MoviesOnline: How big was the forest that they were hiding in ? Did you get to see any of that ?
JAMIE BELL: Yeah, I would say the scale of it, I would imagine for those people, was pretty disorientating. You suddenly find yourself in one long collage of green and brown, and suddenly all the forest starts to look the same. I remember I went to use the bathroom in the forest, because conveniently they placed the trailers about 30 minutes away from the set so that we wouldn't go back there, and I remember coming back and I really had to listen. I was like, “Where the fuck has the set gone? Where the fuck has it gone? I'm totally fucking lost.” And then imagine what it must have been like, because they were exhausted, these people trying to move 1200 people across forests, these people were just absolutely exhausted, and I would imagine if someone sat down to take a rest and they just saw them disappearing, they'd be fucked, because you can't figure out where you are.
But if you talk to any surviving partisans, the way they talk about forests is so different from the way that I think we see forests. The forests and the trees were their savior in a big way. The forests of Lithuania were vast, endless. We would drive for 40 minutes, nothing but forests on the side of the road, just pine, and also there are these weird settlements within that. You would see people now, still today, walking into the forest with their shopping bags, it's bizarre. You can't imagine the way these people still live their lives, and it's incredibly quaint. It's like a time capsule, it really is, and we're very thankful of that.
MoviesOnline: What's the accent you have in the movie ?
JAMIE BELL: Well, it's a Russian/Belarusian almost Polish accent that we did. But our dialect coach, Neil Swain, managed to somehow create a nuance with just how different everyone sounded. Many of these people who joined them in the forest came from very different geographical areas, so you wanted to make sure that lots of different places were being represented.
MoviesOnline: You've done accent work before, is that something that comes relatively naturally for you at this point ?
JAMIE BELL: You have to. Being a Brit, it's like you have to get rid of the accent quickly. Pretty much everything I've ever done there's always an accent and it becomes the same ritual, just the different sound in the end.
MoviesOnline: Are any easier or harder at this point ?
JAMIE BELL: Generic American is like you can just click your brain and you start doing it, it's pretty good. But I did Scottish recently which was a challenge, a real challenge because – what was it that I wanted to slip into? Oh no, it was this one, I did Scottish and then doing this kind of accent I almost wanted to slip immediately back into Scottish, because there are certain vowel sounds that kind of sound the same for some reason. Liev and Daniel had to learn another language, which is a little different.
MoviesOnline: How were they as your siblings ? Did you guys form a bond out there in the woods ?
JAMIE BELL: Very much so. I have a big admiration for these guys as actors, even more so now as men. With Daniel, he's obviously a fellow Brit, so that comes with the territory, but then I've been a massive fan of his for a very, very long time. I remember a TV show he did in England, he probably hates me talking about this, but it's a show called Our Friends in the North, and it was an absolutely fantastic show. And I saw him on stage, a friend of mine directed him in a play, so I think our knowledge of this guy seems to fall to one name, and that's James Bond, but for me that isn't the case at all. I know Daniel Craig, the very fine versatile actor. So getting to work with him and then translating that admiration that I have for him into this brother who basically idolized this guy was actually very easy.__photo London Premiere