. According to this film, which is based upon a play written by Darwin's great-great grandson, while Darwin was a botanist, geologist, biologist and many different kinds of scientist, his driving force in life was his family, especially the light of his life, his oldest daughter Annie." Scott Nash THREE MOVIE BUFFS "It is more about Darwin, father and husband, than Darwin the scientist. Its first half is a portrait of the naturalist and his beloved daughter, Annie, whose death plunges him into despair. Its second half is about how grief creates a marital stalemate. While the film's flashbacks and -forwards are disorienting, the performances give the film propulsion and poignancy." Carrie Rickey PHILADELPHIA ENQUIRER "Creation is an emotionally complex film that examines faith, love, grief and passion through the key events that propelled Darwin to finish one of the most important books ever written." Thomas Caldwell CINEMA AUTOPSY "The film is based on "Annie’s Box" about the last years Darwin spent putting his thoughts in writing. This was a time of great stress for the pioneering scientist. He knew full well that his work flew in the face of the church and the vast majority of society. A film that keeps us from taking the theory of evolution for granted. Darwin paid for those words." Ron Wilkinson MONSTERS AND CRITICS "Connelly is vulnerable and melancholy, Bettany is tortured and intense. Northam is a bit thrown away as the local priest, but little Martha West is a ray of sunshine as Annie. No wonder her dad adored her. Based on the Darwin biography, John Collee's screenplay is probably somewhat better than the film suggests, insofar as the story and the elements are dramatic and interesting, but the execution, notably structure and editing, garble the story and mute the emotions." Andrew L Urban URBAN CINEFILE

The Inside Story The idea for "Creation" first sprang to life when 2004 ALFS Award winning screenwriter John Collee mentioned to his friend, director Jon Amiel, a book he had read called ‘Annie’s Box’. Written by Randal Keynes about his great great grandfather Charles Darwin, it is a personal account of the renowned Victorian scientist. Amiel was similarly inspired by this story of a family man who deeply loved his children, who cared passionately about his religious wife and potentially destroying a society built on the foundations of the church, that he delayed publishing what was to be the most explosive idea in history. For Collee, the book "Is extraordinary. It’s a picture of a man trying to live a creative life with his family swirling around him, there’s politics, there’s religion, it’s 'of the moment'. What interested me was what he suffered along the way to finally achieve an aura of unassailable gravitas. He was deeply in love with a woman who disagreed profoundly with his theory. He cherished his children and saw three of them die. He suffered horribly from a lifelong illness that may or may not have been psychosomatic. He studied to be a parson and wrote the book which killed God. I wanted to write about this man." Together, Amiel and Collee knew they wanted to bring the relatively unknown story of who Darwin was as a man to the big screen. Darwin’s career spanned fifty of his seventy-three years, and as they did not want to make a conventional biopic, they knew they needed to focus on a particular period in his life. Randal Keynes’ biography gave them the heart of the script; that Darwin’s work and his family life were inseparable. "We wanted to make a film that was an intense visual and emotional journey through the heart of darkness of this man. We decided very quickly that the ghost of his dead daughter Annie, who died when she was ten, would be an important character," Amiel explained. "We decided to tell the story in a non-linear way, moving rapidly between past and present, between fantasy and reality, between nightmare and anecdote. Once we had these ideas, I became passionate about Charles Darwin’s story because I could see a way of telling a story about a man that deeply, deeply interested and moved me." In many ways, Darwin’s life was shaped by loss, from the early demise of his mother, to the deaths of three of his young children, and the gradual loss of his religious faith. It was decided the focus of the film would be the time in his life when he lost his beloved daughter Annie, through to his struggle to write his seminal work 'On the Origin of Species'. This book set out Darwin’s theory that man was the product of nature and evolution rather than God. It was to have an immeasurable impact on science, religion, politics and society from the moment it was published in 1859. It is Darwin’s most famous book and has never gone out of print. Amiel took the project to Recorded Picture Company, the British independent production company owned by esteemed 1998 Academy Award ® winning producer Jeremy Thomas ("The Last Emperor"). The unconventional approach with which Amiel and Collee proposed telling the story of Darwin and his explosive idea greatly appealed to Thomas. This led to him optioning Randal Keynes’ book and commissioning Collee to write a screenplay. "It’s a combination of the story, which works very much on an emotional level when you know who and what is significant to Charles Darwin," Thomas notes. "Secondly he’s writing a book, arguably the greatest story ever told, and nobody can deny it’s one of the most important pieces of writing ever written. I thought it could be a very moving and emotional film, but also interesting." "I met with John Collee, Jon Amiel and Jeremy Thomas and was excited at once when I realised how good a company RPC is, and their filmmaking standards," Keynes recalls. "Then I realised John had written the script for "Master and Commander", a wonderful film with a proto-Darwin figure as the ship’s doctor, who plays an important part. It was obvious that this was going to be a very special film, carefully authentic but also, I think most importantly, imaginative." But "Creation" is more than a film about a man of science: it is about a family. It is about how a family survives huge loss and the reverberations of this on the foundations of a marriage. It is about how a man unable to cope with the death of his daughter finds himself unable to write his ground-breaking theories for fear of causing his wife pain and destroying the God she so fervently believes in. It is about a man so racked with anxiety over his work that he suffers years of pain with mysterious bouts of illness. "John Collee’s compelling script tells the remarkable story behind Darwin’s revolutionary theory, and the foundation of a book that changed the world, Thomas notes. "We think of Darwin as an old man with a grey beard, but the reality of our story is very different. In "Creation" the Darwin we see is a troubled character who knows his ideas will trigger a profound change of balance in the status quo, and it makes him ill." For Keynes, the deftness of Collee’s screenwriting talent in adapting his biographical material to create the story we see on screen gave new life to the story of his great great grandfather. "When I read the script, I expected it to wander off the path of absolute historical truth in one or two places, and I was happy for it to do so because this enables the scriptwriter, director and producer to make more of the film than can be evidenced from surviving documents and other material. They had a freedom that I did not have when I wrote my factual biography. They made very good use of it because they brought out truths about Darwin, Emma, Hooker and the whole story, that I could only imagine, that I could only guess at." From the outset, the filmmakers knew they wanted British actor Paul Bettany ("A Beautiful Mind") to play Charles Darwin. Our most familiar image of Darwin is of a balding old man with a long grey beard, but the film captures him in middle age after the loss of his adored ten year old daughter, Annie. In the years following her untimely death, Darwin was left bereft and struggling with his faith. This inner turmoil, along with his inability to put pen to paper and write his manuscript on the evolution of species for fear of destroying his marriage, all conspired to make him ill. An intelligent actor was required to take on this complex role, and as 1996 Cognac Festival du Film Policier Award winner Jon Amiel ("Copycat") says, "There was almost nobody else that I could conceive of playing this role. Paul is perfect, he’s perfect because he’s English, and physically the most like Charles Darwin that you could possibly imagine. He’s very tall, skinny, has a high receding forehead, light sandy colouring and this made him perfect. But above all else, to me, what Paul has in addition to all his incredible acting skills and ability to enter characters, is intelligence. Paul is a very, very intelligent man and brings to the role an effortless, piercing, luminous intelligence that makes him absolutely peerless in this role." For 2004 Evening Standard British Film Award winning actor Paul Bettany ("The Heart of Me" & "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World "), Darwin was the role of a lifetime, "Darwin’s a bit of a hero of mine. I think he was an extraordinarily brave human being." It was a wonderful gift to the film when Academy Award ® winning actress Jennifer Connelly ("A Beautiful Mind") and Bettany's wife in real life, expressed interest in playing Charles Darwin’s wife, Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin, a cultivated and religious woman. Bettany and Connelly had been looking for a project to work on together for some time. "It was obvious to me and to everybody else that Jennifer Connelly would be wonderful casting as Emma, she has tremendous intelligence and the sense of an inner life. Emma was a great linguist, she spoke French and Italian fluently, as does Jennifer. Emma was a concert level pianist who studied under Chopin. Jennifer couldn’t play a lick on the piano, but by golly she worked so hard," Amiel says. "She will totally convince you as she convinced me, and I can play the piano, that she’s playing one of Chopin’s most difficult virtuoso pieces." 2002 BAFTA & Golden Globe winner Connelly's research in to the woman Charles Darwin was married to for forty-four years and had ten children [William Erasmus (1839–1914), Anne Elizabeth (1841–1851), Mary Eleanor (1842), Henrietta Emma "Etty" (1843–1927), George Howard (1845–1912), Elizabeth (1847–1926), Francis (1848–1925), Leonard (1850–1943), Horace (1851–1928), Charles Waring (1856–1858) ] with unveiled an intelligent and complex woman. Her present day great great granddaughter Emma Darwin is the author of "The Mathematics of Love (2006) and "A Secret Alchemy". "Emma was well-educated, she played piano beautifully, she travelled extensively in her youth and lived in Paris, and she spoke other languages. She was very intelligent, and from all accounts seems to have been a pretty extraordinary mother. I read about how the kids would just run about the house everywhere and she really had no issue with that. She had incredible tolerance for that sort of chaos, and Charles did as well. And a huge component of her character of course was her religion. She was devoutly religious, which put her at odds with Darwin’s emerging beliefs." The highest accolade the filmmakers could have hoped for in the casting of Bettany and Connelly comes from Randal Keynes, author of ‘Annie’s Box’ and a direct descendent of Darwin, "I find that Paul Bettany is a perfect Darwin. Jennifer Connelly a perfect Emma. That they should be married gives them I think a special relationship that was evident in the scenes I’ve seen being filmed. Hooker and Huxley and the others are all perfect. And that is, I think, quite extraordinary for a film, and I can only say thank you to them." The crucial casting of Charles and Emma's ten year old daughter Annie led to a unknown young actress making her on-screen debut. Martha West began performing in school plays whilst attending the drama club at her school in South West London. She celebrated her tenth birthday during filming. Directot Jon Amiel recalls: "I saw in her a willingness to learn, a capacity to learn quickly." Amiel wanted to make a film that would not automatically be classed as a period film. The emphasis was to be more on the story of a man in turmoil that can be related to any point in time, including today. Along with the colour palettes of production design, hair and make up, and costume, the lighting and camerawork would influence the mood of the film. "Jon made it very clear from the beginning that he wasn’t interested in making a 'period' film, and this was something I latched onto very quickly," cinematographer Jess Hall ("Hot Fuzz" & "Brideshead Revisited") explained. "He still wanted a certain elegance, and he didn’t want to shy away from good looking photography. It was a matter of finding a middle ground." What's It All About?

Torn between his love for his deeply religious wife and his own growing belief in a world where God has no place, Darwin finds himself caught in a struggle between faith and reason, love and truth. But this is not the grey-bearded old man most imagine when they think of Darwin. Darwin is a handsome man in his early forties who lives a quiet life in an idyllic English village. He is a brilliant and deeply emotional man, devoted to his wife and children, but clearly distanced from them. But the vibrant father, husband, and friend, is gradually buckling under the weight of guilt and grief for a lost child. Annie's death sharpens Darwin’s conviction that natural laws have nothing to do with divine intervention. To his contemporaries, this is an idea so dangerous it seems to threaten the existence of God. Ultimately it will be the ghost of Annie, his adored ten year old daughter, who leads him out the darkness.

The Verdict "It appear that the views held by Charles Darwin (2/2/1809 - 18/4/1892), author of 'On The Origin Of Species', not only divided the religion driven society of the time, but his family too. Yet, we see in "Creation" that he too was conflicted by his own views. It has been claimed that he "established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors" and that evolution is process of 'natural selection'. Thankfully, in a modern society, we have come to realize that what he proposed was only a theory: ie 'supposition or system of ideas explaining something', 'a speculative view'. For that reason, you might speculate that "Creation" should attract cinemagoers from both sides of the fence: those who believe in evolution and those who claim to be creationists. From what has been written it would seem Darwin himself at one time fell in with the latter group. So what was it that changed a man who believed that God was the 'ultimate lawgiver'? It appears it was the death of his daughter Annie (2/3/1841 - 23/4/1851) at the age of ten. According to "Creation", it was the ghost of Annie that encouraged and gave Darwin, the strength to publish his work. It's an interesting 'theory', that like evolution, is hard to prove. "Creation" is save by the performances of Connelly, young Martha West and the cinematography of, Jess Hall B.S.C. ( "The Switch" 28th October 2010). "Creation" is worth having a look at. 3 STARS." The Production Team

Director Screenplay Biography Producer Original Music Cinematography Film Editor Casting Production Design Art Direction Set Decoration Costume Design

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Jon Amiel John Collee Randal Keynes Jeremy Thomas Christopher Young Jess Hall Melanie Oliver Celestia Fox Laurence Dorman Gary Jopling & Stuart Rose Dominic Capon Louise Stjernsward

Who Is Playing Who?

Jennifer Connelly Paul Bettany Jeremy Northam Toby Jones Jim Carter Martha West Teresa Churcher Freya Parks Zak Davies Harrison Sansostri Pauline Stone Christopher Dunkin

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Emma Darwin Charles Darwin Reverend John Innes Thomas Huxley Parslow Annie Darwin Mrs Davies Etty Darwin Jemmy Buttons Lenny Darwin Mrs Darwin's Maid George Darwin

Run Time 108 minutes Rated PG [AUST] Copyright ©2010 - Icon Film Distribution - All Rights Reserved ©1999-2010 The Movie Pages & impact Internet Services. All Rights Reserved. Protected by Australian and International Copyright. Trademark Laws and Intellectual Property Rights apply.