Do you want us looking at you?
Yeah. (laughter)
I felt the film had some witchcraft elements to it.
Was this something you thought about when you were making it?
Yeah, I'm definitely inspired by folklore and, kind of,
how witchcraft, you can see it as something negative,
but actually, it was just people trying to look after themselves
and nothing supernatural, it's almost grounded.
Eleanor's character is sort of seeing that cusp between,
is this something fantastical I should be afraid of,
or is it just something natural?
Gwen has to take on lots of adult duties to keep her family going.
How do you think young people's roles have changed?
Obviously, this is set in the 19th century.
You were raising a family,
she's having to look after a very young sister and an ill mother.
And you had an entire farm to look after,
you had so many responsibilities, and it was all physical, hard work.
We're so privileged now and we don't even realise it.
We have social media, we can talk to people all over the place,
and this young woman was isolated completely
with the weight of the world on her shoulders,
not necessarily the entire world but her world.
And so it's hard to compare the two, but there are definitely similarities
in the fact that obviously we can feel weighted down
by certain responsibilities we have now,
like school gets in the way or we'll have bullying
or social issues that get in the way of things,
but apart from that, it's so hard to compare.
I think the heart of it is the universal story in,
Gwen is feeling this pressure from her mother
and feeling like her mother's always against her
and doing things that upset Gwen,
but actually, it's about realising that that is tough love
and that is coming from a place of protection and care,
and I think that's the universal story, really, at the heart of it
that I think we probably all experience.
Eleanor, you won the Olivier Award at ten years old,
and still so young, you put in this amazing performance.
What do you do to push your acting abilities?
I mean, I always go for roles where I feel challenged.
I read the script and I knew that it was going to be a big push for me.
It's an accent that I'm not used to doing,
it's a storyline that's very dark.
There's a lot of material in it
that I never would have really explored before.
So I guess I push myself constantly to do roles
where it's not necessarily within my comfort zone,
so yeah, I guess that's where it all came from.
The film feels very authentic,
but it's a period I hardly know anything about.
Did you feel a connection with the era?
Yeah, I think it's quite powerful to look back through history
to question where we are now, and I think if you're looking
at a point in history where we were-,
introduction of mechanisation,
huge industry changing a landscape, changing the environment,
I think that is still very relevant today.
So, in some ways, you can look back at the Industrial Revolution
as a mirror to today.
Although the settings and circumstances
are very different to modern day,
do you believe this is a coming-of-age story
that the young people of today can relate to?
As a young person of today, you're probably best placed to answer that.
You know what, I really do.
I think a coming-of-age story is a coming-of-age story.
There are so many similarities you can pick out.
Obviously they're two different ages completely,
but I think that people can relate to this character
and, as Will was saying before,
even when it's tough love from your mother
or accepting responsibility or becoming a woman,
that's something that every person in their life has to go through,
they grow up.
And to accept that maybe the world
isn't so full of fantasy as you first thought,
and trying to move on from that and accept what's happening around you.
There are lots of eerie happenings in the film.
Are you superstitious, and have you ever had a sign
that you should or should not follow an opportunity?
Ooh. (laughter)
Do you know what, I'm not particularly superstitious,
although if I do see a single magpie, I spit and salute,
and if I see two, that's two for joy. That's my only superstition.
Yeah, I think for me, it was more about
the spirituality of place and connection to landscape.
As a kid growing up, I would hear foxes outside in the night,
and that's quite an eerie, strange, creepy sound.
If you grow up in a rural community, I think there's these things
that actually, as a child, spook you that are very natural,
and I wanted to get that into the film, really,
this sense of the eerie, the uncanny, the dread
that can come from a rural environment.
If you are young, your interpretation of it,
often you take the mundane and it becomes sinister.
It's nice to see the sisters having a bit of fun together,
despite the story being bleak.
What impact do you think these moments have on the film?
I think you have to understand the relationship
between Gwen and her little sister
for the end to really have power and make sense, don't you?
Yeah, definitely.
It was so important that we established that bond as sisters
before we'd even started,
and to keep the film from being so dark,
it's those little moments of hope that actually keep Gwen going.
There's a reason for all of this,
there's a reason why she's putting up with her mother's behaviour,
she's putting up with all the uncertainty around her.
It's because there's some light in her life still.
She's got hope and she's got her little sister,
so it was kind of important to have that positive bond.
The location plays such a pivotal role in the film.
How much did you know about it before the shoot?
Well, quite a lot really, because I'd spent eight years
exploring the region of North Wales.
I actually made a short film called Who's Afraid of the Water Sprite?
which is a fairy tale.
A producer called Hilary Bevan Jones saw that,
and actually, she's got a lot of family from North Wales,
she's already shot three productions in North Wales.
And she said to me, 'Why don't you go and explore this landscape?'
This was about 2009 after seeing Water Sprite,
the short, at a student film festival.
And then I just travelled up to the region,
initially thinking about using Snowdonia
as a setting for a fairy tale
and using this epic landscape to tell a story
that maybe wouldn't necessarily have been Welsh.
But then when I spent time there,
I learnt about the history of the region,
and that really inspired me,
just looking at these open-cast quarries that had torn holes,
these scars in the landscape, and understanding why they were there.
Then you got into the clearings of the land for the quarries,
and really, the story changed from being a folk story
into a story about the land and about the landscape,
and became more historical, and merged the gothic
and my fascination with folk stories into the history.
I haven't heard Welsh accents since Gavin and Stacey,
and this is far from that.
What makes this story so Welsh?
I actually think-, I'm from Norfolk so it's hard.
I think filmmakers should be able to tell stories
from anywhere, any region they want to.
I'm not a Welsh filmmaker so I'm very careful when I talk about this,
but I feel like the story of North Wales,
although ours isn't a specific historical moment,
there's definitely creative licence, is a very under-told story.
People losing their homes to big industry
during the Industrial Revolution,
the land and their homes being taken from them,
and then they effectively become a workforce
and have to sustain themselves by working
for the venture capitalists who come in,
is a sort of forgotten story
and people's lives were really ripped up by it.
And I think that removal of people from their homes
and that connection we have to the land
is a really inspiring story to me.
And then we spent a lot of time researching traditional beliefs
and just the basics of living in that period and in North Wales,
just to try and get it-, just to submerse ourselves in that
as much as possible,
although, like I say, it's not based on any specific historical story
because it has elements of a fairy tale.
What came to you first, the narrative or the setting of the film?
The fairy tale that it grew from had been in my mind for a long time
because it was this short film.
But really, the feature film only came alive and existed
once I'd visited Snowdonia.
The short film wouldn't work as a feature film,
and I needed that idea of setting it in the Industrial Revolution,
rather than it being this medieval fantasy period,
that really brought it to life
and gave it the backbone and the gravity that a feature film needs.
Thank you very much for speaking to me.
Ah, thanks so much.