eyes again, but it's a little bit more fresh
How does an Irish writer attempt to tell a Scottish story? Did you spend much time there in the locality?
I had the opportunity to live in Lochinver before we shot, when we were doing location recces and things like that. It was so important to me to get to spend some time in the area. I don't think you ever get as much time as you would like on a low-budget film for research, but the local people were really good to me. I met so many interesting people while I was there. I was there for about three weeks to a month. I met an Irish actor who had climbed Suilven for inspiration every now and then. I was going for a walk down by the shore one day and there was a woman putting lobster pots in the sea, and it turned out that she was a geologist from London and that she goes up to that area of Scotland, the very North-West, every summer. I got to meet a lot of people who were not from the area but who liked to come there, like our character Edie, because they are searching for something. And then I also got to meet people from the local area as well. There was a man who was a full-time carer for his mother and it was his first time off in something like four years and that was very surreal and moving for me because the character of Edie is a full-time carer in the film. I guess being from rural Ireland you have a lot in common with people from rural Scotland, and I guess that was what I found when I was there. Ultimately it's up to the people from Scotland to judge if it is accurate or not. But we were very conscious that we didn't want to do a sort of tourism view of the place, because I'd seen so many films that were set in Ireland but it was Hollywood's view of what they thought Ireland was like. We didn't want to overly romanticise the place either. I think the character of Johnny is somebody who lives in this beautiful place but for him he feels quite stifled by it.
That's a common theme to here as well. If you're from a village then you can't really do anything without the entire village catching wind of it.
Exactly. You don't really have the space to reinvent yourself as you would have if you were in a city. And they know all of your family as well.
This is a woman who was trapped in a relationship where she couldn't express herself, and this is her now finally breaking free at 83. How did you get into the mindset of that character?
I talked with older women that I knew and it became apparent when I was talking to them that they didn't feel that much different than when they were younger, but that your body starts to age and time catches up with you, and that it goes by so fast. One thing that was very informative for me was the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who had come up with the five stages of grief and she had spent a lot of time with people who were dying. There was a
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