I only saw the film a couple of weeks ago, long after the Observer stories, but one of the things that struck me was that, as acted by GA and JI, in the early stages of the film, GA is often walking ahead by herself while JI walks with evident difficulty, dragging one leg, some way behind her. (There are also scenes where she’s helping him, though usually on steep slopes or steps.)
I wondered whether that would have been an obvious question for the two actors to have asked the Walkers — did you walk side by side when the path permitted? When it didn’t, who was in front? Given that Moth was struggling, did he fall behind, often? Did you walk on ahead and let him catch up, or did you always walk at his pace?
Thst would seem like one of the first questions to ask the RL people you’re playing, when you’re about to make a film where half the shots are two people walking, so I wondered if that was what the Walkers had said they did, because the more obvious portrayal, in view of them being a mutually adoring couple, would have been for them always to be walking together, or for ‘Raynor’ to be always helping ‘Moth’ along.
I did find GA’s playing of ‘Raynor’ interestingly steely, compared to the much more klutzy and down-home way SW portrays herself as being in TSP. But of course GA is absolutely right to have thought SW was “‘guarded’. She probably watched loads of her interviews before they started filming. You wouldn’t necessarily notice the guardedness in one, but watch a whole bunch (as many of us on here have), and even without any of the Observer backstory, you couldn’t help but notice how scripted her responses are, how long her answers are (to fend off left of field question, to set out the script herself) , always hitting the same points (Mars bar in tea, rebuilt our Welsh farmhouse with own hands, children, sheep frolicking, diagnosis, under the stairs, the path, always had a connection to nature etc etc).
I wonder now whether GA, who is not a fool, wasn’t basing her performance in part on the RL woman she met, rather than the ‘Raynor’ of TSP, who is much more down-home and vulnerable than the SW one sees in interviews.
I’m not suggesting she’d somehow figured out the backstory by herself, just that her performance suggests she didn’t take the ‘Raynor’ character of the book as gospel.