SAOIRSE RONAN stars in director Peter Weir’s latest film The Way Back, the story of a group of men who escape from a Siberian Gulag in 1940. Ronan chats about running on ice, Polish accents, and food poisoning on location.
Saoirse Ronan in The Way Back
MMM: You joined the rest of the cast after they’d started filming, just as your character Irena joins the Gulag escapees part way through their journey. What was that like for you as an actress?
Ronan: I think it was about six weeks or a month or something like that. It was something really that I’d never experienced before personally, because I’d always started a film with everyone else at the start of shooting. So I was a little nervous about it because I didn’t know anyone as well as they’d gotten to know each other. But luckily we had a really great crew, we all got on really well, so it wasn’t really any trouble at all.
MMM: And you did your own ice running stunts?
Ronan: I did. I did my own stunts on this movie. Basically all I had to do was run across this beautiful, fake ice that they had made for us from wax or something. It looked amazing, it was so great. And I just threw in a few slips and a fall, it was good fun.
Ronan did her own stunts in the film
MMM: You sing in another language in the film. How tough was that?
Ronan: I worked with Valentin [Ganev, dialect coach]. He and Colin [Farrell] made a CD, and sang the whole thing. I started to learn it a couple of weeks before we shot the scene. It’s actually quite a beautiful song. I would take the words and write them up phonetically and somehow found an English word that would remind me of this phonetic, and that really helped me. It wasn’t that long, so it was okay. But it’s always great to speak a foreign language in a film. It’s the only chance we get really.
Polish is a tough accent to do, because it’s not an accent you hear all the time. English or American are things we’ve all grown up with and we see on the TV every day, but we had a great dialect coach that we worked with and he really helped us.
MMM: Was your co-star Colin Farrell an actor you looked up to and aspired to follow as a successful Irish actor?
Ronan: Yeah, everyone Irish is very proud of anyone who does well in Hollywood, or as I prefer to call it, the film business. And Colin has been very successful really since he started. So we’re all very proud of him, and as an actor I would look up to him. It was great to get a chance to work with him. He’s a lovely guy as well.
Co-stars Colin Farrell and Jim Sturgess
MMM: What was the hardest scene to film, either emotionally or physically?
Ronan: I got food poisoning near the end of my shoot. The guys were going on afterwards, but it was one of my last days. I just felt awful. It was maybe 45 degrees or something like that. It was actually a really nice shot, I don’t know whether it’s in there, but I’m sleepwalking and Gustaf [Skarsgard], who plays Voss in the film, is guiding me along so I’m listening to his footsteps.
So I had to keep my eyes closed and try and figure out where I was and walk forward and try not to bump into the camera or anything. And I had this just horrific pain in my stomach the whole day. So that was the toughest for me, but it was still great, still a great shoot besides. It was just that one day.
**THE WAY BACK is in cinemas now.
By Jan Gilbert
