Saoirse Ronan: ​‘I felt a huge respon­si­bil­i­ty mak­ing this film’

Twen­ty-one-year-old Irish actress Saoirse Ronan is doing a sus­pi­cious­ly smooth job of tran­si­tion­ing from child star­dom to chameleon­ic adult char­ac­ter actor. She fit­ted into Wes Anderson’s height­ened uni­verse for The Grand Budapest Hotel and shone as a war-strick­en indie waif in How I Live Now.

John Crowley’s Brook­lyn is adapt­ed by screen­writer Nick Horn­by from Colm Tóibín’s 2009 nov­el about a young girl from small­town Ire­land forced to emi­grate to Amer­i­ca. It fea­tures Ronan’s best per­for­mance yet. She imbues her char­ac­ter, Eilis, with such raw­ness and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty that even the most stan­dard scenes in her new home in Brookyln seem like they could hurt her.

LWLies: Did you read Colm Tóibín’s source nov­el before mak­ing Brook­lyn, or had you read it already?

Ronan: I read it years ago and I real­ly loved it at the time. The sto­ry took on a whole new mean­ing when it came to mak­ing the film. Between the peri­od of when I had read the script and when we actu­al­ly made the movie, I had moved over to Lon­don and had gone through that tran­si­tion per­son­al­ly myself so it took on a much deep­er meaning.

Did it feel reward­ing to have an artis­tic out­let for what you were going through?

I guess it did. It took me a while to appre­ci­ate it because from the very begin­ning there was a huge respon­si­bil­i­ty on myself and John and every­one involved for us to make it authen­tic and tell an hon­est sto­ry. Not only of what a lot of Irish peo­ple have gone through but also to por­tray a woman on screen and have it be a detailed, lay­ered, inter­est­ing char­ac­ter. Some­body who can car­ry us through a whole film with­out being some­one who just moans all the time or is a bit of a pushover or is too harsh. To find that nuance was real­ly impor­tant. I felt a huge respon­si­bil­i­ty in that respect. And this was the first Irish film about an Irish girl that I had been involved in, where we shot at home.

We shot in Ennis­cor­thy which is like 20 min­utes away from where I grew up. I went into it think­ing, ​‘This is great, this’ll be a great job to do, and I’ll be at home,’ and thought about it in a much more sim­ple way. Then all of a sud­den, John opened this door to a whole oth­er lev­el of depth that I hadn’t even thought about. It was him get­ting women so well. Between him and Nick and Colm, these three great men real­ly exposed all of us – all of the actors involved, men and women – to the ques­tions that the sto­ry was real­ly try­ing to raise.

When she first arrives in Brook­lyn, your char­ac­ter is too scared to let peo­ple know what’s going on for her. What advice would you give peo­ple who can’t be hon­est about how they feel?

Even though it’s a tough sit­u­a­tion to be in, there is also some­thing real­ly admirable about some­one who just keeps going. I’m very open about how I feel and I think that comes down to my par­ents – I was always encour­aged to be open about how I felt. I was spo­ken to like an equal, with­out us being peers. But I don’t know what advice I’d give to some­one. It’s not a good idea to bot­tle those things up. When­ev­er I try to keep things under wraps I can’t and it’s phys­i­cal­ly kind of uncom­fort­able. You need to find some­one that you can con­fide in. If you can’t do it, ride it out. Or talk out loud and say how you feel; even if there’s nobody there, just say, ​‘This is how I’m feel­ing right now and I don’t know what to do… blah blah blah.’ It’s always good to vent in some way, whether it’s through music or art or whatever.

Brook­lyn is an emo­tion­al film but also a lot of detail and atten­tion has been paid to ren­der­ing peri­od set­tings, with clothes and loca­tions. Were sets built? How did the pro­duc­tion get the 1950s look?

We had a great cos­tume design­er, Odile (Dicks-Mireaux), who stays very true to the peri­od she works in, which was fan­tas­tic. We wore bras and stock­ings from that time peri­od and, if the bras were too perky, we need­ed to take them down a lit­tle bit. She was so on it, and so tuned into the aes­thet­ic of that time, and always want­ed to make sure it was as authen­tic as pos­si­ble. Our sets, most of them, were made. We used a lit­tle bit of CG but, apart from that, every­thing was actu­al­ly hand-built. When we worked in Ennis­cor­thy we dat­ed back the street where the shop is at the very start and where the dance hall is. There were new shop fronts put on, or the shop fronts were paint­ed and they put signs up. It was real­ly nice in this day and age when every­thing is CG to with­in an inch of its life, to have some­thing just be tac­tile and real. It def­i­nite­ly sets the atmos­phere an awful lot more.

Did Colm help with the mak­ing of the film?

Well, he came to vis­it us a cou­ple of times and he was actu­al­ly an extra in the immi­gra­tion scene. He was a gas. We had him for the day and he had his lit­tle out­fit and his cap on, and he took it very seri­ous­ly. He knew what hand to have his prop in and where he had to walk to, and when he had to stop and who he was talk­ing to in the scene and all that. It was great to have him involved. I haven’t watched it so I don’t know, but I’d be inter­est­ed to know if you can see him in the background.

Brook­lyn is out on Blu-ray and DVD now cour­tesy of Lion­s­gate Home Entertainment.