With his brilliant feature debut God’s Own Country – which came in at #4 in our recent list of the best LGBTQ+ movies – Brit filmmaker Francis Lee created an instant classic, a beautiful, tender love story set in the rugged Yorkshire countryside. Now he’s back with Ammonite, a historical drama about 19th Century fossil hunter Mary Anning, here played by Kate Winslet. In a field that was dominated by privileged and educated men, it was Anning who led the way, driven by her passion for science and her need to survive.
“The image of her struck me very strongly,” Lee tells Empire in the Big-Screen Preview issue, out Thursday 9 July. “Totally working-class woman, born on the bones of her arse, yet somehow she managed to rise to be the leading palaeontologist of the century.”
Like God’s Own Country, Ammonite is set to be a story depicting notions around class and same-sex relationships. Though there was no record of Anning having a romantic relationship with a man, her close bonds with women were documented – a point which Lee uses to tell a very possible version of Anning’s story, depicting a relationship between her and Saoirse Ronan’s Charlotte Murchison. “I’m very fascinated by deep, intimate, human relationships,” he explains. “One of the things I really look for in stories is to be able to explore a romantic relationship between two people of the same gender where the main issues aren’t around the difficulties of sexuality.”
Read Empire’s full Ammonite story in the Big-Screeen preview issue, on sale Thursday 9 July and available to order online here. Ammonite is expected to arrive in UK cinemas in 2021.