Something Blue

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.

- Paul Bradshaw

"I Really Wish they 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!”