Atonement For The Big Screen

Being based in London, we here at Empire tend to notice reading trends thanks to the giant book club that is the London Transport system. Right now, everyone's reading Harry Potter or Cloud Atlas on the long, sweaty path to work. Rewind a year or two, however, and the book du jour was the critically-acclaimed Atonement by Ian McEwan. Now that novel is about to be turned into a film by Joe Wright, director of the (really rather good) forthcoming Pride And Prejudice adaptation. We spoke to Wright recently and asked him about his plans. "Next will probably be a film adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel Atonement, which is with Working Title, and Christopher Hampton is writing it. If all goes according to plan, we'll be shooting that next spring or summer." The novel is a multi-layered affair, starting in the summer of 1935 when a 13 year-old girl returns from school for summer with her family. Amid the small family dramas of love and illness, Bryony makes a mistake that will echo through the rest of her life. "It's a wonderful novel but it's an extraordinary structure and I'm trying to get that structure across," said Wright. "I don't want to tell it in a linear kind of fashion. I think when one's doing an adaptation