Manchester By The Sea opens in cinemas across the UK and Ireland from next Friday 13th January. Frequent visitors to the site will know how much we love the film – we filed a five-star review after seeing it for the first time back in September at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In the film from writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, Casey Affleck stars as Lee, a man whose sparse existence is suddenly ruptured when the death of his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) forces him to return to the hometown he abandoned years before. Rocked by contact with his estranged ex-wife (Michelle Williams) and the revelation that Joe has made him guardian of his teenage son (Lucas Hedges), Lee is forced to face up to painful memories and new-found levels of responsibility as he reconnects with his family.
Apart from the acting, the storytelling an superb direction, one of the film’s biggest assets are its wonderful locations, and we have some stunning scenery and words from Kenneth Lonergan himself to set the stunning scene.
“We shot this movie in Cape Ann from late February to early May.”
“It was very cold at first, but very beautiful,” Lonergan added. “In Cape Ann you are never far from water. I loved being by the ocean and inlets all the time; I loved shooting on the boat, and in the marinas and dockyards and houses in Manchester, Gloucester and Beverly.”
“I loved that part even when we were in triple overtime and I wanted to go to bed and never get up again.”
“During the shoot, I got to stay in a house in Annisquam, overlooking a little cove off the Essex River. It had a big picture window and a long deck outside facing the woods and houses across the water. In the daytime there were all kinds of birds outside my window, and spectacular planets in the sky almost every night. Except for weekends, I was usually in the house in the early mornings either going to work or coming back from it. In the early Spring a swan appeared and could be seen drifting around the cove very regularly. I don’t know anything about swans except what I read in The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White. In that book, the Cobb swims around and around all Spring on the lookout for predators, while his wife sits on her nest somewhere nearby, waiting for her eggs to hatch. I thought maybe that’s what this swan was doing. I had no idea of course, because we wrapped and went home before the cygnets would have been born anyway, and I don’t know anything about swans.”
Check out the stunning visuals of the locations used in Manchester By The Sea, and the film itself when it opens in cinemas from Friday 13th January.
