USA TODAY International Edition
Winslet digs into emotion in ‘ Ammonite’
When you’re a perennial Oscar darling like Saoirse Ronan, there are perks to navigating awards season from your kitchen table. h “From a selfish point of view, I don’t have to wear high heels for 10 hours,” jokes the Irish- American actress on a recent Zoom call. While in lockdown, “it’s been really nice to be in your house with your family, and then come and just talk about the movie that you’ve made.”
Ronan, 26, is four times Oscarnominated for films including last year’s “Little Women,” and could contend again with “Ammonite” ( in theaters Friday, available on demand Dec. 4). Named for a type of fossilized sea creature, the 19thcentury romance co- stars Kate Winslet, a seven- time nominee and Oscar winner for 2008’ s “The Reader.”
The somber yet sensuous drama follows the real- life Mary Anning ( Winslet), a taciturn fossil hunter whose life is upended when she’s entrusted to care for a withdrawn housewife, Charlotte Murchison ( Ronan). Combing rocky, windswept beaches with Charlotte in tow, Mary lets her guard down and the two begin an intense love affair.
“I read it and thought, ‘ This is a brilliant character that I haven’t got a ( expletive) clue how to play,’ “Winslet says. “I knew Mary would bring enormous challenges just because of how emotionally held and isolated she was. Happiness, sadness, longing – these are all emotions I
had to find other ways of expressing.”
The film is written and directed by Francis Lee, whose 2017 drama “God’s Own Country” depicts a similarly repressed gay romance. Lee first learned about Anning a few years ago and was struck by her plight as a working- class woman whose groundbreaking scientific discoveries went mostly unacknowledged during her lifetime. While there is no historical evidence that Anning had relationships with men, she did have friendships with women including Murchison.
“It led me down this track of looking at LGBTQ+ history and how often that history is just obliterated because when there’s no evidence, historians presume heterosexuality,” Lee says. “Given how Mary was looked over by patriarchal society, I felt that my imagining of Mary as a woman who had a relationship with another woman felt the best, most
equal, most respectful thing.”
Winslet, 45, studied with a paleontologist for months before filming and excavated fossils on the English coast where Anning worked. “She gave me a beautiful little ammonite that she found,” Ronan recalls. “She chiseled away at it, polished it and everything – she really got into it.”
The “Titanic” star also isolated herself staying in a seaside cottage that rattled in the wind and rain. She lived alone on weekdays and saw her husband, businessman Edward Abel Smith, and three kids on weekends.
“Saoirse would laugh at me. I’d go home. I’d make my boring little soup. I’d write in the pens that Mary would have used and I would draw because she had to draw all her historical finds in order for them to be documented,” Winslet says. “Sometimes I’d think, ‘ Oh, my God, I’m being way too Method. Just go and get a cappuccino!’ But I tried to live this quite separate life and that was bloody hard when I’ve got a family at home.”
Mary’s emotional wall crumbles in the film’s second half, as she and Charlotte give in to their desires in a pair of intimate and explicit sex scenes.
“In terms of the actual movements, Kate and I planned all that out,” Ronan says. “We got our little notebooks out, like, ‘ OK, Step 1: You’re gonna put your hand on my shoulder. Step 2: I’ll nuzzle your neck or whatever.’ It was great. It was my first time having an experience like that in a sex scene, where you really do have complete control over where the scene goes.”
Winslet, who has done same- sex love scenes in films such as 1994’ s “Heavenly Creatures,” says it was “very important” to get them.
“Francis knew that as a man, he had to allow us as two women to use our power and our knowledge. And also, women know what women want,” Winslet says. “He was brilliant at allowing us create our own narrative and actually change a lot of what he had described on the page – not because we didn’t like it, but because we discovered different things on the day. So I felt we were able to really create the space for longing between Mary and Charlotte because of the lack of actual words. The intensity of those scenes is so profound because you feel what they feel through their physical expression. It was wonderful to be part of something that felt so equal, safe and connected.”