Screenwriter Reed Van Dyk was leafing through a magazine one day in 2012 when he came across an article about the human cost of war that stopped him in his tracks.
The film, based on the magazine piece, begins in 2003, when the lives of an Iraqi family and a war veteran became tragically intertwined in a Baghdad under fire. In the movie, Lou and Mariam sit face-to-face in California, brought together by the efforts of Michael Reid , a journalist who had interviewed both of them about the war.
“I wasn’t in a position to make a film about this back then,” he told AFP. That all changed after his short film “DeKalb Elementary” won critical acclaim and earned an Oscar nomination in 2018, so he went back to the New Yorker article and began work on “Atonement,” which goes on limited release on Friday. “I was so touched by this piece of writing and the story and all these characters and the way that their lives had intersected very tragically, and then by some miracle, they all intersect again a decade later,” Van Dyk said. “I was very drawn to the idea of that complexity, and very drawn to the idea of being this witness at this remarkable meeting over years with two people trying to process the enormous pain and loss of very different kinds,” Branagh told AFP on the sidelines of the Toronto International Film Festival. “And then the really compelling drama of this immensely difficult thing, meeting again to feel, discuss, forget, forgive,” said the British actor, whose character is inspired by journalist Dexter Filkins, author of the original article. “I was pulled to write about and explore these trio of people, and so that was in spite of the fact that you know it wasn’t a story that headlines were echoing at the time of my writing,” Van Dyk said.
