There is a lot that comes naturally to her, where I have never trusted myself to allow things to just come to me on the day. The pair had different approaches, explains Winslet: “Saoirse is an incredibly gifted actor. “I’ve admired her forever,” says Winslet of Ronan. It marked the first time the two actresses have worked together. “That is so layered throughout the film, and it really does build to that moment of physical connection.” “It was important to us not to shy away from the real sexual, visceral emotional connection between those two characters,” says Winslet. The sex scenes were something Winslet, Ronan and Lee talked about and choreographed together. “I read a lot of letters from women at that time – these women were in marriages but it was not uncommon for women to form these deep friendships, their bonds were tight.”īack in 2019 when Ammonite was shooting, hiring an “intimacy co‑ordinator” was not yet standard practice. Winslet had researched letters that close female friends had written to each other in the mid-19th century, some of which tipped over into sexual relationships. “Because she was living in a world that was dominated by the patriarchy, it wouldn’t have felt right to have her in a relationship with a man.” “I love that Francis chose to pair her with a woman,” she continues.
“There is no historical information about Mary Anning’s personal, private world – she never married – so we had a bit of freedom in terms of inventing our version. Winslet thinks the film is stronger for it. While in production, the film attracted some complaints from Anning’s distant relatives – she has no direct descendants – for its depiction of their family member in a lesbian relationship, with a younger married woman named Charlotte Murchison, played by Saoirse Ronan. Neon released in the US in November, while Lionsgate has UK rights.
“She is a very experienced actor and she’s been on so many film sets of so many scales and sizes, and this was only Francis’s second feature, but you never felt that difference in terms of how much Kate respected Francis in terms of being an artist and how Francis respected Kate as an actor.” Canning adds the whole crew could “feel Kate’s joy” when she found a real fossil one day while cameras were rolling.Īmmonite – which was backed by BBC Film and the British Film Institute – was rewarded with selection for the Cannes 2020 label, and then by the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. “Francis and Kate had a meeting of the minds,” recalls Iain Canning, who produces Ammonite alongside his See-Saw Films partner Emile Sherman, with Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly. And the visual poetry of Francis’s work I just found staggering.” There is not a lot of exposition and explanation, you’re seeing these two people come together. She had seen and loved Lee’s 2017 debut God’s Own Country, explaining, “It was my kind of film, it had a rawness and purity to the story. Winslet, of course, has her pick of high-profile roles but it did not faze her to work on a lower-budget film with a director on only his second feature. I spent my nights drawing or chipping away at my ammonites.” I had to do many things to understand her rhythm. “I couldn’t have come home and cooked dinner for my family or fed my dog every night. “I needed to create an emotional bunker,” she explains. The actress lived in a cottage on her own during the film’s production.
“She was less overtly emotional than me – that was quite difficult for me to get into.” “Mary Anning is a woman who is so different to me, she barely moved her hands apart from to work,” she says. Winslet dedicated herself to finding out all she could about Anning’s world, spending time in her hometown of Lyme Regis (on the Dorset coast of south England) not just to nail the local accent but also to go fossil hunting herself. “I don’t believe that actors should look glammed-up and glossed-over, especially in period films.” “Her life is hard, I appreciated that we weren’t seeing a rosy glow,” she says. “Everything felt so raw and real.”Īnning was not a polished society woman Winslet’s hair is wild and she is digging in mud and hitching up her skirts to relieve herself on a beach. “You can see the wrinkles on the back of my hands, you can see the translucency in my face and neck when it was cold,” says Winslet.
#Where was ammonite filmed how to#
As are the close-ups of those same hands doing detailed drawings of fossils – Winslet indeed learned how to draw intricate fossils as well as picking up Anning’s elegant handwriting style. The close-ups of weathered hands with dirty fingernails are Winslet’s. To portray Anning, she was actually digging through sand and mud. Kate Winslet got her hands dirty – literally – with her role as 19th-century fossil hunter Mary Anning in Francis Lee’s Ammonite.
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