'Ralph Fiennes is so skilled and so truthful' - The Choral director

The "wonderfully eloquent" Fiennes was Hytner's first choice to play Henry Guthrie - a gay Germanophile hired by a rural Yorkshire community choir in 1916 – in The Choral.

"It just felt like the kind of part that Ralph would play brilliantly with his hidden passions and griefs and frustrations, but his tremendously strong-willed drive to achieve what he sets out to achieve.

"Never having worked with him on film before, I was always blown away by how exactly he knows what to do and how beautifully he plays for the camera."

Fiennes, who Hytner first directed in a 1991 stage production of King Lear, is currently engaged in what he views as a "genuine artistic challenge", he says - directing his first opera in Paris.

As a "true artist", the Conclave actor goes wherever his creative impulses take him, Hytner says.

"His curiosity is infinite and he is a true artist. He works on what excites and inspires him."

The screenplay for The Choral was written by award-winning 91-year-old writer Alan Bennett.

Both men are long-term London residents who grew up in the north of England and feel a bit like "outsiders", Hynter says.

"There's a kind of ironic, melancholic, outsidery perspective that I find very, very attractive in the way he writes… His way of imagining worlds is very much mine."

Hynter - who received a knighthood in 2010 for his services to drama - lives nearby to Bennett, and out of the blue finds the writer's sketches of story ideas, diaries, novellas and short stories in his letterbox.

A sketch of the story that became The Choral turned up back in early 2000, and after life got in the way for a few years, it was filmed with a large ensemble cast of actors and non-actors in 2024.

The gusto this multi-generational group brought to learning the music - a monumental 1900 oratorio called The Dream of Gerontius - really impressed the former opera director.

"They were all throwing themselves into conquering something that wasn't second nature to them."

At its heart, The Choral is a film about a community finding resilience in an "appalling" time by making art - in this case music - together, Hytner says.

"Singing in a choir, playing in a band, playing in an orchestra, dancing, finding something that insists on collaboration and community is one of the things that makes even difficult lives worth living.

"Any kind of creative enterprise that a community can join in together is a kind of net plus in the store of common humanity."