Film Spotlight: I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)

“I reached the point of thinking there were no more masterpieces to discover, until I saw I Know Where I’m Going! It was funny, it was exciting, it was truly mystical and it was deeply stirring”- Martin Scorsese

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's stunningly photographed comedy, romance flourishes in an unlikely place—the bleak and moody Scottish Hebrides. Wendy Hiller stars as a headstrong young woman who travels to these remote isles to marry a rich lord. Stranded by stormy weather, she meets a handsome naval officer (Roger Livesey) who threatens to thwart her carefully laid-out life plans. Its the story of a young woman's transformation as she learns there can be much more to life than its glossy surfaces.

Pressburger wrote the screenplay in four days. "It just burst out, you couldn't hold back," he said. Pressburger said that, when he visited Paramount Pictures in 1947, the head of the script department told him they considered the film's screenplay perfect and frequently watched it for inspiration. Shooting took place on the Isle of Mull and at Denham Studios.

The movie was originally meant to star Deborah Kerr and James Mason but Kerr could not get out of her contract with MGM, so they cast Wendy Hiller. Six weeks before filming, Mason pulled out of the movie, saying he did not want to go on location. Roger Livesey read the script and asked to play the role. Powell thought he was too old and portly but Livesey lost "ten or twelve pounds" (four or five kilos) and lightened his hair.

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