“It was their breathing. It was whether they breathed in sync with each other or not.” Joe Wright is describing what made him want to take Erica Schmidt’s musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac from the stage to the screen. Night after night, he would sit in the audience while Schmidt’s husband Peter Dinklage and Wright’s partner Haley Bennett, playing the proud Cyrano and the boxed-in Roxanne, sang their hearts out to each other.

“When she breathed in and he breathed out, they were like a tide going back and forth. I kept on finding myself leaning forward, and I realized that I just wanted to be closer to what they were doing,” Wright sighs. “I wanted to really fully experience the intimacy of that relationship. I wanted to put a camera up there on stage with them.”

Wright is, after all, held in high regard by certain Letterboxd as the hand-flex guy; a romantic anti-cynic who excels at tucking small details into big drama. Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas touching foreheads in Darkest Hour. Keira Knightley and James McAvoy entwining hands beneath a dining table in Atonement. Matthew Macfadyen stretching out those love-struck fingers in Pride & Prejudice. “I always work my focus puller very hard,” he chuckles. (More on that, soon.)

And so, in the thick of a pandemic, Schmidt and Dinklage, Wright and Bennett, and a team of Wright’s regular collaborators decamped to Noto, Sicily to film their dark, desire-fuelled Cyrano, which swaps large tracts of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 text for songs crafted by The National band Bryce and Aaron Dessner, their lead singer Matt Berninger, and his lyrical and life partner Carin Besser.

The tamped-down terseness of the soundtrack might challenge lovers of toe-tappy musicals, but The National fans are beside themselves—and not only because Dinklage’s and Berninger’s voices have an uncanny similarity. As Ada writes on Letterboxd: “I can safely say this is the most The National thing they could have done: middle-aged men, repressing all their emotions, yearning and coping only through piano-driven indie rock.”

In the three weeks of rehearsals leading into recording, which Wright insisted would happen live on set, Dessner says Dinklage discovered pockets of vocal range that it took Berninger twenty years of live shows to capture. “Peter has a lot of actual volume… he’s projecting to the back of the room. And so essentially getting him to sing in quieter s, he has all these really interesting things in his voice that we hadn’t heard, basically, until we made the film.”

The Cyrano de Bergerac story—one of cat-fishing through poetry, basically—has been retold many times: Cyrano, a large-nosed, devastatingly lyrical swashbuckler, loves Roxanne, the liveliest woman in town. Doubting that Roxanne could ever love a fellow who looks like him, Cyrano agrees to help the more handsome, less eloquent young soldier Christian woo the woman they both love, by ghost-writing insanely romantic letters.

Throw Dinklage into the leading role, with Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Christian and Wright regular Ben Mendelsohn as a grotesquely camp Duke who wants the money-troubled Roxanne for himself, and this Cyrano becomes not just about beauty and pride, but also a more complex stew of class, race, ability and the worth of women. (Bennett, having observed that other Roxannes always appeared “prim”, felt that she was instead radical, “a woman before her time”. To affirm this, the actress showed up to the original theatrical reading in a fencing costume.)

This Schmidt-penned variation on the de Bergerac theme is decidedly sensible, since it is rather difficult to suspend disbelief around the idea that Peter freaking Dinklage would ever be unlucky in love (as proven in many thirsty Letterboxd reviews). “He is unbelievably handsome in the film,” laughs Dessner. “A classic stage actor with so much talent.”

Dessner says Dinklage found new ways to surprise the close-knit crew, specifically in a scene involving a new song written for the film, ‘When I Was Born’. The snappy, spoken-word vibe was a doddle for Dinklage, who was a rapper in his youth—but he had to deliver it while taking on several men up a steep flight of stairs. “He’s in a sword fight, and he’s acting, and then he’s actually doing this live—seeing that whole experience was kind of mind-blowing.”

Wright’s films tend to be slow-burners. This might make it difficult to fight for Academy eyeballs in a noisy awards season (justice for Dinklage!), but if there is one category that this master of yearning, this inventor of beauty, consistently wins at, it’s Most Obsessively Rewatchable. Seventeen years on, Pride & Prejudice sits comfortably in Letterboxd’s Highest Rated Most Obsessively Rewatched Club and is the source of many frantic and fevered outpourings of appreciation for Fitzwilliam Darcy’s sunrise- and rain-soaked declarations (and for that hand flex, most of all).

The director its to being bemused by these responses: “I’m not very aware of the ripple effect of my films. I make them and they mean something to me very personal and hopefully, therefore, they’ll mean something to other people personally.” Even if he claims not to know what his films mean to their audiences, Wright absolutely knows what he is doing in the moment to capture the gestures that resonate.

He is constantly in search of ways to connect people “without them being physically connected. When Christian climbs to the balcony to kiss [Roxanne], we focus on Cyrano—it’s almost as if he’s kissing her. He shuts his eyes when she shuts her eyes. He reaches to kiss as she reaches to kiss.” Another scene, revolving around the song ‘Every Letter’, puts Roxanne, Cyrano and Christian in a frenzied ménage à trois of poetic arousal, all in their separate spaces. It is, writes a different Christian, “possibly the horniest song in existence”, in a film that has no overt sexual content.

“Huh, that’s good,” Wright smiles. “I’m proud of that. I’m proud of it because you don’t see anything, you know what I mean? There’s no nudity. It’s all in the audience’s mind. I think sexuality is so subjective that when you objectively view it through a lens, it just becomes weird. It’s like two dogs or something. It’s kind of like, ‘What’s that? That’s not how it feels. That’s just a kind of objectification.’

“What I try to do with my movies is to be suggestive, but to allow space for the audience to project their own, be it sexuality, or their own heartbreak, or their own yearning into the space.”

Says Bennett: “On stage there’s only so far you can go besides just language. Joe so beautifully captures smaller human moments and the landscape of the human face.” (He also beautifully captured his own beloved, as Calvin notes in his Letterboxd review: “Haley Bennett lit at just the perfect angles, Joe Wright pulled off the perfect wife-guy cinema.”)

Given that he wears his cinematic heart very much on his sleeve, what does Wright consider to be the most romantic film of all time? In an instant, he name-checks David Lean’s 1945 masterpiece, Anthony Minghella.

“It’s about the delicacy in which the stories are told, rather than the romantic storyline,” she says, emphasizing that all of the movie-making departments, from cinematography to costuming, create the conditions for romance on screen. To quote one more favorable review of Cyrano from Citizen Bane, “Every cheesy, hokey, schlocky move this movie pulls is one they get to pull because there was ion, desire, love put into this product.”

As he absorbs the from Letterboxd lovers, we wonder: what does Wright make of this deep gratitude for his wholehearted embrace of sincerity? He accepts it, without hesitation. “One of the things I worry about is the way in which cynicism and irony are somehow seen as expressions of intelligence. But there’s a different kind of intelligence. There’s an intelligence that is trusting and comionate and believes in the inherent good in people, and I try and hold onto that.”