Rose Tremain, author of the short story Extra Geography, has praised the new film adaptation, calling it a project that has delighted her. The film, which updates her 1950s boarding school story to the early 2000s, explores the intensity of teenage female friendships. Tremain, speaking from her home in Norfolk, contrasted this experience with the disappointment of the film adaptation of her novel Restoration, which she described as "a dog's dinner" despite its Hollywood budget and cast.
From Page to Screen
Tremain was initially approached by playwright and Succession scriptwriter Miriam Battye, who adapted the five-page story into a 90-minute film. Battye told Tremain at their first meeting that the story would easily transfer to the modern day. "It's not just a little relic from my past. It has relevance now," Tremain said. She praised Battye's inventions as "very, very right for the story," noting that Battye "completely understood it and yet made it her own."
The film is set in a boarding school in the north of England in the early 2000s, where Year 10 students Minna and Flic rule the common room. Minna is described as posh and fast becoming a beauty, while Flic is a "scholarship girl," brainy but lacking her friend's confidence. One afternoon, they decide to make themselves more interesting by falling in love, borrowing the idea from A Midsummer Night's Dream (which Flic declares a "rubbish" play). They agree to fall in love with the first person they see, who happens to be their geography teacher Miss Delavigne, played by Alice Englert.
Friendship as the Real Romance
Tremain explained that the film is not about love but about friendship, a recurring theme in her work. "Romance is the staple of fiction and always has been. But I think friendship, which is a kind of poor relation of that, is so interesting." Battye, who connected deeply with the character of Flic, said she found the story "really truthful." She drew on her own experience at an intense girls' school in the north, where there was "an intense kind of rabid ambitiousness" and a strong sense that they had to make something significant of themselves.
Director Molly Manners, whose cinema debut this is, was drawn to the script's "unbelievably witty and truthful way, very sharp-tongued. Really bold." She aimed to capture the epic scale of teenage emotions. "The scale of the feelings that you have as a teenager are huge. Small things can feel quite world-ending. I wanted the feelings to be huge." Manners emphasized that the biggest feelings Minna and Flic experience are for each other. "A massive part of it was to show what huge romances these early female friendships are," she said.
Setting and Casting
The film is set pre-social media, which was important to Manners. "Mobile phones were around but not many of the girls would have had them. It was like: 'You can speak on the payphone to your parents for 15 minutes maximum.' It needed to feel as isolating as possible, no access to the real world." The isolation is disrupted by lads from a neighbouring all-boys school who arrive to work on the end-of-term play, introducing "the male gaze and a bit of real world."
Manners, who previously led casting for Netflix's adaptation of One Day, spent months with casting director Lucy Pardee trawling drama clubs to find the film's leads. The shoot took place in a dilapidated country pile in North Yorkshire, which the crew called the "cold cradle" because of the lack of pastoral care. Actor Marni Duggan, 19, who plays Flic, said she felt possessive of the character from the start: "Throughout the audition process I said: 'If I don't get this part I'm not going to be able to watch the film.'" She related to the intense female friendships of her own teenage years, noting that a friendship breakup can feel "absolutely devastating and it feels worse than a romantic breakup."
Asked if she ever actually fell in love with her geography teacher, Tremain laughed and recalled an afternoon when she and her friend Heather were bored and decided to fall in love with someone. They had a slight crush on the geography teacher, Miss Howard, who was "very pretty." "It didn't go far. We just tried to do rather well at geography. I don't think she ever knew that we had this little crush on her." Extra Geography is in cinemas now.
