Steele: ‘I waited for Saoirse to get older for role’

Producer Charles Steel revealed he had been waiting since 2007 for then 12-year-old Irish actress Saoirse Ronan to grow up to give her the starring role in an adaptation of Meg Rosoff’s novel How I Live Now.

The film features an American teen forced to go into survival mode after world war breaks out during a family holiday to England. Unfortunately, the Hollywood Reporter took less than 24 hours to describe the new movie as “potentially interesting apocalyptic” that “devolves into dreary sub-Hunger Games survivalism and banal teen romance”.

Steel had watched Ronan in Atonement and believed that in a few more years she’d be perfect to play the lead part.

“We’d already been developing it for several years and we thought we need Saoirse to be older,” Steel said following the world premiere at the Winter Garden in Toronto. “But it took us so long that we were worried that we had missed our opportunity.”

Ronan, who’s now 19, remained as the lead and the Hollywood Reporter said she is “almost always worth watching, but not especially in this drippy outing, in which she morphs from sullen teen brat to can-do wilderness heroine”.

For her part, Ronan said: “How I Live Now was the most fun I’ve ever had making a film.”