Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts walk the TIFF red carpet for ‘The Impossible’
Posted September 10, 2012 6:22 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts premiered their new film, The Impossible at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on Sunday. The movie, based on a true story, tells of one family’s experience during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
McGregor plays a father of three children who, along with his wife, are vacationing in Thailand when the tsunami hits on Dec. 26, 2004. The family is swept up and separated, but struggle to survive one of the worst natural disasters in history.
McGregor said he felt a responsibility to tell a story that would honour not only the real-life man he was portraying, but also the more that 200,000 people that died in the disaster.
“Well there’s a responsibility to him, but in a situation like this, the responsibility lies more with … all of the survivors and all of the people that lost their lives there. I think you sort of feel that responsibility a lot. I know I did. I know the director did and the other cast members,” he said.
As for Watts, who plays wife and mother, Maria, she said she wasn’t keen on doing a disaster film, but the touching script and Maria’s own personal story influenced her to take the role.
“The idea of doing a disaster movie is not something I’m seeking out, necessarily, but this obviously is a true story and her version of that truth was very intimate and very real and moving and that was clear in the first ten pages of the script. I wanted to do it,” she said. “And when I met her, I found that incredibly useful. She was just full of detailed information, every choice she made and every moment, everything that kind of came to her and every thought in her head. This is a film without a lot of dialogue, and a lot of it is just about looks in the eyes and physical connections.”
The Impossible hits theaters in December — it was just one of the more than 280 films to screen at TIFF, which runs through Sept. 16.
