A spoonful of hope, love, light and laughter
ONCE Gemma Arterton had read the script for the film Summerland she didn’t have far to go to discuss the project.
The actress lives just around the corner from playwright, filmmaker and director Jessica Swale, who wrote the wartime story of Alice lamb, a cantankerous scholar who lives alone in a wooden cottage, perched on a cliff on the South East coast, and who reluctantly takes in Frank, a schoolboy evacuee from london.
initially, Arterton read the screenplay without any notion of starring in it, said Swale. The actress had intended to offer to get involved as a producer. Soon, however, Swale was rewriting the Alice role for her neighbour to play.
The pair have been frequent collaborators. Arterton took the title role in Swale’s play Nell Gwynn at Shakespeare’s Globe.
When the show moved to the West End, Gugu Mbatha-Raw took over that part. And at the heart of Summerland is a friendship, much of it in flashback, between Alice and Vera, who is played by Mbatha-Raw.
i remember Arterton telling me i was going to love Summerland. And she was right. it’s a rare treat from BBC Films and the BFi, opening in cinemas next Friday.
There are several nonCaucasian actors in the film and i was struck by how Swale has managed to make her casting feel organic, not contrived. Swale said she feels passionately that ‘diversity should be woven into the seams of movies’, and not always the focus.
She wanted Gugu, for instance, in the role of Vera, because she has a ‘sparkle’ when she arrives on the screen.
Just as good is young actor lucas Bond, as Frank, who meets cynical Alice — regarded by locals as a witch because she studies pagan myths — and ends up opening her eyes, and her heart.
During the lockdown, Swale and Arterton have been doing a lot of collaborating, working on a TV series which they will co-write, with Arterton to star.
Swale has other projects, too, including an adaptation of Nell Gwynn for Working Title Films and a version of Persuasion for Searchlight.
After she started writing Summerland, her father was diagnosed with a terminal illness.
‘He stopped wanting to watch films which were in any way morbid, and i made it my mission to make movies that people like my dad would enjoy . . . films for people who need a little bit of hope, of love and light and laughter.’
Her father died before seeing Summerland. But Swale told me: ‘He will always be there in everything that i do.’