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