paragraph in her book on death and dying that really stood out for me for this character and it was about how the people who find it most difficult to die are those with the biggest regrets. I remember thinking that that was very powerful. I think it was a combination of reading things, of speaking with older women that I knew, and I was lucky enough in that there was no shortage of strong women in my life. I've two grandmothers who in their own way were very strong. That's the thing about Edie's character you think that if she lived in a different time that it probably wouldn't be 83 by the time that she was able to think about doing something for herself. The thing is, at the same time, when I started to realise that the theme of the film was essentially regret, it was something that we can all tap into and all identify with. I don't think that there's anyone alive that doesn't regret something that they haven't done or regret something that they have done. You find things in your own life that are in the character.
Then you have that older/younger dynamic between Edie and Jonathan, a type of Harold and Maude type situation. Where did that come from?
When I came onboard there was already a draft that had been done between Simon Hunter, the director, and a writer friend of his Edward Lynden-Bell. There was a character called Johnny. It was a very different script. It was a straight story with a character having different encounters with different people as she went on her journey. I just thought wouldn't that be very interesting if she developed a friendship with this young man Johnny, and that that could be the central relationship in the film. I certainly had seen Harold and Maude and maybe we could have gone more in that direction, but I just thought it was an interesting dynamic between young and old. Johnny represents, in a way, her younger self and that was an interesting idea. I don't think that we deliberately set out at the beginning to do Harold and Maude, but through various different drafts as I worked through them I kept the bits that were strongest and that seemed to work the best, and this friendship evolved to become the heart of the film. In a way you can imagine how if Edie had married somebody like Johnny then her live would have been completely different, but also in a way Johnny is a young Edie as well.
40 CinÉireann / May 2018