![]() He also has another, even simpler, theory: “The film is also about an almost utopian rallying cry to say ‘Forget about our differences and problems with each other, overcome your pride and let us dig down together.’ People are responding to that.” There are moments in history where you can’t gauge the level of change that will occur due to a crisis, how unrecognisable the world will be as that crisis unfolds,” Stone says. He reckons something about it resonates with our pandemic predicament, in its portrayal of the strangeness of carrying on with life under the shadow of distant threat (the film is set just as World War II begins). The loquacious, eloquent Stone has a dozen theories as to why the film works. But the real heft of the film is in its depictions of people treading warily around each other’s grief, loss, resentment, uncertainty and secrets – even as they avidly unearth a profound mystery from the land under their feet. The dig itself is surprisingly engrossing. This spurs some class tensions – it was a long time before Brown’s role in the discovery was properly recognised – and also adds secondary characters, who act out a more conventional period-piece subplot on the themes of forbidden love and the onset of war. Once they realise they are onto something significant, a team of upper-crust archaeologists from London joins the project. Pretty’s intellectual curiosity propels her to commission Brown to dig up some mysterious mounds in one of her fields. The drama revolves around the shared single-mindedness of a wealthy, landed widow (Edith Pretty, played by Carey Mulligan) and a taciturn, spikily proud and self-schooled man of the soil (Basil Brown, played by Ralph Fiennes).ĭespite the gulf of the prewar class system, they have in common both a sediment layer of hidden emotion that they’re unwilling to disturb, and a passion for disinterring the historical secrets of the earth. And I’m surprised that I care about them, and I’m surprised at how moved I’ve become’.” “And then I read the script and I went, ‘Oh I really care about these characters. I got this pitch which was, ‘Do you want to do this film about the Sutton Hoo find?’ And I thought to myself, ‘That feels really dry and it’s not going to be particularly compelling.’ “But it reminded me of my own reaction to the script. This is huge, how is this happening?’” he recalls. ![]() A friend sent me a message saying, ‘Dude, you’re No. 1 in the UK on the second day it was out. NetflixĮven so, its Europe-based Australian director, Simon Stone, is both surprised and unsurprised at the huge audience interest. Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan star in The Dig. It’s an intriguing personal drama, and its discovery upended the prevailing understanding of Anglo-Saxon culture and British history. It’s ostensibly a film about a group of men in three-piece suits with trowels and teaspoons, excavating the Anglo-Saxon burial site of Sutton Hoo in a rustic corner of 1930s prewar England.īut it turns out that there’s a lot more to the (lightly fictionalised) story of how Sutton Hoo came to be uncovered. The Dig doesn’t sound much like a box-office barnstormer. Among the usual rota of true-crime, teen flicks and big-budget US releases was an unexpected, improbable sleeper hit. Something slightly strange happened this past month on Netflix’s list of the top 10 most-watched films in Australia, Britain and beyond.
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