Director James Marsh talks time and truth in 'The Theory of Everything'

To encapsulate any person's life into a 90 minute film is no mean feat, but when that person is one of history's most brilliant minds? That's a real toughie - and one that director James Marsh was eager to take on with The Theory of Everything. The thing you as a viewer have to remember is that this movie isn't so much a story about the sheer genius of Stephen Hawking (played with care and integrity by Eddie Redmayne) as it is the story of a loving relationship thrashed by tragedy and success.

It very quickly becomes clear that Hawking's mostly-steadfast wife Jane (a fantastic Felicity Jones) has grown to feel trapped by the growing demands of his illness and intellectual clout, which makes the emotional roller coaster that follows worthy of a few hours of your weekend. Need more? We briefly picked Marsh's brain to learn more about what made him take the plunge, the limits of truth in filmmaking and how Hawking's musings on time influenced how the movie ebbs and flows.

Warning: The following may contain spoilers, so watch the movie and come back if you're concerned.

Engadget: First things first, why did you want to make The Theory of Everything?

James Marsh: Well, I was obviously aware of his life story. He's a well known public figure, particularly in the UK, but when I was sent the script, I was under the impression that it was going to be a biography of Stephen Hawking. It wasn't - it was a portrait of two people in a relationship which is tested in all sorts of ways that relationships aren't normally tested. I was given this surprising perspective of Jane and Stephen being equal characters in the story, and that drew me in to what became an emotionally very complicated undertaking.

Engadget: Did you find it hard to balance how you portrayed him as Hawking, titan of science and Hawking, tragic lover and man?

JM: The emphasis in the screenplay was indeed the latter, but that offers its own perspective on his scientific ideas and the progression of the appalling illness he suffers from. An interesting tension arises between three elements - his marriage and his relationship with Jane, his scientific career and the increasing importance of that, and indeed his inexorably progressing illness which puts a different kind of stress on the marriage. We [the crew] look at Stephen's career though that lens, if you like, and we showed some of the ideas he's best known for and how we came upon them in broad strokes. I'm not sure that a feature film is really the best place to be discussing the abstractions of theoretical physics, so I envisioned myself as the audience, and I assumed that we're all as smart as each other or as dumb as each other when it comes to the science stuff.

Engadget: Even as the relationship between Stephen and Jane becomes stressed in ways neither of them ever expected, Hawking continues to spend much of the film trying to understand time itself. Did his musings on the nature of time influence how you put everything together?

JM: There's a fluidity to how we let time slip forward in the film. What I did was bring interludes of intimate home movie footage that would allow a sense of time passing as they do, home movies that suggest both nostalgia and time having passed in a certain kind of way. I brought that idea in to punctuate the film, so we could progress the story by a few years and you join the home movie footage and you see the extent of Stephen's illness... which is the great marker of time in our film, oddly enough. It had to be a linear film -- that illness is progressive, inexorable and it's own sort of drama, if you like. That marks time for you very significantly, but you quickly understand that Stephen has gotten worse and is more disabled each time.

Still, there's a playful aspect to the use of time in the film, which comes to its fruition at the very end when we reverse time in a way that people speculate would happen in a black hole. We see Stephen's life play out in reverse, that allowed me to give him back what we'd taken in the course of the narrative, so we'd end up with an able-bodied Stephen, an innocent Stephen at the very end of the film.

Engadget: You're just as well known for your documentaries as you are for your narrative films. Stephen Hawking himself said he felt the film was "broadly true" -- what does that mean to a filmmaker like you?

JM: It's about as good as you can get, to be honest. Stephen's a very smart man, and he knows you cannot tell an accurate, precise, day-by-day account of his life for 25 years in a film. To say something is broadly true, that feels broadly true to him in its emotions is about the best you can hope for.

I think he was more surprised by the film than pleased, actually. He was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't just awful. He said he felt it broadly true, and I've had documentaries where people have not said that about the story that's absolutely based on their words. I'll take that as the best kind of compliment one could hope for. He actually wrote to the production to tell us that he thought he was watching himself on screen toward the end of the story when Eddie becomes the Stephen Hawking of the iconic public imagination.

Engadget: This isn't the first time you've tackled scientific topics in your films. What's the most effective way express the complexities of science into a big film like this?

JM: I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge - which is mathematical, essentially - can have a playful visual element to it. Those two I remember vividly, despite being a not-particularly-good science student. It struck me that this was the level I could offer it: as uncomplicated, visual images. I'm not trying to get you to follow the mathematics, which I couldn't follow any more than most people could. What was more valuable was trying to visualize in very simple ways some of the enormous, complicated ideas Stephen's dealing with. That's the sort of level that could work best for an audience, using things like beer on a table or peas and potatoes - very simple everyday objects - to somehow give you access to the nature of what he's thinking about. The film doesn't have a huge amount of science in it, and that was one of Stephen's observations: he wished there was more.