Saoirse Ronan sat down with AwardsCircuit to discuss ‘Brooklyn’ while promoting the film at 2015 Toronto International Film Festival and you can read it below:
One of my highlights of TIFF this year was the opportunity to sit down with Saoirse Ronan to discuss her new film Brooklyn, as part of Fox Searchlight’s press junket for the film. Having seen the film a day earlier, I was eager to find out how she prepared for the role and the experience of making such a beautiful film. Below is an edited version of our conversation.
Shane Slater: Congratulations on such a beautiful film, it even made me feel nostalgic for Ireland! Was this a case where you knew from the start that you had something special here?
Saoirse Ronan: Yeh, I read the script about a year before we started to shoot the film. And from when I signed on, to when we actually made it a year later, I had moved out, left home and I had gone through that whole emotional journey that she goes through. So, I loved it to begin with and it was absolutely the right first Irish script for me to do. I had never done another Irish film before and this felt like the right one. But by the time we actually shot it, it meant so much more to me.
It’s interesting that you say that you felt that yearning as well. Because when we were making it and when I went to Ellis Island after we wrapped, I thought this is an Irish film, for Irish people, for Ireland. My mom came over for her birthday and I told her I really wanted to go to Ellis Island, to kind of round the film up. And I had only ever thought of it as a place where a lot of Irish people came in. And I went there, and for better or worse, the amount of Irish, English, Scots, Jewish, Germans, all these different people had been brought to this one place and had no idea what to expect. It’s so incredibly special because it binds everyone together and from that point onwards, I thought this story is actually for everyone. For anyone who ever left home, moved away to college, moved down the road, or left the country they grew up in. And it’s that sense of not knowing where you belong in this new part of your life, we’ve all gone through it. That’s what I went through when I moved to London and I basically relived it all over again when we did the film. So it was very overwhelming.
Continue reading
