Living In The Now

o often I'm the youngest one on a set, it was nice to feel like a veteran,” smiles Saoirse Ronan. The 19-year-old Irish actress has long been the kid crashing the adult-table – from the moment she scored an Oscar nomination at just 13 for her brilliant turn in Joe Wright's Atonement – but that wasn't the case with Kevin Macdonald's How I Live Now. “It was just all kids we were workin' with. We were all of a pretty similar age, but I was one of the older ones. It was a really great experience, personally.”

How I Live Now is a high drama about the end of the world and fucking your cousin. Based on a young adult novel by Meg Rosoff, it's set in the English countryside – cue Nick Drake and Fairport Convention on the soundtrack (although meticulous electro nerd Jon Hopkins did the score) – in the wake of an apocalyptic attack by unseen terrorists; but it's really a heaving-heart soap opera about “the loss-of-innocence” and the tortured romance between Ronan and both-on-and-off-screen boyfriend George MacKay.

“For younger people, the end of the world makes sense,” Ronan says. “If you're going through your first-ever love affair, it's so intense, you have to have something truly massive to contrast with it. For adolescents, it already feels like the world is ending every single day.”

Literature and cinema come filled with tales of kids who must learn to survive without parents – from The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe to Spirited Away, with countless iterations in between – and, so, it's a film about siblings and cousins becoming their own kind of family. But there's an interesting new-millennial wrinkle: as important as it is to separate children from adults, dramatically speaking, it's just as important to separate the children from technology – true adventure lurking offline. “That's most important for my character, Daisy, who's this real modern girl, one who feels the need to be connected to the world at all times, and has to learn to let go of that,” says Ronan.

Ronan sees this character as the one, more than any she's played before, closest to herself – “Normally I like to play roles that're the complete opposite of me; you're really actin' that way” – but isn't quite the same device-slave. “I try to be conscious of not getting too obsessed with my phone, endlessly staring at these things that aren't actually really going on in the world right now.”

Her turn in How I Live Now comes on the heels of The Host, in which Ronan played the lead in a future-world whose alien-centric mythology was penned by Twilight author Stephenie Meyer. The cumulative effect is that, on screens, Ronan has spent most of 2013 running across the post-apocalyptic countryside, desperately hoping to be reunited with loved ones. Ronan sees the similarities from the outside, but feels the experience of making them wasn't comparable: The Host a “huge logistical undertaking” filled with crane shots and Hollywood money; How I Live Now, a small-budget picture shot on handheld cameras in the English countryside by the dude who made Touching The Void.

Come 2014, Ronan will be appearing in a far-different pair of films. She's spent 2013 filming two works of eccentric auteurdom: in Germany, playing a key role in Wes Anderson's latest movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel; and then in Detroit, starring in Ryan Gosling's 'fantasy-neo-noir' directorial debut, How To Catch A Monster. “Everything is very tactile on Wes' films: all the sets are made, they're all built; everything that you see on screen is really there,” says Ronan. “And the acting style in Wes' films is so different. The performances he gets from people – like Tilda Swinton or Owen Wilson or someone – is so different to how you see them in any other film; this quirky, theatrical style that he likes his actors to bring.”

The amazing cast of The Grand Budapest Hotel features familiar Anderson totems (Wilson, Swinton, Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel, Jeff Goldblum) as well as Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law and Tom Wilkinson. In making the transition to Anderson's theatrical style, Ronan sought advice from Swinton. “I was talking to Tilda before I started working and she said, 'You'll notice that he wants you to deliver a line almost like music; every line has a beat to it, a rhythm',” Ronan recounts. “At first I wasn't sure I'd be able to get it quite right – I'd never done anything like that before. Once you get into the swing of it, and you get in tune with what Wes wants, then everything just flows.”

From there, she went to Detroit – “it's almost an eerie place, no one lives there any more” – to work with Gosling (and Christina Hendricks, Eva Mendes, Ben Mendelsohn and Matt Smith) on How To Catch A Monster, which found another different take on acting: extensive improvisation. “Every single day we would improvise; everything was a surprise every day,” Ronan says. “Ryan cast us because he knew what we were like as people, and [he encouraged us], as we improvised, to bring more of ourselves to the roles. We dealt with dreams a lot. We rehearsed with a dream analyst, who had worked with Ryan before, and for a few days all we spoke about were dreams we'd had the night before, and how that subconsciously fed into the character. It was a complete different experience to anything I'd ever had – it was amazing.”

After The Grand Budapest Hotel and How To Catch A Monster in 2014, Ronan is lined up to play the titular historical figure in Susanne Bier's take on Mary, Queen Of Scots. And after that, well, she's just auditioned for Star Wars: Episode VII, for an unspecified role that she's sworn to secrecy over. She's “already said too much” about her possible jaunt to a galaxy far, far away; for now, she's here to talk How I Live Now.