By Gill Pringle at Toronto International Film Festival
As the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, Ronan talked to FilmInk from her home in London about what is the most intimate film of her 16-year career.
“Kate and I just got on straight away and a big part of that is her, because she’s very personable and friendly and open,” Ronan says.
Their love scenes, she argues, were no different than in her previous work.
“It wasn’t really different at all. I guess my character is quite reserved for the first half of the film and essentially, she is going through a grieving process after losing a child; recovering emotionally and physically.
“So, while she’s starting to see the woman (Winslet) who she’s beginning to fall in love with, which she really embraces – they also have to balance that with her recovery. In terms of their relationship, it’s the same as any other in which they have these moments where they’re in conflict and other moments where they come together and care for one another.
“It’s a very delicate and quiet sort of film, so it was important for myself and Kate and Francis to map out where these shifts happen in their relationship,” she says of Ammonite’s writer-director Francis Lee.
With echoes of Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire last year, Ammonite is a passionate love story nurtured by salty sea air and a blissful absence of men. Set in 1840s England, on the rocky coast of West Dorset, Winslet’s acclaimed paleontologist, Mary Anning, excavates fossils known as ammonites, regularly visited by eager young male students. On one such visit, one man abandons his sickly wife, Ronan’s Charlotte Murchison, leaving Mary to play exasperated caretaker and, later, enthusiastic lover.
Reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang writes: “It fully embraces the wild, rustic carnality of its setting, quietly doing away with the sexual coyness and the punitive spirit that have often attended Hollywood’s flirtations with gay romance.”
Filmed almost two years ago, Ronan first received a call from Winslet on the set of Little Women.
“I’d actually just done a scene with Timothee [Chalamet] on the ice where we were swinging each other around and I was like ‘This is our Titanic moment,’ when Kate called and I was like ‘Oh my God, it’s Rose!’” laughs the actress whose previous films include Brooklyn, Hanna, Atonement and The Lovely Bones.
Later, on the set, she told Winslet, “Who would have thought, when I was eight years old, that I’d be kissing Rose one day!”
Relieved that Winslet was so easygoing, she says, “Actors have this amazing ability to go, ‘Hello, we just met and now we’re husband and wife or we’re best friends. It is the luck of the draw whether you get to work with someone you just click with or maybe have to work on it a bit.
“We were really lucky and I think two women getting to come together, especially with the more intimate scenes, being able to choreograph that ourselves, was a new experience and great to be able to do that with Kate.”
For Winslet’s part, she told the Hollywood Reporter, “It’s definitely not like eating a sandwich. I just think Saoirse and I, we just felt really safe. Francis was naturally very nervous, and I said to him, ‘Listen, let us work it out’. And we did. ‘We’ll start here. We’ll do this with the kissing, boobs, you go down there, then you do this, then you climb up here’. I’ve felt the proudest I’ve ever felt doing a love scene. And I felt by far the least self-conscious.”
Ammonite is in cinemas January 14, 2021
