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TRUE GRIT
YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA
Daisy Ridley (swim)suits up to play a real-life trailblazer.
Back in 1926, Gertrude ‘Trudy’ Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel, arriving home to a New York ticker-tape parade. If you’ve never heard of her, don’t feel too bad – neither had Joachim Rønning, the filmmaker bringing Ederle’s extraordinary life to the screen.
‘I was just floored by Trudy’s story,’ says Rønning, who was introduced to her achievements by screenwriter Jeff Nathanson while the pair were in production on 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge. ‘I love true stories like this, which is about the triumph of the human spirit.’
Surviving a near-lethal bout of measles as a young girl, Ederle defied gendered expectations of the period to become ‘Queen of the Waves’ – a goldmedal-winning, world-record-breaking swimmer, all before she was 20. But her greatest sporting achievement was the 35-mile swim from Cap Gris-Nez to Kingsdown beach in Kent.
Casting Ridley for ‘her talent as an actor, but also her stamina’, Rønning was resolved to shoot the centrepiece swim in-camera, with the Black Sea doubling for the English Channel. ‘I didn’t want it to be in a tank, or against a green screen,’ Rønning states. ‘It was very important for me to do it as real as possible. I think you can really feel it.’
This consideration also extended to Ridley, who spent ‘weeks and weeks’ in the sea to film the crossing. ‘Daisy’s swimming in 15 or 16° Celsius water on a daily basis, and never complaining,’ Rønning recalls. ‘I had to drag her out when she was hypothermic!’
For Rønning, currently in production on Tron: Ares, the film marks a return to the verisimilitude of his 2012 waterbased breakthrough, Kon-Tiki. ‘I have two careers,’ Rønning notes. ‘I’m making these big tent-pole movies, which are very effects-driven. And this is kind of a reaction to that. I want to go out and get the water sprayed in my face, just to feel alive.’
YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 31 MAY.
Daisy Ridley
Q&A
How did you feel about shooting the swimming scenes for real?
Before we were about to go, I told everyone, ‘Just so you guys know, Iam quite fearful of open water.’ I think they thought I was joking. So it was really intense. After the fact, I thought: ‘I actually cannot believe I did that.’ And I certainly have not done it since. No more swimming, thank you.
Did diving in with both feet help you temporarily overcome that fear?
I was actually talking to my GP when I went for a medical last year, because I was about to start [shooting] Cleaner. I’ve also developed a fear of heights, and that film is about someone hanging onto the side of the building. I was like, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ But it does become a sort of sick overcoming of something.
It’s as much a family story as it is a real-life underdog story…
Yeah. To me, it always felt like: this is a story about someone who swam the Channel, who defied expectations, and a group of people who rallied around her. Who knows, really, how she did it – by sheer will or sheer grit. But my feeling was that I wanted Trudy to succeed because her family was there.