On chesil beach
Love, sorrow and very awkward bedroom scenes collide for Saoirse Ronan in ON CHESIL BEACH – Atonement author Ian McEwan’s devastating relationship drama that’s almost too real to watch. Total Film meets the team crafting a wince-inducing wedding night.
Saoirse Ronan stars in another Ian McEwan adap about a troubled couple.
"I really wish they'd called it On Miami Beach,"
laughs Saoirse Ronan, remembering the time she got tonsillitis after standing on a damp Dorset beach for days in the middle of winter, doing long takes of some of the most emotionally intense scenes she’s ever shot. Love, it turns out, is hard work.
Exactly 10 years after she made her name with Atonement, Ronan is back for another adaptation of an Ian McEwan novel – a short, sharp novella centred on the first awkward night in the lives of two newlyweds in 1962. Emotionally charged, loud with unspoken thoughts and wrung through with the kind of uncomfortable truths that never normally leave the bedroom, it’s the sort of relationship drama you never expect to actually see. “There are moments when it’s so awkward you almost have to laugh,” says Ronan. “And it’s also pretty fucking heartbreaking at the same time. But as we say in Ireland, one of the best days out you can have is when you go to a funeral!”
Total Film is at Wigmore Hall, in central London, and everyone is feeling pretty miserable. Ronan sits at a piano in front of a crowd of extras as she stares off into the middle distance, playing a key scene when her character, Florence, suddenly recalls an awful moment from her past. It’s a tough wallop of emotion to nail, but this is also the morning that Donald Trump has just been elected, and the entire cast and crew are all looking stunned, checking their phones between every take. “It was a very weird day,” she remembers later. “All we could think about was the election. We were up early and it was dark and the scene we had to shoot… Everyone pretty much had that look!”
Florence is a classical musician who falls too fast for history student Edward, played by newcomer Billy Howle, and their story takes place just before the sexual revolution starts – the weight of expectation landing on their honeymoon like a lead balloon. Florence and Edward are both virgins, and the pressure of what to do next builds into tragedy. “I feel like she’s a bird trapped in a cage,” says Ronan. “The story is so much about the confines of society at that time, and the pressures that were put on younger people, especially in relation to marriage and sex. They’re right on the precipice.”
The script was written by McEwan himself – the first time he’s ever tackled one of his own books. “I didn’t want anyone else to do it!” admits McEwan – eloquent, softly spoken and exactly what you’d expect one of Britain’s greatest living writers to sound like. “I felt like if I let it get too far away from me, it might be taken off in a different direction.”
Tough role
Originally written for Sam Mendes and Carey Mulligan back in 2010, the film got stuck in limbo after James Bond came along. Then just 17 – too young for the part, but obsessed with McEwan after meeting him on Atonement – Ronan kept everything crossed that the project would keep stalling. Luckily, she had someone else in her corner hoping for the same thing. “I remember thinking, ‘God, if only Saoirse were old enough to do this,’” smiles McEwan. “I’d fallen in love with her instinctive, intelligent grasp of acting even when she was 12 years old.”
With Florence cast without even really trying, the bigger problem was finding Edward – a blues-loving student McEwan variously describes as a roustabout, a country bumpkin and “a vulnerable thug who longs to be an intellectual”.
“It’s a very tough role to cast,” says debut director Dominic Cooke, catching up with TF after a tough day trying to stop 250 elegantly costumed extras from talking about Donald Trump in the middle of 1962. “That mixture of rugged masculinity and sensitivity, and that particular kind of lower middle-class sensibility too, is very difficult to find. But as soon as we put Billy in a room with Saoirse it was just so clear.”
First seen in E4’s Glue, but better known for his work on stage, Billy Howle seems like the perfect choice, nervous and confident at the same time. “I’m definitely carrying the character around with me a lot more than I thought I would,”
he muses, showing us an iPhone full of period music that he listens to on set every day. “I read the book when it came out. My parents are both big fans of McEwan, so it was a novel that was discussed at great length in our house. I was distraught by it at the time and I sort of still am.”
Back on set, Cooke calmly congratulates everyone before calling cut. Ronan slips out from behind the piano in a hidden pair of Ugg boots, and a harried looking assistant rushes out to wipe the fingerprints off the keys. The only thing that doesn’t look immaculate is the dog-eared copies of McEwan’s novel left on chairs, under rolls of duct tape and stuffed into back pockets. “Dominic actually told me to put my copy away!” laughs Ronan. “I found that I was putting too much pressure on myself. I’ve done films before where I deliberately won’t read the book before I start. In most cases, for me, that’s a healthier approach. But in this case it was Ian who was adapting his own book, so we could trust him completely. He just naturally creates such a clear picture of the whole world.”
Talking it out
Walking Cooke around all the locations in the Chilterns where he pictured his characters living, McEwan had the film fully realised in his head before shooting started – although adapting such a short, internal novel was challenging.
“Until Florence and Edward get on the beach, there’s hardly any dialogue in the book,” considers McEwan. “So
I had to get everyone talking.” Adding extra scenes to the backstory and epilogue that weren’t there, including parental roles for the likes of Emily Watson, AnneMarie Duff and Samuel West, the adaptation also gave the writer a rare chance to bulk-up his own book. “There were things that I wrote for the movie that I’d have definitely put in the novel if they’d crossed my mind at the time. So it was a great chance for a stab at second thoughts.”
With scenes in Oxford and Buckinghamshire as well as Wigmore Hall, the bulk of the film takes place in a faded seaside hotel and on Chesil Beach itself, near Weymouth. Trapped between the sea and a lagoon, the narrow stretch of cold stony beach was so exposed that the cast and crew had to be ferried across on a rowboat everyday. “The whole ritual of it became kind of special, in a way, but it was a nightmare at the same time,” laughs Cooke. “It was a wonderful spot but it took hours to get everyone over there.” Shooting on film, and taking visual cues from the likes of
The Misfits, Taste Of Honey and Hiroshima, Mon Amour alongside volumes of photos, Cooke felt that getting the look and texture of the period was more important than anything else.
“People talk a lot about the ’60s, but they really mean about 1967 onwards,” explains McEwan. “The rest of the ’60s weren’t so different from the ’50s. And they themselves weren’t all that different from the ’30s. But there were stirrings… The pill arrived in Britain in 1962. I saw the Rolling Stones play in a tiny room above a bus station in the same year. My father never embraced me as a child, but by ’68, ’69, he did. That was the enduring legacy of the ’60s – and it had nothing to do with hippies or Woodstock or dope.”
It’s this emotional revolution that Florence and Edward just miss out on in the pivotal bedroom scene – the awkward, crushing, brutally realistic moment of intimacy between two people who don’t actually know each other that well at all.
“We scheduled those scenes for the very end of the shoot,” says Cooke. “I think we spent about half a day, just the three of us, going through the staging of it all so it felt as natural and comfortable as it could be”.
For McEwan and Cooke, the important thing was exploring “the frontier between love and intimacy”. But for Ronan, the most important thing was topping the sex scene in MacGruber.
“It’s the best because I’ve seen so many sex scenes done like that in serious movies!” she laughs, suggesting that real people don’t lose their virginity in a roomful of candles, floaty curtains and ’80s soft rock. “There are some harsh truths that people want to escape from when they go to see a film, but at the same time, I know as a girl growing up in this day and age what it means to watch something like Lena Dunham’s Girls, and to see real sex and how messy it is. I think boys and girls still feel a lot of pressure to perform in a particular way.” For McEwan, just talking about it is a good place to start. Suggesting that he could have just as easily set his story today, where a culture of online pornography lays a different set of expectations on young people, the idea that any outside pressures still stand in the way of love is what drove him to write the book in the first place. “To fall in love and have sex, and to do both at the same time, is the one truly outstanding and great moment of adult life,” he muses. “Nothing will ever get better than that. Not skiing, not cocaine, nothing will top that peak.” He pauses for a long while. “Well, except maybe finishing a novel…”
ON CHESIL BEACH OPENS ON 18 MAY.