Knightley news

"Before I started, yes. I read the script first. I wonder if I would have played the character the same way if I had read the book before the script. Because I think in the book [Cecelia's] a lot more maternal in a funny way. . . . What's great about having a book like 'Atonement' and what I think Ian McEwan is really wonderful at is he draws his characters completely brilliantly and you see every situation through each character's eyes, from everybody's point of view. So they can be behaving horrendously but they'll have a reason. So for an actress who's doing an adaptation it's like having a blueprint, and it's fabulous to have that backup to constantly go back to. . . . I told you I rattle on."

No problem.

"Having not read the book," I asked, "was the arch acting style of the manor a function of the time period or a function of the character's melodramatic retelling of that story later on?"

"Both. Very much. But you have to play the scene for the truth. You can't play it knowing it's a fiction created in another character's head because otherwise it will give it away from the get-go. There are parts of it that are melodramatic and unashamedly. But I think what the accents really do is help put you in that social setting and also create the tension that is hugely there in the book - it's not a comfortable read and it's not meant to be a comfortable film to watch. The whole thing is like a pressure cooker and you almost feel like something has got to explode. And I think the machine-gun quality of the accents, that very tipped English accent, the speed that goes back-and-forth and back-and-forth, works to constantly put you on edge. It never allows you to kind of get relaxed into it."

"So now that you've gone back to the '40s, can you one day bring back the '50s British comedies too?"

Knightley laughed. "Would you want to?"

"I love those Alec Guinness movies."

"I think they're trying really hard to get those sort of Ealing comedies back," Knightley said, impressing with her knowledge of British cinema. "We do do comedies very well, Richard Curtis ["Bridget Jones's Diary," "Notting Hill," "Four Weddings and a Funeral"] and all the rest of it."

"So what's next for you?"

"I've got another film here called 'Silk' and I just finished a film that actually my mom wrote, called 'The Edge of Love,' with Sienna Miller."

"Was that the film that originally was with Lindsay Lohan?"

"It was with Lindsay and she couldn't do it and Sienna brilliantly came in right at the last moment and saved us. I'm just about to start something called 'The Duchess,' which is slightly daunting, about the Duchess of Devonshire who was a political hostess in the 1780s for the Whig Party."

"And are you 'The Duchess?' "

"I am 'The Duchess.' "

"You're a young duchess?"

"Well, she was 17 when she got married."

"So you're an old duchess."

"Yes," she said, laughing, "an old duchess." *