Saint Maud producers Andrea Cornwell and Oliver Kassman on starting a film with one line …..

Originally scheduled for release back in May, Rose Glass’s impressive directorial debut, Saint Maud, arrives in cinemas this week with a big head of steam behind it.

Rising star Morfydd Clark plays the title role, a deeply religious live-in carer who takes on a new patient, a former dancer suffering from terminal cancer, played by Jennifer Ehle. The previous carer warns Maud that their patient can be a bit of a handful – not malicious as such, but suffering from the inevitable pain and frustration that goes with her condition and the inability to resist baiting the impressionable Maud for her beliefs.  But the young woman refuses to be defeated, so much so that she becomes obsessed with saving her patient’s soul.

The film is the first collaboration from producers Andrea Cornwell (Suite Francaise, Apostasy) and Oliver Kassman (Florence Foster Jenkins) and, as they tell The People’s Movies’ Freda Cooper in the interview below, they were working on the films since the first, one sentence pitch they received from Glass. They also describe why they chose Morfydd Clark for the lead from over 100 auditions, how Jennifer Ehle agreed to play her patient – and they spill the beans about the credit in the cast list given to a six legged member of the cast called Nancy!

Saint Maud is released in cinemas on Friday, 9 October 

Read our review of the film here

About the Author

Freda Cooper

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Freda is a Senior Writer at The People's Movies. A lifelong movie fan and a film critic for over ten years, Freda’s natural habitat is the darkened rooms frequented by fellow cineastes. She can also be found asking questions of some of the biggest names in the business – from Cate Blanchett to Daniel Craig or Mike Leigh to Pete Docter – or crafting reviews for a number of sites and publications, including The People’s Movies. And listeners to BBC Local Radio can catch her views on the latest releases. She always – and probably always will – cite The Third Man as her favourite film of all time. Her top ten? That’s a moveable feast …..

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