Last Friday, we gave you the first half of our exclusive interview with Samuel Claflin, and in the second half, he tells our audience about his next projects, his very special Snow White scene, and why his performance should bring you back to see the film a second time!
Beware, there are spoilers for Snow White and the Huntsman to follow!
Hypable.com’s James Bean: How about your next projects? I just happened to go through the synopsis of the next one about a professor that tries to create a poltergeist. Anything you can tell me about that?
Sam Claflin: Well, it’s something I’m very much looking forward to. My character is a guy that has been brought into this experiment, a professor believes he’s come up with the cure for negative energy: extracting it, transforming it, turning it into a giest. He has two students helping him with this experiment, and then he hires me to film it, so my character is like the documenter. He’s the guy that comes and films it all, and it’s also set in the ’70s, very stylistic.
JB: So is it one of those found footage movies or is it a kind of narrative?
SC: I’m not sure exactly. I’m not sure how much I can tell you. It’s about to kick off in about a week and a half, so it’s moving quickly
JB: How did you like how Snow White and the Huntsman came together? When did you first get to see a full cut?
SC: I saw a cut in January, about three weeks after we stopped filming. The director worked really hard, had done a very, very rough edit, none of the special effects were in and that was – I had never seen an unfinished film before. The green screen was very green, there were elements from the script that we had worked from that had changed, relationships got slightly altered. When you take one scene out, all of a sudden other characters are friends, it’s really bizarre. The happiest I’ve been through all of it is what we’ve ended up with. The finished product. All the relationships are clear and enough is told without delving into every single character’s past. There’s a very specific narrative, it had a very clear message-
JB: -and a lot of surprises as well.
SC:That was a lot of what drew me into the project, where the director wanted to go with all these twists and turns and unexpected moments and surprises. People are very familiar with the story, so what we’ve done is added some new elements and some new characters that will keep people guessing.
JB: Yeah! Your character ends up being such a crucial part of the story…I know we shouldn’t say too much, but how did you feel finding out that you were the turning point of the story?
SC: I can’t talk too much about it, but I was shocked and a little apprehensive, but I’m really happy with how it turned out. It will shock quite a few people. It was one of the most playful scenes, one of the scenes I was really able to come to grips with. It was a different approach, there was a different tempo to every other scene I had been involved in. I obviously enjoyed working with Kristen. It was probably one of my favorite things to film, with the playfulness and how I approached it. There was a lot of pressure, I wanted to vocalize Charlize, and get her voice and her physicality and the entire character changed for me for that scene.
JB: How was that? Having to balance between the two characters?
SC: We tried it loads of different ways. We tried one where I was quite obviously not William, but in my form. Then there were tries where I was just William, just finding the balance between how much we give away. In the end product we found the right balance-
JB: -It’s just such a tricky scene.
SC: There’s little moments, for those who go to watch it again, but little moments where you’ll glimpse or hear different elements of “Oh yeah, he does that or she does that.”
JB: How far back do those go? Is it just in that one scene?
SC: There’s that scene the night before with the Huntsman where I’m telling him, “I don’t know how to tell her I love her,” and there was a crow watching us talk. That kinda gave it away that the raven was her. So basically you see me saying “I need to find a way to tell her I love her,” and then it cuts to the next day with me telling her “I’d do anything for you.” So that discussion wasn’t overlooked by the Queen.
JB: How much input did you have in what your character did, the type of conversations you had-?
SC: Well, every actor in the world wants their character to be the main character. I wanted my story told and there were more elements that I wanted to tell more of a story on – because the script’s changed and the way we’ve cut, it’s changed – and that’s for the good of the film, but it’s always hard to lose those bits.
JB: Thank you very much for talking to me, Sam!
Check out our reviews of Snow White and the Huntsman by Jessie Cadle and James Bean! If you’ve seen it, don’t forget to sound off about it in our What Did You Think? feature!