Four doors and a windscreen: the making of Rae of Sunshine

When people hear that Rae of Sunshine takes place almost entirely in a parked car, the first question is usually some version of ‘wasn’t that limiting though?’

It was. And that was exactly the point.

The film follows a mother and daughter trying desperately to make up for lost time. It's Rae's 30th birthday, and her mother, played by Nicola Berry, is sitting beside a grown woman she feels so close to, but doesn’t know. Paislie Reid's Rae has spent years cut off from her; now they have one conversation to begin closing that distance.

A car felt like the only place that conversation could happen. It's one of the most intimate spaces we share with other people. You sit side by side rather than face to face, which somehow makes it easier to say difficult things, and, of course, harder to avoid hearing them. Neither of them can easily walk away. The world carries on outside the glass, but inside, the conversation is all there is.

The restrictions shaped every creative decision on set. There are only so many places to put a camera inside a car, so each angle had to earn its place. Choosing when to hold both women in a single frame, and when to separate them, became one of the ways we told the story: together, apart, and occasionally, fleetingly, meeting in the middle.

There's a particular kind of honesty that comes from actors who have nowhere else to go. Without the space to perform they have to find the unvarnished truth, and both Nicola and Paislie did exactly that.

We sometimes think of creative freedom as having every option available. Making Rae of Sunshine reminded us that the opposite is sometimes true.

Remove the options, and what remains is the thing that matters most for this story: a mother, a daughter, one bittersweet conversation, and the thirty years of lost time sitting between them.