‘These early friendships are huge romances’: Extra Geography’s lessons in teenage love

A few years ago, Rose Tremain was asked to name her biggest disappointment. Her reply? The film of her novel Restoration. Despite a Hollywood budget, Robert Downey Jr and Ian McKellen in the cast and a couple of Oscars, it was “a dog’s dinner”. Speaking on the phone from her home in Norfolk, Tremain is far more complimentary about a new British adaptation of her semi-autobiographical short story Extra Geography, set in a boarding school in the 1950s and first published in 2007.

‘It’s not just a little relic from my past’ … Rose Tremain. Photograph: Mark Bourdillon

“I’ve been delighted by this whole project,” she says, still sounding surprised. Tremain adores the script, adapted from her elegant five-page story by playwright and Succession scriptwriter Miriam Battye. At their first meeting, Battye told her it would easily transfer to the modern day: “I felt really pleased about that,” says Tremain. “It’s not just a little relic from my past. It has relevance now.”

She is equally delighted with the finished film: “To make a 90-minute movie, Miriam had to do a lot of inventing. And I think all the inventing that she’s done is very, very right for the story. She completely understood it and yet made it her own, which, honestly …” Tremain pauses. “In cinema, I don’t know how often that happens. Usually when somebody says they’re going to write your thing, they take it in a direction which you can’t recognise at all.”

The film is set in a boarding school in the north of England in the early 2000s, where Year 10s Minna and Flic rule the school, queens of the common room. Minna is posh and fast becoming a beauty (a dewy faced English rose, think teenage Kate Winslet). Flic is a “scholarship girl”, brainy, but lacking her friend’s effortless confidence. They are gloriously extra. “What happens if we don’t get into Oxbridge?” asks Minna. “Maybe we’ll just die,” sighs Flic. There is no irony. It’s all from the heart.

One long afternoon, Minna and Flic decide to make themselves more interesting by falling in love. Borrowing the idea from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a “rubbish” play, declares Flic) they agree to fall in love with the first person they see. Who happens to be their geography teacher Miss Delavigne, a woman with sturdy ankles and frumpy skirts, played in the film by Alice Englert.

But Extra Geography is not about love, rather friendship, which is a recurring theme in her work, says Tremain. “Romance is the staple of fiction and always has been. But I think friendship, which is a kind of poor relation of that, is so interesting.”

I call Battye, who explains that she instantly wanted to adapt the story into a film: “It felt very familiar to me, like it was something I’ve gone through. I felt very connected to the character of Flic. I just found it really truthful.”

Galaxie Clear and Marni Duggan in Extra Geography. Photograph: Brock Media

Did she go to a boarding school? “No. But I went to quite an intense girls’ school in the north. It was extraordinarily ambitious. There was an intense kind of rabid ambitiousness to everyone. And a strong sense that we had to be something, and to do something with ourselves. I brought that out a little more in the film. That was something I was interested in, the impatience and intensity in the girls to make something significant of themselves. I can remember being pretty hard on myself, I think we all were.”

Battye was the story editor on Season four of Succession. I tell her that I can see a similarity between the ferociously funny dialogue in the boardroom and the schoolroom in Extra Geography. “Well, I am obsessed with dialogue. I like characters who use their language very intentionally and intensely. It’s not supposed to be improvised or mumblecore.”

It was the script that hooked the film’s director Molly Manners, speaking over a video call from her home in Brighton. “Miriam writes in this unbelievably witty and truthful way, very sharp-tongued. Really bold. I was really drawn to the language and the way in which the script explored relationships in very funny but tragic way.”

Miriam Battye, Marni Duggan, Galaxie Clear and Molly Manners at a photoshoot for Extra Geography. Photograph: Jeff Vespa/Shutterstock

The reviews for Extra Geography have been glowing. One critic described it as Jane Austen updated to a 21st-century boarding school. Another compared the twists and turns in Minna and Flic’s friendship to Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. When I mention the Ferrante comment, her eyes widen. “I don’t know if I actually read that one. I must go and read this!” she jokes.

But in all seriousness, epic emotions are what they were going for, she says. “The scale of the feelings that you have as a teenager are huge. Small things can feel quite world-ending. I wanted the feelings to be huge.” And the biggest feelings Minna and Flic experience are for each other: they are the love of each other’s 15-year-old lives. “A massive part of it was to show what huge romances these early female friendships are,” says Manners.

Did she go to boarding school? “No I’m pleased to say. But my experience was an all-girls’ school, having these intense female friendships as you’re forming your world and self-view. The boarding school setting intensifies it further, so it becomes a petri dish.”

The film is set pre-social media. That was important says Manners: “Mobile phones were around but not many of the girls would have had them. It was like: ‘You can speak on the payphone to your parents for 15 minutes maximum.’ It needed to feel as isolating as possible, no access to the real world. It’s a very sheltered all girls’ experience.” That changes with the rude interruption of lads from a neighbouring all-boys school to work on the end-of-term play. “You get the male gaze and a bit of real world.”

‘As isolating as possible’ … Minna and Flic. Photograph: Brock Media

Extra Geography is Manners’ cinema debut. She was the lead director on Netflix’s adaptation of One Day, where she oversaw the casting of Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall as Emma and Dexter. To find Extra Geography’s Flic and Minna, she trawled drama clubs up and down the country for months with casting director Lucy Pardee. The shoot took place in a dilapidated country pile in North Yorkshire. “We called the school the ‘cold cradle’, because there’s no pastoral care there. No useful adults.”

The actor Marni Duggan, 19, who plays Flic, says she that felt possessive of the character from the get go: “Throughout the audition process I said: ‘If I don’t get this part I’m not going to be able to watch the film.’” What did she connect to? “The intense female friendships was something that I could relate to. When I was 14, 15, I had really intense female friendships that looked romantic almost. It’s not that they were romantic, it was just that they were so intense. When you have that friendship breakup it’s absolutely devastating and it feels worse than a romantic breakup.”

Back with Rose Tremain, I ask did she ever actually fall in love with her geography teacher? She laughs. “Well, at girls’ boarding school in the 1950s, there was a lot of dead time.” Usually she spent loose hours writing plays. “But there was an afternoon my friend Heather and I were really bored. We thought it’d be quite nice to fall in love with somebody, and we had a slight crush on the geography teacher, who was called Miss Howard and was very pretty. It didn’t go far. We just tried to do rather well at geography. I don’t think she ever knew that we had this little crush on her.”