Rye Lane cast and director on making their new "quirky little Peckham rom-com"
Rye Lane may be Raine Allen-Miller's feature directorial debut, but the director tells Total Film that she didn't always envision making a rom-com as her first movie when we meet her in a London hotel room. "I think it would have been the last type of film I'd want to make. If someone said to me, 'Your first film will be a rom-com', I'd be depressed," she laughs. "Rom-com is the cheesiest genre ever normally, but I read [the script] and was like, 'Oh, God, this is actually quite funny,' and felt like I could add my flavor to it."
Rye Lane certainly has a flavor all its own – with the bulk of the action taking place over one tumultuous day, the movie follows Yas (Vivian Oparah) and Dom (Industry's David Jonsson), two newly single 20-somethings who are thrown together after a chance encounter and embark on a chaotic journey around Peckham and Brixton in south London as they grapple with lost love and new feelings.
Like her director, the film's female lead Oparah wasn't particularly enthusiastic about romantic comedies, either. "I'm not a huge rom-com fan. I've seen the classics, but it isn't the genre that I naturally gravitated towards, just because maybe I didn't feel like it was for me. I've seen the great films, but when you don't see yourself in a place, you're just like, 'Okay, I'm gonna go to look at aliens,'" she says, referring to her breakout role in Doctor Who spin-off, Class. "But I was excited at the prospect of this quirky little Peckham rom-com."
She continues: "I was excited to play a character who was just so unapologetically messy. It was cathartic as a woman to just be like, 'You can be a mess, and you can be fun, and you can be scared.' I think you always want to play characters that have a lot of
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