There’s no arguing that The Dig, the new film premiering January 29 on Netflix, is a big, beautiful period drama. Indeed, it checks all the boxes: gorgeous English setting, a ramshackle country estate, period-specific costumes, Carey Mulligan as a rich widow. But what makes The Dig even more appealing is that despite how wild the story it tells might be, it’s all entirely true.
The movie, directed by Simon Stone, stars Mulligan as Edith Pretty, whose country estate is discovered to be home to some very important artifacts—buried, of course, deep beneath the ground. As the threat of war looms over Britain, the operation to unearth the treasures on her land goes into overdrive; archeologists will feud, museums will scheme, the notion of how history is presented will loom like a storm cloud over characters played by Ralph Fiennes, Lily James, and Johnny Flynn. It’s based on the 2007 historical novel by John Preston as well as the true story of Edith Pretty, whose land—known as Sutton Hoo—was where two medieval cemeteries were discovered in the early 20th century, and where excavation was ongoing as recently as the 1990s.
Here, Stone explains what made the story so appealing and why it’s made him stop to look in nearly every hole in the ground he passes.
The movie’s a dramatized version of real events, but it is based on a true story. When did you encounter it?
I did go to primary school in the UK, so I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it. But a lot of people learned about it at school in Britain. I really discovered the story for the first time when I was reading the script, which was sent to me in 2015 or 2016. I saw this story, that on the surface seems a little dry—I mean, archeology is not the sexiest of all subject matters—and I was like, “Oh, it's not really my field of expertise or interest,” but then I read it and was so moved. It was such a gripping page-turner that I had to change all of my preconceptions immediately.
What about the story was so moving for you?
I loved the challenge of how to make this an unconventional period thriller, to ask, “what's going to happen?" and “what will they discover?” and “is the war coming?” and at the same time to make it an elegiac, poetic, longing film, tinged in sadness. I liked all of those elements coming together in an unexpected field like archeology.
How much did you feel like you had to stick to the facts, whether in the big-picture storytelling or the kind of minutiae that archeology experts will be looking at?
That stuff matters to me, but you need to be conscious of what you're jettisoning from the past, and you need to know why you're doing it. Everything is an edit, even documentary films are edits of the past, when you’re choosing what to put in and what to leave out. We do as much research as we can, and we only put in things that feel true. And yet sometimes you have to bend reality to make people fall in love with that reality. I think seducing people with picks, and brushes, and various other tools, seducing people with this digging, that's a hard task.
A lot of people wouldn't necessarily have the patience to watch an archeological dig, because it would take weeks, and very little happens. But then there’s the meaning of what happens when you then discover something, and what it says about the history of society; that exultant, liberating feeling that they achieve this historic event. To me, that’s the job.
Did you end up more interested in archeology, and what might be lurking beneath the surface, than you were prior to making the film?
Of course. I stop at archeological digs now. You can always find them, because whenever they're building new buildings or renovating in most cities in the world, they have a legal responsibility to excavate and see if they find anything of historical importance. Which means that there's constantly these digs happening all around us, and I stop at them and think, "I wonder if they're about to discover the body of someone hugely important, or some kind of detail that's going to change the way we look at the past."
Underneath every part of us is the history of our civilization. Even in a field in the middle of nowhere, there might be something that tells you something about how people used to live. And the fact is that we're building on the foundations of the past on a constant basis, even if the superficial look of the world keeps changing.
The film is a period piece, but it’s about a lot of issues that are still being dealt with today.
Absolutely. I was really pushing for that as much as I could. I know that some people enjoy this film as a piece of escapist period drama, and I'm very happy that they've been able to find their escapism in it, but I was very interested in saying, "This is about a world very similar to the world that we're living in right now." The '30s are the most analogous decade to certainly the last five years we've been living: great financial insecurity, shifting international geopolitical powers, and a sense that the world is changing on a daily basis.
Those are all scary things to be thinking about, of course, and I felt that when I first read the script; [it was] the political uncertainty that we're living in right now. I wanted to ask what it is to live in a time like that and how much can that be a story for us nowadays.
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What did it end up meaning to you about the modern day?
There’s an incredibly multicultural past in the United Kingdom. This boat [discovered on Edith Pretty’s property] is from a German king who arrived at the shores of a country that had Celts in it and Britons. They brought the German language to the United Kingdom and it changed everything. Later, the French came, and the Vikings came and so on—all of these influences create who we are, and the language we speak nowadays. At some point, that turned into a very uniform, homogenous idea of what it means to be British and from that moment on, it wasn’t allowed to mutate—and that was something I wanted to bring out in the movie. It's a celebration of the fact that we're all incredibly different, and that it's an all-encompassing difference that can unite us.
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