Those in the know will attest that movie sets can be boring timesucks where not very much happens on a minute-by-minute basis. There is a lot of waiting about while technical personnel mill about, getting the minutiae of their craft painstakingly right. Not for nothing did Michael Caine say: "I act for free, it's the standing around I get paid for".
That said, there is a unique and curious energy building on the set of this rom-com (or 'dramedy', as the producers prefer to call it). Much of it has to do with a cast that's not so much a who's-who as a who's-next of film. The leads, Lily Collins and Sam Claflin, are particularly earmarked for greatness.
Collins - daughter of Genesis drummer Phil - stars in the next big wallet-busting teen franchise, The Mortal Instruments. Claflin will wrap on Love, Rosie and head to the set of the next Hunger Games instalment. Love, Rosie's supporting cast are a similarly promising bunch: among them are Bradley Cooper's girlfriend Suki Waterhouse, Jaime Winstone and Tamsin Egerton (linked to actor Josh Hartnett).
And in the summer of 2013, the cast certainly made the most of their downtime in Dublin. Fans spotted the actors partying in Lillies, enjoying outdoor gigs like Justin Timberlake, and shopping on Grafton Street. But it's not just the cast of hip young gunslingers that are piquing interest. According to the film's producer Simon Brooks, the script derived from a Cecelia Ahern novel - Where Rainbows End - is not what audiences might expect.
"Apart from the fact that it's a terrific story, it was a challenge to get it adapted," he concedes. "When I acquired the script (from Ahern), we knew we didn't want a fluffy, Hollywoodised rom-com. It's a bit more 'now', edgy, current, feisty and cool. It has an independent film feel. The script is hot and cool, and the people in it are hot, young and cool."
Ahern is the queen of the high-concept novel, with ideas often ripe for the big screen treatment… but to be fair, these aren't normally the superlatives that spring to mind when considering her work. For anyone who has seen the horse & cart pile-up that was P.S. I Love You, even less so.
"I for one didn't want [the film] to be hokey or diddly-dee, so we stayed away from that," says Brooks. "P.S. I Love You was Hollywoodised; it's a great film but we wanted to be different to that. We didn't want people to think that because it was Cecelia Ahern, it's going to be a soft rom-com."
The synopsis of Love, Rosie - adapted from a book Ahern wrote, aged 22 - certainly carries the hallmark of your common-or-garden romantic film: best friends and would-be soulmates Alex (Claflin) and Rosie (Collins) get separated as teens when Alex's family moves to the US. Their friendship continues via emails and texts, while their future happiness as a couple is jeopardised by various lovers and life in general.
So far, so familiar… yet the film will at least be a departure from P.S. I Love You in one significant way: no 'begorrah' accents. Rather, the story will be set in the UK and US, despite the film being shot in Ireland and Toronto.
"In terms of shooting here, Cecelia really made a point of it being shot in Ireland, but the Irish accent was never part of the equation," explains Joanne Byrne, Ahern's longstanding publicist. "She figures that Ireland's going through a tough time, and anything that can be brought into the economy is a good thing."
Sure enough, the film has been shot in various postcard-ready locations, from Stoneybatter and George's Street Arcade to Portmarnock and Powerscourt
"What we're seeing in the rushes [film that's watched on set], I think we've got something special," she adds. "Dublin looks breathtakingly beautiful. The plan is that people will be going, 'where is that? I want to go there'."
As it happens, Ahern has been a steady, albeit largely non-intrusive presence on set, going so far as to appear as an extra in one of Love, Rosie's wedding scenes.
"She said it was the scariest thing she'd ever done," says Byrne. "When Cecelia met Sam and Lily [to start rehearsals] she got really emotional. The two actors were really surprised at her reaction, and they felt she had really embraced [the project] then. The production really wanted her to be on board with every part of it, but you have to believe you're entrusting your book to the people who know what to do with it. But Cecelia was bowled over by the script (written by Calendar Girls writer Juliette Towhidi). They really wanted to have her stamp of approval."
It was a revisiting of sorts for Ahern; after all, the novel had been written even before the media mayhem of her debut P.S. I Love You's release. "She was saying, going back into the story as a mum of two now, 'what did I know about motherhood at the age of 22? Dear God!'," adds Byrne.
In the course of the story, Collins' character Rosie becomes a mother, meaning that the character ages from 15 to her thirties. It's a tall ask for any actress, not least a dewy, doe-eyed ingénue like Collins. Standing at barely five feet tall on set in Terenure, it's safe to assume that Collins - 24 at the time of filming - will have to have had ID close to hand on any nights out in Dublin.
"I get to play a Mom!" exclaims Collins, wide-eyed. This afternoon in Terenure, she is talking to a group of assembled Irish journalists in a round-table interview in between takes during filming. She may be gracing the cover of US Glamour Magazine as we speak, but for now, she is dressed down in her standard-issue Mom costume: jumper, jeans and Uggs. "It's very strange," she muses. "I have about five different looks. I look so young anyway and so many people don't believe me as older. I guess it gives me confidence to go for roles that might be older.
"I said to my agent, 'I'd love to do a comedy', and then I was asked, 'would you like to play a Mom?' Would you like to play a British character?' And a few days later the script landed. Everything came together in a real fate way."
Curiously enough, Collins had been working as a journalist before her big break into acting, and has now found herself in the position of gamekeeper turned poacher. With bylines in Teen Vogue, Seventeen and the Los Angeles Times magazine, Lily came to a fork in the road and had to choose between the two.
"There was a point when I was interviewing people I had worked with or wanted to work with, and I was worried they wouldn't believe me as a character," she explains. "I still love writing for magazines and asking questions, and I may come back to it someday."
Not that it looks likely to happen anytime soon. During our set visit, we are reminded on more than one occasion that we are in a somewhat fortunate position to be accessing both Collins and Claflin, even for a 20-minute round table interview. "This time next year, there will be no getting near them," Byrne assures us. But in the summer of 2013, they can walk around Grafton Street largely unobstructed: "In fact, Tamsin's boyfriend Josh [Hartnett] got more hassle than any of them," adds Byrne.
"I went out with [Love/Hate actor] Killian Scott and everyone was more into him," laughs Claflin. "I've been lucky with the paparazzi on my time off. Those who get their lives invaded by press, they go out looking for it. They go into supermarkets with sunglasses on with three security guards. If you walk around unassuming, it's more like, 'he looks a bit like that guy'."
For now, both actors are working on an intimate set that's a million miles away from the Hollywood soundstages they're fast becoming used to.
"It feels more personal to have a smaller crew and less shooting days, and people are here because they love the script and story," says Collins. "It's not that it's not there [on Hollywood films], but the idea to go off the page and collaborate is a lot more. It's so calm yet everything gets done. I don't understand how everything gets done. Sometimes I'm freaking out and it's like, 'well no one else is, so why am I freaking out?'"
Adds Claflin: "You get to learn everyone's names on a set like this. On the bigger sets with 700 crew members and 600 extras, every day there's someone new. Here, it's family orientated."
Another thing that bodes well for Love, Rosie is the pair's easygoing chemistry as actors. They have been filming together for a month, and have their own affable, charming dynamic. As it happens, both are in relationships with other actors at the time of filming: he with Inbetweeners star Laura Haddock; she with her Mortal Instruments co-star Jamie Campbell Bower. In the months since then, Claflin has married Haddock, while Collins split from Campbell Bower not long after wrapping on Love, Rosie. But during the shoot, both Claflin and Collins need to negotiate the perils of geographical distance in their own relationship, much like their Love, Rosie characters.
"I grew up with distance in my family," notes Collins. "Growing up in England, moving to LA, having siblings in Vancouver and other family in Switzerland, distance doesn't effect emotional distance for me. Be it phonecalls while travelling or emails or Skype, we made it work and I wouldn't have had my childhood any other way. Physical distance is not a negative thing… in fact, missing someone is kind of what makes that relationship stronger."
Claflin feels the distance while he's filming in Ireland a bit more acutely: "I do go away and start a new job and meet new people, and you throw yourself within that job. You miss that other person but you don't allow yourself the time to mope around. When we're together, we're inseparable. I'm a very different person on set than at home. I'm very boring and grumpy at home."
It's hardly the admission of a heartthrob-in-waiting. But as Collins and Claflin are whisked away after our allotted time, there's a definite sense that these are two actors that are going places. Whether Love, Rosie will be a blip on their stellar CVs or the breakthrough indie sleeper hit that gives their acting careers some texture… well, much like Alex and Rosie's fate as star-crossed lovers, it all remains to be seen.


Love & other stories... on the set of Love Rosie - Independent.ie

Love & other stories... on the set of Love, Rosie

Those in the know will attest that movie sets can be boring timesucks where not very much happens on a minute-by-minute basis. There is a lot of waiting about while technical personnel mill about, getting the minutiae of their craft painstakingly right. Not for nothing did Michael Caine say: "I act for free, it's the standing around I get paid for".
That said, there is a unique and curious energy building on the set of this rom-com (or 'dramedy', as the producers prefer to call it). Much of it has to do with a cast that's not so much a who's-who as a who's-next of film. The leads, Lily Collins and Sam Claflin, are particularly earmarked for greatness.
Collins - daughter of Genesis drummer Phil - stars in the next big wallet-busting teen franchise, The Mortal Instruments. Claflin will wrap on Love, Rosie and head to the set of the next Hunger Games instalment. Love, Rosie's supporting cast are a similarly promising bunch: among them are Bradley Cooper's girlfriend Suki Waterhouse, Jaime Winstone and Tamsin Egerton (linked to actor Josh Hartnett).
And in the summer of 2013, the cast certainly made the most of their downtime in Dublin. Fans spotted the actors partying in Lillies, enjoying outdoor gigs like Justin Timberlake, and shopping on Grafton Street. But it's not just the cast of hip young gunslingers that are piquing interest. According to the film's producer Simon Brooks, the script derived from a Cecelia Ahern novel - Where Rainbows End - is not what audiences might expect.
"Apart from the fact that it's a terrific story, it was a challenge to get it adapted," he concedes. "When I acquired the script (from Ahern), we knew we didn't want a fluffy, Hollywoodised rom-com. It's a bit more 'now', edgy, current, feisty and cool. It has an independent film feel. The script is hot and cool, and the people in it are hot, young and cool."
Ahern is the queen of the high-concept novel, with ideas often ripe for the big screen treatment… but to be fair, these aren't normally the superlatives that spring to mind when considering her work. For anyone who has seen the horse & cart pile-up that was P.S. I Love You, even less so.
"I for one didn't want [the film] to be hokey or diddly-dee, so we stayed away from that," says Brooks. "P.S. I Love You was Hollywoodised; it's a great film but we wanted to be different to that. We didn't want people to think that because it was Cecelia Ahern, it's going to be a soft rom-com."
The synopsis of Love, Rosie - adapted from a book Ahern wrote, aged 22 - certainly carries the hallmark of your common-or-garden romantic film: best friends and would-be soulmates Alex (Claflin) and Rosie (Collins) get separated as teens when Alex's family moves to the US. Their friendship continues via emails and texts, while their future happiness as a couple is jeopardised by various lovers and life in general.
So far, so familiar… yet the film will at least be a departure from P.S. I Love You in one significant way: no 'begorrah' accents. Rather, the story will be set in the UK and US, despite the film being shot in Ireland and Toronto.
"In terms of shooting here, Cecelia really made a point of it being shot in Ireland, but the Irish accent was never part of the equation," explains Joanne Byrne, Ahern's longstanding publicist. "She figures that Ireland's going through a tough time, and anything that can be brought into the economy is a good thing."
Sure enough, the film has been shot in various postcard-ready locations, from Stoneybatter and George's Street Arcade to Portmarnock and Powerscourt
"What we're seeing in the rushes [film that's watched on set], I think we've got something special," she adds. "Dublin looks breathtakingly beautiful. The plan is that people will be going, 'where is that? I want to go there'."
As it happens, Ahern has been a steady, albeit largely non-intrusive presence on set, going so far as to appear as an extra in one of Love, Rosie's wedding scenes.
"She said it was the scariest thing she'd ever done," says Byrne. "When Cecelia met Sam and Lily [to start rehearsals] she got really emotional. The two actors were really surprised at her reaction, and they felt she had really embraced [the project] then. The production really wanted her to be on board with every part of it, but you have to believe you're entrusting your book to the people who know what to do with it. But Cecelia was bowled over by the script (written by Calendar Girls writer Juliette Towhidi). They really wanted to have her stamp of approval."
It was a revisiting of sorts for Ahern; after all, the novel had been written even before the media mayhem of her debut P.S. I Love You's release. "She was saying, going back into the story as a mum of two now, 'what did I know about motherhood at the age of 22? Dear God!'," adds Byrne.
In the course of the story, Collins' character Rosie becomes a mother, meaning that the character ages from 15 to her thirties. It's a tall ask for any actress, not least a dewy, doe-eyed ingénue like Collins. Standing at barely five feet tall on set in Terenure, it's safe to assume that Collins - 24 at the time of filming - will have to have had ID close to hand on any nights out in Dublin.
"I get to play a Mom!" exclaims Collins, wide-eyed. This afternoon in Terenure, she is talking to a group of assembled Irish journalists in a round-table interview in between takes during filming. She may be gracing the cover of US Glamour Magazine as we speak, but for now, she is dressed down in her standard-issue Mom costume: jumper, jeans and Uggs. "It's very strange," she muses. "I have about five different looks. I look so young anyway and so many people don't believe me as older. I guess it gives me confidence to go for roles that might be older.
"I said to my agent, 'I'd love to do a comedy', and then I was asked, 'would you like to play a Mom?' Would you like to play a British character?' And a few days later the script landed. Everything came together in a real fate way."
Curiously enough, Collins had been working as a journalist before her big break into acting, and has now found herself in the position of gamekeeper turned poacher. With bylines in Teen Vogue, Seventeen and the Los Angeles Times magazine, Lily came to a fork in the road and had to choose between the two.
"There was a point when I was interviewing people I had worked with or wanted to work with, and I was worried they wouldn't believe me as a character," she explains. "I still love writing for magazines and asking questions, and I may come back to it someday."
Not that it looks likely to happen anytime soon. During our set visit, we are reminded on more than one occasion that we are in a somewhat fortunate position to be accessing both Collins and Claflin, even for a 20-minute round table interview. "This time next year, there will be no getting near them," Byrne assures us. But in the summer of 2013, they can walk around Grafton Street largely unobstructed: "In fact, Tamsin's boyfriend Josh [Hartnett] got more hassle than any of them," adds Byrne.
"I went out with [Love/Hate actor] Killian Scott and everyone was more into him," laughs Claflin. "I've been lucky with the paparazzi on my time off. Those who get their lives invaded by press, they go out looking for it. They go into supermarkets with sunglasses on with three security guards. If you walk around unassuming, it's more like, 'he looks a bit like that guy'."
For now, both actors are working on an intimate set that's a million miles away from the Hollywood soundstages they're fast becoming used to.
"It feels more personal to have a smaller crew and less shooting days, and people are here because they love the script and story," says Collins. "It's not that it's not there [on Hollywood films], but the idea to go off the page and collaborate is a lot more. It's so calm yet everything gets done. I don't understand how everything gets done. Sometimes I'm freaking out and it's like, 'well no one else is, so why am I freaking out?'"
Adds Claflin: "You get to learn everyone's names on a set like this. On the bigger sets with 700 crew members and 600 extras, every day there's someone new. Here, it's family orientated."
Another thing that bodes well for Love, Rosie is the pair's easygoing chemistry as actors. They have been filming together for a month, and have their own affable, charming dynamic. As it happens, both are in relationships with other actors at the time of filming: he with Inbetweeners star Laura Haddock; she with her Mortal Instruments co-star Jamie Campbell Bower. In the months since then, Claflin has married Haddock, while Collins split from Campbell Bower not long after wrapping on Love, Rosie. But during the shoot, both Claflin and Collins need to negotiate the perils of geographical distance in their own relationship, much like their Love, Rosie characters.
"I grew up with distance in my family," notes Collins. "Growing up in England, moving to LA, having siblings in Vancouver and other family in Switzerland, distance doesn't effect emotional distance for me. Be it phonecalls while travelling or emails or Skype, we made it work and I wouldn't have had my childhood any other way. Physical distance is not a negative thing… in fact, missing someone is kind of what makes that relationship stronger."
Claflin feels the distance while he's filming in Ireland a bit more acutely: "I do go away and start a new job and meet new people, and you throw yourself within that job. You miss that other person but you don't allow yourself the time to mope around. When we're together, we're inseparable. I'm a very different person on set than at home. I'm very boring and grumpy at home."
It's hardly the admission of a heartthrob-in-waiting. But as Collins and Claflin are whisked away after our allotted time, there's a definite sense that these are two actors that are going places. Whether Love, Rosie will be a blip on their stellar CVs or the breakthrough indie sleeper hit that gives their acting careers some texture… well, much like Alex and Rosie's fate as star-crossed lovers, it all remains to be seen.


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