Uncovering passion
Saoirse Ronan choreographs historical love story in ‘Ammonite’
For Saoirse Ronan, starring in “Ammonite” opposite Kate Winslet in a lesbian love story set on England’s Dorset coastline, hit all the right buttons.
She had just spent months in Boston filming “Little Women.”
“In terms of scale and the amount of actors that were involved in a scene, even the amount of dialogue we had, ‘Little Women’ was just jampacked with energy and talking and people,” she said via Zoom call from London.
“I was really craving something that was a little bit more quiet and intimate to do straight afterwards — and this came along and was exactly what I needed.”
“Ammonite” charts 1840s paleontologist Mary Anning (Winslet), an actual historical figure, and her lifechanging affair with Ronan’s married geologist Charlotte Murchison, who unlike the impoverished Mary is comfortably upper middle class.
“I was getting to play somebody who was seen, initially, as a woman of her time in terms of her presentation of herself and the kind of life that she had, the lifestyle she had. It was very typical of women of that class and of that time,” said Ronan, at 26 a four-time Academy Award nominee.
“And of course Charlotte breaks out of that throughout the movie, which is what makes it, you know, interesting.”
For many, what may be most interesting is the simmering same-sex attraction that comes to a boil.
Asked if there’s a difference here from the heterosexual couplings she’s filmed, “It’s really not,” Ronan answered. “I’ve been very lucky in that for whatever reason I’ve never felt very nervous doing a sex scene. Like, I would feel more nervous doing a kissing scene with someone because that is almost ‘You
ARE kissing someone.’
“Where obviously you’re not having sex with someone. It’s choreographed. It’s a completely technical scene. But I guess the difference here was because we had a gay male director” — Francis Lee who had a similarly detailed but gay scene in “In God’s Country” — “he wouldn’t really have an insight into what a woman would respond to.
“So Kate and I took the lead in basically what kind of choreography we wanted to have the sex scene consist of. We essentially came up with all these moves ourselves.
“Because we were very much taking the lead as the two women in the scene and the two women leading the film, it was a very safe space.
“We were also lucky with our crew,” she added. “Our DP (director of photography) was male but he’s incredibly lovely and sensitive and his entire camera team were female, which I do think makes a difference to have more women on set than men.”