'The fact that they were a genuine counterculture movement, of the sort that doesn't really exist any more, and couldn't really exist in the same way. 'What they stood for is still very important and quite unusual,' he says. More to the point, perhaps: why on earth do we find these post-war figures still so intriguing, in an age where information is readily and immediately accessible? ''You're just playing Allen Ginsberg from New Jersey, who's going to university for the first time, to start his new life. I don't think we felt a great deal of pressure playing real people. 'I'm playing Allen at 17, which is a period when nobody really knows what he sounded like, where there's no real recording of him and images are few and far between. 'We didn't play these guys as icons,' Radcliffe says. Unlike, say, Walter Salles' lacklustre reading of On the Road, Krokidas wanted his film to be simply a snapshot in time, to feel as vivid and vibrant as possible. Playing the 17-year-old Ginsberg, who with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs became known as the Beat poets, required Radcliffe to research the pre-fame figure, pre-Dylan, pre-protest movement, pre-infamy. 'It was a battle to stop me from laughing a lot of the time, to be honest, just because it's that sort of nervous laughter.' You just had to dive in and go for it,' he says. 'With the sex scene, it was shot so quickly, we didn't have time to get nervous. But those hoping for anything salacious will be sorely disappointed. In a much buzzed-about scene, Ginsberg the teen freshman, fresh out of a troubled home, is seduced by a man in a bar. The film has been causing quite the stir since debuting at Sundance in January (before further key festival stops at Cannes, Venice and Toronto). Which, as it turns out, is a rather interesting topic in itself.įollowing positive notices for his post-Potter turn in The Woman in Black, Kill Your Darlings sees him play gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. 'It's more a gradual realisation through my teen years, 'OK, people are interested, very interested.' It just makes you very firm about what you want to do and keeping your private life private, as much as you can.'Īlthough he has spoken openly about a past struggle with the bottle (he gave up alcohol in 2010), these days Radcliffe - who divides his time between New York and London - would rather focus solely on the work, if you don't mind. But there was never a moment when I thought, 'Oh shit'. There are moments when you're a teenager, when you become aware that the press is interested in your life. 'I don't feel like I've lost my privacy, I have tonnes of privacy,' he says, with an indifferent shrug.

Jack kerouac kill your darlings