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My Summer Of Love
Cast & Crew
- Director
- Producer
- Screenwriter
- Director of photography
- Main CastPaddy Considine (Phil), Natalie Press (Mona), Emily Blunt (Tamsin), Paddy Considine, Natalie Press, Emily Blunt
- Editor (Cut)
- Original Score
- Production Design
- Costume Design
Director's comment
The film is inspired by the novel “My Summer of Love” by Helen Cross. lt had these two great characters who immediately engaged me — Mona and Tamsin. I especially loved Mona. She was just my sort of character — cynical, lyrical, funny, unpredictable, always at odds with the world and with herself.One other important source was an encounter I had with born-again Christians in 1987, when I was shooting a documentary in Lancashire about an evangelist preacher who was actually trying to plant a cross on top of Pendle Hill – where, famously, some witches were hanged in the 17th Century – to claim it for Christianity. I've never forgotten him and it.
I mainly kept the characters of the two girls. The book was a much busier, more populated affair. I remember Mona had a proper family; a father, a stepmother, a sensible older sister, and an obese stepbrother. Their pub was very lively, very Northern, with a crowd of "characters." There was also a creepy paedophile lusting after Mona, there were two murders, and the whole place was in the grip of the Miners Strike – the year was 1984. Ah, and a murderous Ripper was on the prowl killing young girls and terrorizing the population. None of this survived into the film.
So the novel was much more sociologically specific. lt was also quite plotty. The world in our film is much more spare, almost a little abstract. I wanted to tell the story through images and create a more timeless and elemental landscape, one in which the sort of emotions I'm interested in could occur, where someone can look into another's eyes and get obsessed. What I really wanted to avoid on MY SUMMER OF LOVE was making one of these so-called `gritty realist' films, which supposedly reflect contemporary Britain or contemporary youth — neither of which interest me very much.
