Hi I'm Maiah Stewardson and I play Grace in My First Summer. Hi I'm Markella
Kavenagh and I play Claudia in My First Summer. And you can find My First Summer
on DVD from Peccadillo Pictures or these platforms. These platforms? THESE platforms!
I love it.
When Katie sent me the script Katie had also spoken to a psychologist and had sent them the
script and they'd analyzed it and had provided us with really helpful notes around Claudia's
situation, specifically around secure attachment anxious attachment and how that manifested with
the relationship with her Mum. So that was what a lot of my research was into where Claudia's trust
and abandonment and kind of addressing that in teasing out how and why their relationship was
that way and we spoke a lot about this idea of there being a guilt bank, and that when you meet
Claudia her guilt bank is already... it's just... there's just so much going on that every time her
Mum would degrade her or lead her into feeling that she wasn't listening and therefore not
validating her mum's feelings about the world and her mum's perspective of the world and how
destructive it is, and that every time that would happen that would make a withdrawal from the guilt
bank and so just each time it would constantly take so much longer for Claudia's confidence and
Claudia's belief in herself and in her natural interest in what lies outside of of the box,
both in the literal and metaphorical sense. And that was really interesting to me because you hear
a lot about confidence taking years and years and years to build - and then a second to shatter it.
So it was just focusing and honing in on the push and pull of that and how I really wanted
the audience to feel that throughout the film you could feel Claudia
just taking so much energy for her to just get to a space where she felt comfortable
enough to actually express, and how to be vulnerable with someone, and trust someone,
and then the second it kind of moves you just feel her crumble and have to rebuild. And I
think the other thing is it kind of sets it up as well for the relationship she has with Grace
because a lot of the times she assumes and and predicts and expects something to go wrong before
it actually does. So that sets her up for kind of a failure in a sense. Film wise, references wise,
I mainly kept it quite psychological and kind of again looking into trauma therapy
and then I... because I wanted to make sure that I was doing that justice as much as possible and
then focused on films like 'Persona' which were very isolating, in one location as well. Films
that had very limited locations and 'Persona' is one of them obviously and you feel so immersed
in the world and you feel like you can't escape the film as much as the character can't escape
their environment. I who had thought myself immune find that the wave has
tumbled me over head over heels leaving me to summon my forces, rise and confront the enemy.
I think I went and prepped Grace from a more embodied sort of space. I did a lot of getting
my hands dirty and walking places and being in nature and making things and like, crafting things
quite badly. We did it as part of our development and we did some collaging but I was a big lover
of collaging and like um, Rookie magazine and Frankie magazine which were really wonderful
indie Publications when I was a younger person and I also went back and found all my old diaries that
I wrote as a teenager. I listened to the music I was listening to as a teenager but also similarly
when we were shooting this, Ariana Grande's album 'Thank U Next' came out, and Ariana's album 'Thank
U Next' was actually really, like, I listened to it all the time in prepping for it. There
was something about the energy of the music that was poppy and fun and exciting but also,
created this sense of don't mess with me because I I absolutely have my own back and I think that
Grace certainly carries that into the world so yeah, a lot of it was sort of living like
Grace. I made a real conscious effort to begin walking through the world physically like her,
and just really feeling what it would be like to be in her body. Because I do think that a
lot of Grace's responses to things in the world come from an inherently sort of physiological
energy. She is quite impulsive and so really living in her body was really helpful.
I remember you listening to that album on set as well. Yeah, I loved it. Constantly blasting. Yeah!
You make me think...
That all the stuff my mum taught me in class,
about the world being cruel, about people being monsters...
It's all a lie.
[Music]